The Cherry Orchard — Commentary

In brief

Lubov Ranevskaya comes home from Paris in May, broke, to an estate that will be auctioned on 22 August. A merchant called Lopakhin, whose father and grandfather were serfs on the place, tells her exactly how to save it: cut down the orchard and let the land for villas. She finds that vulgar. Nobody does anything. On the day of the sale she gives a ball she cannot pay for, and Lopakhin comes back from town having bought the estate himself. In October they all leave for the station, with the axes already audible, and lock the house with an old servant inside.

The play has no villain, and its one decisive act is a bid at an auction, offstage. The library catalogue lists the play under 1903, the year of writing; this page dates it 1904, when it was first performed and first printed.

Comedy or tragedy

The quarrel began before the first rehearsal, and it is documented. Chekhov wrote to Stanislavsky’s wife on 15 September 1903: “It has turned out not a drama, but a comedy, in parts a farce”. The title page says comedy, and so does the Gutenberg text. Stanislavsky read the script and wept. His reply, as given in James Loehlin’s Cambridge study, was flat: “This is not a comedy, nor a farce as you have written, this is a tragedy”. He went on: “I wept like a woman, I wanted to control myself but I couldn’t.” And he anticipated the objection: “no, for simple men this is a tragedy.”

Another letter of the period protests about tone: “Not once does my Anya cry”, and “in the second act there is no graveyard.” After the opening Chekhov wrote, “Stanislavsky has ruined my play”, and asked, “Why do they so obstinately call my play a drama in play bills and newspaper advertisements?” Years later Stanislavsky admitted part of the charge, saying that he had invented birdsong and barking dogs and “caused a protest on the part of Chekhov”.

Chekhov has the better of it on the text. The play’s jokes are built into its grief. Lubov tells how she cried all the way home and then, through her tears, says, “Still, I must have my coffee.” Gaev comes in weeping from the sale and stops at the click of billiard balls. He delivers a jubilee oration to a bookcase. A clerk who carries a revolver in case he decides to shoot himself is more troubled by his squeaking boots. Stanislavsky was also right in one sense he did not intend, because in the last minute nobody in the theatre is laughing. It is a comedy in that it refuses to grant its people the dignity of tragedy, and the refusal hurts. Julius West’s phrase in his introduction is close to it: “the tragedies of doing nothing”.

The shape of the play

Four acts, May to October, with the sale itself kept offstage. Act One is an arrival at dawn in a room still called the nursery. Act Two takes everyone outdoors at sunset, to a field with old tombstones and telegraph poles on the horizon, and gives Lopakhin his plea for “Just one word”. Act Three is the ball, in which Charlotta does card tricks and the household waits for news. Act Four repeats the first set with the curtains and pictures gone.

Lopakhin

Chekhov’s view of who matters is on record. “When I was writing Lopahin, I thought of it as a part for you”, he told Stanislavsky on 30 October 1903, calling it “the central one of the play”. He added that Lopakhin “is a very decent person in every sense”, must behave “with perfect decorum”, and that Varya “wouldn’t be in love with a mere money-grubber”. Stanislavsky took Gaev instead and cast Olga Knipper as a glamorous Ranevskaya. Loehlin suggests that this may have tipped the whole play towards sympathy for the gentry, and the tradition of nostalgic Cherry Orchards starts there.

Read as Chekhov asked, Lopakhin has the first line of the play, “The train’s arrived, thank God”, and his first speech gives the wound. He recalls being fifteen, his nose bleeding from his father’s fist, and Lubov washing him in this room: “Don’t cry, little man, it’ll be all right in time for your wedding.” He is rich now and says, “I’m still a peasant down to the marrow of my bones.” He tells her that “My father was the serf of your grandfather and your own father”, and that he loves her as family “and even more”. He offers to raise a loan of 50,000 roubles. He is the only person in the play with a plan that would save her.

