The story of The Seagull's production reads like a fairy-tale. Jottings in Chekhov's notebooks after 1891 suggest that the play was a long time in conception. Ivanov (1887) had been an unexpected success in Moscow and St Petersburg; the more naturalistic play The Wood Demon (1889), however, was a total failure in Moscow. The former was a success with the public because it was more closely modelled after the kind of melodrama which was common throughout Europe at that time; the latter was a failure because Chekhov had discarded too many of those theatrical conventions the audience expected. Six years were to pass before he settled to write a long play again, six years in which he could debate with himself how far he dare press upon his audiences a more realistic and objective theatre. Thus F. A. Korsh, the theatre manager, could not believe that a man could shoot himself, as Konstantin Treplev does, without first making a speech about it. It is hard for us today to see what simple, but fundamental, issues Chekhov had to face.

In 1895, at his newly acquired farm estate at Melikhovo near Moscow, he began work on the new play. All of Chekhov's plays are ‘country’ plays rather than city ones, and the last ones must owe something to life on a country estate where people are forced upon each other's company. It is said that he wrote the first draft in four weeks and read it to the party at Melikhovo.