Anton Chekhov

NOTES ON ANTON CHEKHOV

The Cherry Orchard.

Consider the play’s setting, turn of the century Tsarist Russia in the Reign of Nicholas II, son of the conservative Alexander III, who died in 1881.  The Romanov line begins with Peter I “the Great” (1682-1725) who wanted to westernize Russia to some extent; Catherine II “the Great” (1762-96) is another illustrious member of the line.

Alexander I   1801-1825 (Napoleonic era)

Nicholas I     1825-1855 (status quo, empire grows; Crimean War against Ottomans leads to Western opposition)

Alexander II 1855-1881 (liberated serfs 1861, a reformer who was nonetheless killed by the Narodnaya Volya)

Alexander III          1881-1894 (conservative, didn’t follow his liberal father’s policies)

Nicholas II    1894-1917 (also conservative, defended monarchy from revolutionary pressures)

The eastern sensibility and feudal past long had a strong hold on Russia in spite of Peter the Great’s campaign to bring the country into the orbit of western Europe, and there seems to have been a distrustful relationship between the monarchy and the feudal lords.  During the 1860s-70s, pressure came from the nihilists who opposed both the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie.  From the 1880s onward, new pressure came from a nascent proletariat and intellectuals like Trotsky and Lenin who supported it, resulting first in the 1905 uprising and then in the 1917 October Revolution that ushered in the Soviet Union, which lasted until 1990.

Act I

The sway of the feudal past is a good entry point for Chekhov’s bitter comedy: it seems that the play’s protagonist, Lubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, owner of an aristocratic estate with a beautiful old cherry orchard, is strongly oriented towards this past; she sees in it and in the place that embodies it a refuge from modern life, with its financial imperatives and its failure to appreciate the need for beauty, deep affection, and continuity of identity.  These things are important to some of Chekhov’s characters – his plays tend to be about attitudes towards life, not about events, at least not directly.  There’s one main event in The Cherry Orchard, and that’s the proposed and then actual chopping down of the orchard itself once Lopahin buys it at an auction.  The other events have to do with historical developments beyond the play, not with anything the characters themselves are doing: I mean that Lubov’s plight is really that of the landowning class to which she belongs at the turn of the century; as an aristocracy tends to do, they are becoming more and more hedged in and superannuated.  They may have a fine family history, but that doesn’t pay the bills.  That’s worth something since, as Oscar Wilde says, “the only way to stay alive in the memory of the commercial classes is by not paying one’s bills.”  Even so, not having money has a way of catching up with a person, as it does here in the case of Madame Ranevskaya.

We are also introduced to Yermolay Alexeyevich Lopahin, a prosperous merchant who comes from peasant stock –it’s undeniably his perspective that wins out in the end since he becomes the proprietor of the estate; in spite of his personal attachments to Madame Ranevskaya, who treated him and his family well, he stands firmly for modernity and utility.  One doesn’t know quite what to make of him at times, as when on 1536 he calls himself a “pig in a pastry shop.”  He can hardly believe how far he’s come in a short time, but such pronouncements may also mask bitterness and resentment at those whose heritage trumps his lowly upbringing. 

The servants in this play also deserve attention because the clerk Yepihodov has proposed to Dunyasha the maid, even though she’s mainly interested in Yasha the valet.  Together with the proposed Varya and Yermolay match, I suppose, this is where the traditional comic concern with successful marriages comes into play since the domestic arrangements of Madame Ranevskaya have been anything but comic – we find out about the death of her husband, the perfidy of her lover, and the drowning of her young son several years before the time of the play.  That drowning is what makes the initial setting – the “nursery” room of the estate – so poignant.  It isn’t a happy oblivion to which Madame Ranevskaya is returning after five years in Paris, but a place with both sweet and sorrowful associations.  Anya is a conduit to this fact since it’s she who tells us on 1540 about Lubov’s loss of her husband and her son, Grisha.

