The Sea-Gull

On a country estate beside a lake, a famous actress, Irina Arkadina, spends the summer with her lover, the successful writer Trigorin. Her son Konstantin dreams of creating new forms of theatre, and stages his strange symbolic play with Nina, the young girl from the next estate who longs to be an actress, but his mother laughs at it. Konstantin shoots a seagull and lays it at Nina's feet; Trigorin sees in it the subject for a short story, a girl destroyed by a man who has nothing better to do, and the summer's loves and ambitions lead to a quiet tragedy two years later.

Anton Chekhov's play failed at its first performance in St Petersburg in 1896, then triumphed in 1898 at the new Moscow Art Theatre, which took the seagull as its emblem. It is a play about art, love and wasted lives, full of humour and sadness. Chekhov's next great play is Uncle Vanya.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.