# The Seagull: every role by lines, words, and stage time

> Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. 12 speaking roles, 15,221 words, about 109 minutes of speech.

- URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/the-seagull
- Last updated: 2026-10-08

**Treplev** has the most to say in The Seagull: about 341 lines and 2,960 words, 19.4% of the play. The Seagull gathers writers and actors at a lakeside country estate, where young ambitions collide with established ones. Treplev has the largest part, close to a fifth of the words, but Nina, Madame Arkadin, and Trigorin are not far behind at about 15% each. All four speak in every act, so the weight is shared widely.

- Speaking roles: 12
- Scenes: 4
- Words: 15,221
- Speech time: 109 min

## Every role, largest first

| Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Treplev | 341 | 2,960 | 19.4% | 21.1 | 4 |
| Nina | 279 | 2,393 | 15.7% | 17.1 | 4 |
| Madame Arkadin | 293 | 2,300 | 15.1% | 16.4 | 4 |
| Trigorin | 256 | 2,247 | 14.8% | 16.1 | 4 |
| Sorin | 173 | 1,423 | 9.3% | 10.2 | 4 |
| Dorn | 164 | 1,227 | 8.1% | 8.8 | 3 |
| Masha | 129 | 936 | 6.1% | 6.7 | 4 |
| Shamraev | 72 | 599 | 3.9% | 4.3 | 4 |
| Medvedenko | 70 | 570 | 3.7% | 4.1 | 4 |
| Polina | 66 | 518 | 3.4% | 3.7 | 4 |
| Yakov | 7 | 32 | 0.2% | 0.2 | 2 |
| The Cook | 2 | 16 | 0.1% | 0.1 | 1 |

## Who speaks in which scene

Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: Act 1 = Act 1; Act 2 = Act 2; Act 3 = Act 3; Act 4 = Act 4.

- **Treplev**: Act 1 (1,237), Act 2 (231), Act 3 (460), Act 4 (1,032)
- **Nina**: Act 1 (754), Act 2 (590), Act 3 (164), Act 4 (885)
- **Madame Arkadin**: Act 1 (620), Act 2 (557), Act 3 (856), Act 4 (267)
- **Trigorin**: Act 1 (64), Act 2 (1,270), Act 3 (606), Act 4 (307)
- **Sorin**: Act 1 (498), Act 2 (258), Act 3 (425), Act 4 (242)
- **Dorn**: Act 1 (519), Act 2 (208), Act 4 (500)
- **Masha**: Act 1 (226), Act 2 (95), Act 3 (279), Act 4 (336)
- **Shamraev**: Act 1 (199), Act 2 (138), Act 3 (148), Act 4 (114)
- **Medvedenko**: Act 1 (283), Act 2 (7), Act 3 (41), Act 4 (239)
- **Polina**: Act 1 (151), Act 2 (155), Act 3 (36), Act 4 (176)

