Axiology of Art in A.P. Chekhov’s The Seagull and Its Interpretive Transformations

Abstract

The article examines how the category of art functions as a value in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896) and how the play’s evaluation of art has been reshaped across a century of stage and critical interpretation. Working within the axiological approach to literary studies, the study treats the play as a distribution of competing value-positions concerning what art is and what it is for – fame, professional craft, formal innovation, and vocation. A close reading of the text shows that Chekhov withholds an authorial verdict among these positions, and that the value of art the play affirms is condensed in Nina’s closing reevaluation, where worth migrates from external recognition to endurance and faith. It is argued that this axiological openness is the very mechanism that generates the play’s interpretive plasticity: from the failure of 1896 and the Moscow Art Theatre triumph of 1898 to symbolist, modernist, and later deconstructive stagings, each interpretive community re-values art through the play. The findings support the thesis that the durability of Chekhov’s axiology of art rests not on a fixed doctrine but on a question kept open.