Well, Lopahin is the man who knows what’s to be done: sto delat’, as the Russians say.  Carve up the property around the orchard and the riverbank and lease the parcels to summer vacationers.  Meaning, of course, that the magnificent old cherry trees would have to be cut down (1541).  Old Firs (1542) remembers that they used to make good money by harvesting and drying the cherries, but that’s a lost art now.  “They’ve forgotten,” he says – “Nobody remembers it.”

Towards the end of the first act, Pyotr Trofimov’s dialog with Madame Ranevskaya brings home to us the insight that her orientation towards the past is a complex, troubled one: on the one hand, the estate is a place she loves – on 1544 she speaks fondly of her “innocent childhood,” when she “used to sleep in this nursery.”  At the same time, she indicates a need to forget the past: “If I could free my chest and my shoulders from this rock that weighs on me, if I could only forget the past!”  Leaving it behind would, no doubt, allow her to accept the useful advice that Lopahin has given her about how to get clear of her debts and generate sufficient income.  Trofimov was Grisha’s tutor, so his presence now reminds Madame Ranevskaya of the sad affair of six years ago, when Grisha drowned in the river.

Through it all, Lubov’s brother Leonid Andreyevich Gayev isn’t much help – he fancies himself quite the liberal opponent of the oppressive eighties under Alexander III, maybe even a minor version of the Turgenev-style superfluous man (1547).  Leonid is capable of conceiving a number of plans to get his sister and the family out of their money troubles, but isn’t practical enough to execute any of them well.  He’s a man without a point or purpose in life, and he tends to go on foolishly about things, until other characters tell him to pipe down. 

Act II

In keeping with the play’s emphasis on character’s ties to and attitudes towards their own past and the present as predicament, we hear governess Charlotta musing about her personal history: “where I come from and who am I, I don’t know” (1548).  Yepihodov, on the same page, comes across as a hopeless romantic, maybe a bit of a nihilist, with a comic bent.  One doesn’t take him too seriously as he’s a creature of books, or so he tells us, anyway.  On 1549, Dunyasha tells us that becoming part of the servant family on this estate has made her refined and fearful of change, of forces beyond her control: “I’m afraid of everything.”  She also fears rejection by Yasha, that westernizing rascal of a servant to Madame Ranevskaya.  She’s right about that – Yasha the allegedly overeducated man is hardly a sentimentalist, and I think Charlotta, something of the Shakespearean fool in her clarity and wisdom, sees through his act.  As she says of Yepihodov, “These clever men are all so stupid….”

On 1549, Lopahin continues his promotion of the “cut and lease” scheme, while Madame Ranevskaya admits to her own frivolity when it comes to money – she is simply incapable of managing it in the thoroughly modern way.  Her way is one of generous excess with unintended consequences: “the old people get nothing but dried peas to eat, which I squander money thoughtlessly.”  On 1550, she provides the details of her unhappy past, what with her husband who “drank himself to death on champagne” and her son who drowned, and her lover who abused and abandoned her to the point of driving her to a suicide attempt.  And “then suddenly I felt drawn back to Russia, back, to my own country, to my little girl” (1551), she reveals – this pull of the mother country is quite strong, and it has nothing to do with modernity, westernization, utility, or anything like that. 

On 1552, old Firs the servant and former serf reminds us of the futility of trying to make sense of modern times – for him, liberty seems to be more confusing than exhilarating.  What he misses is the human connection he felt, the feudal bond between servant and master, one which has been replaced by newfangled notions about mobility and liberty: “there’s no making out anything.”  In that larger historical context, of course, this seems like a delusion, as all defenses of feudalism’s purported humaneness tend to be.  Marx’s commentary in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism laid bare and owned outright the brutal exploitation of relations in pre-technical times seems on point: feudalism had only dishonestly masked the barbarity of master-slave relations, it had not constituted a bulwark against such inhumanity. 