## The longest speeches

| Speech | Scene | Words | Lines |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Trigorin: “What is there particularly nice in it? I must go and write directly. Excuse me, I mustn’t stay … . You have stepped on my favourite corn, as the saying is, and here I am beginning to get excited and a little cross. Let us talk though. We will talk about my splendid bright life. … Well, where shall we begin? There are such things as fixed ideas, when a man thinks day and night for instance, of nothing but the moon. And I have just such a moon. I am haunted day and night by one persistent thought: I ought to be writing, I ought to be writing, I ought … I have scarcely finished one novel when, for some reason, I must begin writing another, then a third, after the third a fourth. I write incessantly, post haste, and I can’t write in any other way. What is there splendid and bright in that, I ask you? Oh, it’s an absurd life! Here I am with you; I am excited, yet every moment I remember that my unfinished novel is waiting for me. Here I see a cloud that looks like a grand piano. I think that I must put into a story somewhere that a cloud sailed by that looked like a grand piano. There is a scent of heliotrope. I hurriedly make a note: a sickly smell, a widow’s flower, to be mentioned in the description of a summer evening. I catch up myself and you at every sentence, every word, and make haste to put those sentences and words away into my literary treasure-house—it may come in useful! When I finish work I race off to the theatre or to fishing; if only I could rest in that and forget myself. But no, there’s a new subject rolling about in my head like a heavy iron cannon ball, and I am drawn to my writing table and must make haste again to go on writing and writing. And it’s always like that, always. And I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I am eating up my own life, and that for the sake of the honey I give to someone in space I am stripping the pollen from my best flowers, tearing up the flowers themselves and trampling on their roots. Don’t you think I am mad? Do my friends and acquaintances treat me as though I were sane? “What are you writing? What are you giving us?” It’s the same thing again and again, and it seems to me as though my friends’ notice, their praises, their enthusiasm—that it’s all a sham, that they are deceiving me as an invalid and I am somehow afraid that they will steal up to me from behind, snatch me and carry me off and put me in a madhouse. And in those years, the best years of my youth, when I was beginning, my writing was unmixed torture. A small writer, particularly when he is not successful, seems to himself clumsy, awkward, unnecessary; his nerves are strained and overwrought. He can’t resist hanging about people connected with literature and art, unrecognised and unnoticed by anyone, afraid to look anyone boldly in the face, like a passionate gambler without any money. I hadn’t seen my reader, but for some reason I always imagined him hostile, and mistrustful. I was afraid of the public, it alarmed me, and when I had to produce my first play it always seemed to me that all the dark people felt hostile and all the fair ones were coldly indifferent. Oh, how awful it was! What agony it was!” | Act 2 | 607 | 61 |
| Nina: “Why do you say that you kissed the earth on which I walked? I ought to be killed. I am so tired! If I could rest … if I could rest! I am a seagull. … No, that’s not it. I am an actress. Oh, well! He is here too. … Oh, well … it doesn’t matter … no. … He did not believe in the stage, he always laughed at my dreams and little by little I left off believing in it too, and lost heart. … And then I was fretted by love and jealousy, and continually anxious over my little one. … I grew petty and trivial, I acted stupidly. … I did not know what to do with my arms, I did not know how to stand on the stage, could not control my voice. You can’t understand what it feels like when one knows one is acting disgracefully. I am a seagull. No, that’s not it. … Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and, just to pass the time, destroyed it. … A subject for a short story. … That’s not it, though . What was I saying? I am talking of the stage. Now I am not like that. I am a real actress, I act with enjoyment, with enthusiasm, I am intoxicated when I am on the stage and feel that I am splendid. And since I have been here, I keep walking about and thinking, thinking and feeling that my soul is getting stronger every day. Now I know, I understand, Kostya, that in our work—in acting or writing—what matters is not fame, not glory, not what I dreamed of, but knowing how to be patient. To bear one’s cross and have faith. I have faith and it all doesn’t hurt so much, and when I think of my vocation I am not afraid of life.” | Act 4 | 311 | 32 |
| Treplev: “We need new forms of expression. We need new forms, and if we can’t have them we had better have nothing . I love my mother—I love her very much—but she leads a senseless sort of life, always taken up with this literary gentleman, her name is always trotted out in the papers—and that wearies me. And sometimes the simple egoism of an ordinary mortal makes me feel sorry that my mother is a celebrated actress, and I fancy that if she were an ordinary woman I should be happier. Uncle, what could be more hopeless and stupid than my position? She used to have visitors, all celebrities—artists and authors—and among them all I was the only one who was nothing, and they only put up with me because I was her son. Who am I? What am I? I left the University in my third year—owing to circumstances “for which we accept no responsibility,” as the editors say; I have no talents, I haven’t a penny of my own, and on my passport I am described as an artisan of Kiev. You know my father was an artisan of Kiev, though he too was a well-known actor. So, when in her drawing-room all these artists and authors graciously noticed me, I always fancied from their faces that they were taking the measure of my insignificance—I guessed their thoughts and suffered from the humiliation. …” | Act 1 | 240 | 24 |
| Nina: “I am alone. Once in a hundred years I open my lips to speak, and my voice echoes mournfully in the void, and no one hears. … You too, pale lights, hear me not. … The stagnant marsh begets you before daybreak and you wander until dawn, but without thought, without will, without the tremor of life. For fear that life should spring up in you the father of eternal matter, the devil, keeps the atoms in you, as in the stones and in the water, in continual flux, and you are changing perpetually. For in all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit . Like a prisoner cast into a deep, empty well I know not where I am and what awaits me. All is hidden from me but that in the cruel, persistent struggle with the devil—the principle of the forces of matter—I am destined to conquer, and, after that, matter and spirit will be blended in glorious harmony and the Kingdom of the Cosmic Will will come. But that will come only little by little, through long, long thousands of years when the moon and the bright Sirius and the earth are changed to dust. … Till then—terror, terror … . Here my powerful foe, the devil, is approaching. I see his dreadful crimson eyes. …” | Act 1 | 218 | 22 |
