Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin

A successful, fashionable writer of fiction and Arkadina's lover, some years her junior, whose extended reflections on the compulsive, joyless mechanics of authorship (Act Two) -- constantly noting turns of phrase and details for future use even in his own life, including Nina's -- constitute one of the play's most direct statements of Chekhov's own thinking about craft. Flattered and drawn in by Nina Zarechnaya's youth and admiration despite his attachment to Arkadina, he pursues her, is persuaded by Arkadina to break it off, then resumes the affair once free of her; by Act Four he has fathered a child with Nina, lost the child, and abandoned her to return to Arkadina and his old routines, treating the whole episode -- including, pointedly, the dead seagull Treplyov once brought Nina -- as material he has already half-turned into a magazine story.