Could the ending of great works be different? Could the heroes have a different fate? Take Nina Zarechnaya, the heroine of Chekhov’s «The Seagull» — was it really impossible for her to have a bright future? Let’s try to figure it out.
At eighteen, it is natural to dream of fame, to tremble before famous people, to endow them with unearthly virtues and, not noticing the loving eyes of a young man in the neighborhood, entrust your youth and love to an older womanizer. Nina Zarechnaya from Chekhov’s play «The Seagull» is the embodiment of a naive hope, she infects the inhabitants of a country house with a dream about an unrealizable one. And they begin to dream: young Treplev — about the love of his mother, Trigorin — about boundless admiration, the aging actress Arkadina — about unfading youth and success.
It is so easy for a gullible girl to get into the cycle of someone’s desires! She does not really separate fantasies from reality, her own motives from those of others, it is easy for her to inspire any ideas, to captivate, to confuse her head. Lack of education and parental involvement, youthful naivety lead her to a fatal decision: to run away to the city, to become an actress. It seems to her that a beautiful life and unearthly love is very close, around the corner, you just need to succumb to temptation and take a chance. The future does not cause her any anxiety, it seems simple and deceptively clear.
Seduced and abandoned children, deprived of naivety, tenderness and purity, are no longer needed by anyone.
But the dream that grew up on poor soil, not backed up by knowledge either about itself or about people, only remains to be knocked down by a seagull, and the girl herself — to become an object for satisfying other people’s whims.
So groundless hope eventually kills the young: Nina loses her family, her child, her chance for self-respect and another life. Treplev also cannot survive another rejection and commits suicide. Seduced and abandoned children, deprived of naivety, tenderness and purity, are no longer needed by anyone. No one helped them grow up and learn about the world. They were used for their own needs: cold and quite cynical.
Nina nowadays
Nina can still be found in the admissions office of any theater university. Every spring, hundreds of Nings take long-distance trains and travel from the provinces to the capitals for a beautiful life and fame. They know how to take risks and dream, but they don’t know how to learn and think. They are beautiful and often kind, but they do not know themselves at all, they do not have an inner core and knowledge about life.
Unfortunately, life very quickly confronts them with the fact that external attractiveness and the desire to love are not enough to take place. Without work on oneself, the anti-Cinderella scenario is realized (she was still that hard worker): sheer disappointment, no prince.
Inner content is developed by kind conversations with wise and responsible adults, education, reading great books, going to psychologists, natural and gradual career growth. And this knowledge becomes an excellent basis for the possible realization of dreams, fantasies and dreams. Dreaming is not harmful, it is harmful to have only dreams.