| Treplev: “Loves me, loves me not; loves me, loves me not; loves me, loves me not . You see, my mother does not love me. I should think not! She wants to live, to love, to wear light blouses; and I am twenty-five, and I am a continual reminder that she is no longer young. When I am not there she is only thirty-two, but when I am there she is forty-three, and for that she hates me. She knows, too, that I have no belief in the theatre. She loves the stage, she fancies she is working for humanity, for the holy cause of art, while to my mind the modern theatre is nothing but tradition and conventionality. When the curtain goes up, and by artificial light, in a room with three walls, these great geniuses, the devotees of holy art, represent how people eat, drink, love, move about, and wear their jackets; when from these commonplace sentences and pictures they try to draw a moral—a petty moral, easy of comprehension and convenient for domestic use; when in a thousand variations I am offered the same thing over and over again—I run away as Maupassant ran away from the Eiffel Tower which weighed upon his brain with its vulgarity.” | Act 1 | 210 | 21 |
| Trigorin: “What success? I have never liked myself; I dislike my own work. The worst of it is that I am in a sort of delirium, and often don’t understand what I am writing. I love this water here, the trees, the sky. I feel nature, it arouses in me a passionate, irresistible desire to write. But I am not simply a landscape painter; I am also a citizen. I love my native country, my people; I feel that if I am a writer I am in duty bound to write of the people, of their sufferings, of their future, to talk about science and the rights of man and so on, and so on, and I write about everything. I am hurried and flustered, and on all sides they whip me up and are angry with me; I dash about from side to side like a fox beset by hounds. I see life and culture continually getting farther and farther away while I fall farther and farther behind like a peasant too late for the train; and what it comes to is that I feel I can only describe scenes and in everything else I am false to the marrow of my bones.” | Act 2 | 203 | 21 |
| Treplev: “I have talked so much about new forms and now I feel that little by little I am falling into a convention myself. “The placard on the wall proclaimed. … The pale face in its setting of dark hair.” Proclaimed, setting. That’s stupid . I will begin where the hero is awakened by the patter of the rain, and throw out all the rest. The description of the moonlight evening is long and over elaborate. Trigorin has worked out methods for himself, it’s easy for him now. … With him the broken bottle neck glitters on the dam and the mill-wheel casts a black shadow—and there you have the moonlight night, while I have the tremulous light, and the soft twinkling of the stars, and the faraway strains of the piano dying away in the still fragrant air. … It’s agonising . I come more and more to the conviction that it is not a question of new and old forms, but that what matters is that a man should write without thinking about forms at all, write because it springs freely from his soul. What is that? There is nothing to be seen … . Someone ran down the steps. Who is there? Nina, Nina!” | Act 4 | 200 | 20 |
| Nina: “Men, lions, eagles and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the water, starfishes and creatures which cannot be seen by the eye—all living things, all living things, all living things, having completed their cycle of sorrow, are extinct. … For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature on its surface, and this poor moon lights its lamp in vain. On the meadow the cranes no longer waken with a cry, and there is no sound of the May beetles in the lime trees. It is cold, cold, cold! Empty, empty, empty! Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! The bodies of living creatures have vanished into dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into rocks, into water, into clouds, while the souls of all have melted into one. That world-soul I am—I … In me is the soul of Alexander the Great, of Caesar, of Shakespeare and of Napoleon, and of the lowest leech. In me the consciousness of men is blended with the instincts of the animals, and I remember all, all, all! And I live through every life over again in myself!” | Act 1 | 187 | 19 |
| Nina: “No, no. … Don’t see me off, I will go by myself. My horses are close by. … So she brought him with her? Well, it doesn’t matter. When you see Trigorin, don’t say anything to him. … I love him! I love him even more than before. … A subject for a short story … I love him, I love him passionately, I love him to despair. It was nice in old days, Kostya! Do you remember? How clear, warm, joyous and pure life was, what feelings we had—feelings like tender, exquisite flowers. … Do you remember? “Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the water, starfishes, and creatures which cannot be seen by the eye—all living things, all living things, all living things, have completed their cycle of sorrow, are extinct. … For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature on its surface, and this poor moon lights its lamp in vain. On the meadow the cranes no longer waken with a cry and there is no sound of the May beetles in the lime trees …”” | Act 4 | 183 | 19 |
| Treplev: “This began from that evening when my play came to grief so stupidly. Women never forgive failure. I have burnt it all; every scrap of it. If only you knew how miserable I am! Your growing cold to me is awful, incredible, as though I had woken up and found this lake had suddenly dried up or sunk into the earth. You have just said that you are too simple to understand me. Oh, what is there to understand? My play was not liked, you despise my inspiration, you already consider me commonplace, insignificant, like so many others … . How well I understand it all, how I understand it! I feel as though I had a nail in my brain, damnation take it together with my vanity which is sucking away my life, sucking it like a snake … . Here comes the real genius, walking like Hamlet and with a book too. “Words, words, words.” … The sun has scarcely reached you and you are smiling already, your eyes are melting in its rays. I won’t be in your way .” | Act 2 | 177 | 18 |

## Questions actors ask

### Who has the most lines in The Seagull?

Treplev, with about 341 lines and 2,960 words, 19.4% of everything spoken in the play. Nina is next, with about 279 lines (15.7%).

### How long is The Seagull?

The full text has 15,221 spoken words, about 109 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary.

### How many speaking roles are in The Seagull?

12 named roles speak in this edition, across 4 scenes. 2 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled.

## How we count

Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anton-chekhov/the-seagull/constance-garnett) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).