Like Vanya, we have a pastoral love-triangle. This is much stranger, however, as it is metafictive (a play about plays and playwrights; about playacting--one must wonder if the characters are ever sincere, shades of Hamlet Act II.) and heavily indebted and intertextual with Hamlet. Again, there is a concern with the future (everyone agrees that eventually all life will die out--the end). Here there are Manichaean concepts in a play-within-the-play. Again, I'm left with the feeling that I'm missing the thread that ties it all together.

Again there is a preoccupation with "wasted lives;" with "the tedium of the country," which leads to "philosophizing," hating the quiet of one's own thoughts, Sorin oversleeping, and a young man going through with suicide twice. Everyone gets a little cabin fever and tempers flare up over very small matters (like horses).

SORIN. It is easy for you to condemn smoking and drinking; you have
known what life is, but what about me? I have served in the Department
of Justice for twenty-eight years, but I have never lived, I have never
had any experiences. You are satiated with life, and that is why you
have an inclination for philosophy, but I want to live, and that is why
I drink my wine for dinner and smoke cigars, and all.

Treplieff is jealous of Trigorin's fame; Nina is star-struck with him, yet he "doesn't feel fame." Trigorin, like Hamlet, makes us wonder if he really is insane--he is always inspired or compelled to write. I don't know any writers like that.

Trigorin: A young author, especially if at first he does not make
a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His
nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is
irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about
them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye,
like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I
did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were
distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and
when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in
the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with
cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

--
MASHA. Oh, if you knew what it is to love without hope for years and
years, to wait for ever for something that will never come! I shall not
marry for love, but marriage will at least be a change, and will bring
new cares to deaden the memories of the past. Shall we have another
drink?

Treplieff waits for success and recognition; the girls wait for love. Masha gets Medvienko (settles for him) and is still miserable; Treplieff gets published and is still miserable. Again, Chekhov has St. Augustine's skepticism about human happiness--as Vonnegut said, no one knows it when they are happy, only after.

Nina: [She passes her hand across her forehead]
What was I saying? Oh, yes, the stage. I have changed now. Now I am a
real actress. I act with joy, with exaltation, I am intoxicated by it,
and feel that I am superb. I have been walking and walking, and thinking
and thinking, ever since I have been here, and I feel the strength of
my spirit growing in me every day. I know now, I understand at last,
Constantine, that for us, whether we write or act, it is not the honour
and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength
to endure. One must know how to bear one's cross, and one must have
faith. I believe, and so do not suffer so much, and when I think of my
calling I do not fear life.

As for the title, it is the really strange gift that Constantine gives to Nina; it gets stuffed and kept around the house, but she goes off to the big city to be a famous actress. She says that she is a seagull, because she is a "houseless wanderer." But, like a seagull, she can't go too far for very long, and returns in the end, unknowingly precipitating disaster.

Everyone ends up disappointed: Nina in Trigorin, in her career; Treplieff with everything. This cannot be a comedy any more than Faust is a tragedy. Someone explain this to me. As with Vanya, I feel like I'm missing something. It's not quite a tragedy (since Treplieff was a loser in Act I) and it's definitely not a comedy. What is this?

The musical metaphor of "minor" is always misused with Chekhov; if anything, he is jazzy--starts with tension, ends with tension. And yet it's beautifully human.