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the play: no matter the form is new or old, the only thing that matters is that it should freely flow out from the soul. Last, but not least we have to explain the title of the play - the Seagull is written in Hungarian with an orthography mistake. We consider Chekhov's play a rich, unsurpassable work of art full of mysteries, which has an uncountable number of interpretations, and in each period, each historical situation there were different things considered more important than others, different things were emphasised. Therefore we thought that our performance, no matter how much we strive for perfection, cannot be "the" Seagull, but only a variant of the original, it can only give an idea about the depth and abundance of the play. We notify this by making a small mistake in the title. Anna Veress

CREATION OF THE SEAGULL 1895 After making a lot of promises that he would never deal with theatre again, after a good many one-act plays performed all over Russia, Chekhov started to write a new drama on the 21st of October, 1895. "I am writing with pleasure, although I offend against the laws of theatre. Comedy, three female and six male roles, four acts, a landscape (a panorama of the lake), many discussions about literature, little action, five pounds of love." On the 18th of November he wrote:"l finished the play. I started forte and finished pianissimo, breaking all the rules of theatre art. It turned to be a short novel." (...) Chekhov read the play in front of a wide company, this was the first audience of the Seagull, and the theatre critics mainly used to the overwhelming plots of Sardou and Dumas generally didn't like it. The first objection was that Potapenko the seducer of Lika was easily discernible in the figure of the famous writer, Trigorin. (Chekhov has condensed many autobiographical elements in this character, too, but the critics didn't notice it at the beginning.) The censorship was studying deeply and for a long time the text of