Trofimov’s modern thinking runs in that direction, too – his conversations with Gayev, Lopahin, whom he despises, and Anya are illuminating.  What to do?  Work, says Trofimov.  Don’t look to the past with sentimentality, with nostalgia for some lost ideal, and don’t sit around like the Russian intelligentsia vainly building sand-castles in the air.  The new, enlightened Russia must be built, not philosophized into existence.  The irony here is that Trofimov is quite the man for waxing philosophical – advocating the centrality of work is, in fact, a central European philosophical move, as evidenced in the work of Hegel and then Marx.  But at 1555, his recasting of the cherry orchard as a symbol of the oppressive past is powerful: he says such orchards symbolize Russia’s backwardness in the face of European progress.  Labor in building the new Russia would be the way to expiate the landowner’s crimes of the past and pave the way for a less provincial future.  Anya admits the effectiveness of this rhetoric on her, but of course she’s seventeen years old; Trofimov’s talk would have no such effect on Madame Ranevskaya, whose affection for the orchard is not so easily moved.

Towards the end of the second act, we first hear the “sound of a snapping string, mournfully dying away.”  This sound and the appearance of the drunken beggar to whom Madame gives extravagantly are symbolically charged, a means of cutting through the mutual recriminations and contradictions and incompatibilities of the several characters.  What Chekhov is describing, I think, is a Russia filled with competing poses and sentiments, none of which add up to a coherent picture or way of facing the present.

Act III

Varya’s quandary and distress.  Lopahin’s advice would mean selling the estate she manages.  At 1559, we find Madame Ranevskaya’s clearest definition of what the orchard means to her, and right after that comes a reproach against Trofimov for his dismissal of “love,” his failure of sentiment.  At 1563, Lopahin announces he’s bought the cherry orchard – his brutality is hard to overlook at this point since he finds it impossible to refrain from gloating over this evidence for his newfound status.

Act IV

At 1566, Trofimov declares his independence from Lopahin – his idealistic views make him an alternative to the Lopahin/Ranevskaya opposition between practicality and sentiment.  At 1567, Yasha wants to go to Paris again – anywhere but Mother Russia.  At 1568, Pischchik the fellow landowner has leased some of his land to a mining concern: he has no genuine ties to his land or to the Russian past, so it’s easy for him to make the profitable choice.  At 1569, the Lopahin/Varya match comes to nothing, and at 1570 theirs is a poignant leave-taking scene.  At the play’s end, the old servant Firs lies down and becomes very still, and indeed he may have passed away.  There’s no “renewal” for him, then.

What keeps the play from being a tragedy?  Well, in a sense it’s simply that only old Firs the servant dies, but beyond that, the destruction of the cherry orchard also implies the possibility of letting go, of liberating oneself or being liberated from the places, things, and people that have kept one from living fully and in the present.  Madame Ranevskaya really has no choice in the matter since, of course, she is in the common aristocratic predicament of being land rich and cash poor.  Heritage doesn’t pay the bills, and she has no idea how to turn a profit on the estate or its produce, so Yermolay Lopahin the merchant’s advice is the only one that would have led to a way out.  And he is the one who finally buys the estate and plans to chop down the orchard to make way for summer cottages and the income they will bring.  Sometimes the terms “comedy” and “tragedy” are rather too narrow to do justice to a play.  Henry James, in “The Art of Fiction,” writes in favor of keeping fiction (novels and short stories are his focus) wide open in terms of the rules it must obey, the better to embrace and reflect on all areas of life.  Rules, after all, have a way of narrowing down the subjects that can be discussed, and forbidding artists from experimenting to capture something new.  The same plea might be made for drama, I suppose – after all, Shakespeare, probably the greatest dramatist ever, never showed the least interest in conforming his efforts to some tradition-baked set of conventions: he didn’t follow standard definitions of tragedy or comedy, if he even fully knew them. 

So in the present Chekhov play, we are left with the sound of the axe stroke and the symbolic snapping of a string.  What to make of them, comic or tragic or something else in between?  There’s no projected future to affirm or embrace, and in that sense the ending differs from Shakespearean romantic comedy.  But it’s also the case that if anybody dies (I mean Firs), it isn’t from swordplay in accomplishing some revenge plot, or anything like that, but simply natural causes.  Well, maybe that’s realism, too: as Henry David Thoreau said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."