So the great moment of Act Three is not a villain’s triumph. Asked who bought it, he says, “I bought it.” The speech that follows is drunk, ecstatic and appalled: he has bought the estate “where my grandfather and my father were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed into the kitchen”, and he calls the band to “come and look at Ermolai Lopakhin laying his axe to the cherry orchard”. Then he sees her weeping and turns in the same breath: “Why then, why didn’t you take my advice? My poor, dear woman, you can’t go back now.” Then, “I can pay for everything!”, knocking into a table. Even Trofimov tells him he has “thin, delicate fingers, like those of an artist”. In the fourth act this powerful man is left alone with Varya to propose, an event everyone has arranged, and he talks about the weather while she mentions a broken thermometer.

1861 and the money

The Emancipation of 1861 is the event behind everything, and the play names it sideways. The orchard grew on unpaid labour. Fiers, as the text spells Firs, recalls the old system as an order now lost: “I didn’t agree with the Emancipation and remained with my people”, “I remember everybody was happy, but they didn’t know why”. Trofimov tells Anya what the trees mean, since her ancestors “owned living souls”. And Chekhov’s own stake is personal. His father, a grocer, was the son of a former serf, and in Taganrog a man named Selivanov bailed the family out for the price of their house, a transaction his biography compares to Lopakhin’s.

The sums are all there, and they are the real comedy. The estate could earn “at least twenty-five thousand roubles a year” from villas. Pischin is always after money for his mortgage, 240 roubles in Act One, and is saved first by a railway and then by Englishmen finding white clay on his land. The relation in Yaroslav sends fifteen thousand, which does not even cover the interest. Lubov scatters gold coins in Act Two, and gives gold to a tramp while the servants eat peas. Deriganov starts at thirty thousand above the mortgage; Lopakhin wins with “ninety more than the mortgage”. The finest touch comes in Act Four, when the money for saving the estate turns out to have a second use: “I’ll live there on the money your grandmother from Yaroslav sent along to buy the estate”. She is going to Paris on it. “My nerves are better, it’s true”, she says, shortly before she and Gaev sob alone in the empty room.

Firs left behind

The ending looks like a stroke of fate and is really a chain of small assumptions, which the text lays out with care. Anya asks whether Firs has gone to hospital. Yasha says, “I gave the order this morning. I suppose they’ve sent him.” Anya asks Epikhodov to check; he makes a joke and crushes a hat-box. Varya calls through the door to ask, and Anya, who does not know, answers, “Yes.” By the time Lubov voices her worry, the guess has hardened: “Mother, Fiers has already been sent to the hospital. Yasha sent him off this morning.” Lubov then says, “We go away, and not a soul remains behind.” Lopakhin turns the key in a side door. The stage is empty; carriages go; the axe begins.

Firs comes in and tries the handle. “It’s locked. They’ve gone away.” His first worry is that Gaev has gone out in the wrong coat. Then comes the plainest line in the play, “Life’s gone on as if I’d never lived”, and then the word he has used for everyone else, turned on himself: “Oh, you... bungler!” The direction says only that he lies without moving. Whether he dies is not stated. He is eighty-seven, he refused freedom in 1861, and the family he stayed for forgets him without meaning to. Lubov and Anya have both asked after him, and that is the point: their concern was real, and it did not reach the door.

The breaking string

The sound comes twice. Late in Act Two, as they all sit silent at sunset, comes “the sound of a breaking string, which dies away sadly”, heard “as if from the sky”. Lopakhin says, “It may be a bucket fallen down a well somewhere”. Gaev suggests “some bird... like a heron”. Trofimov says, “Or an owl.” Lubov shudders. Firs alone connects it with history: “Before the misfortune the same thing happened.” Asked which misfortune, he says, “Before the Emancipation.”

It returns in the final seconds after Firs lies down, followed only by the axe. Between the two soundings it has changed from a mystery that people explain into a fact no one is left to hear. Nothing in the text says what it is, and I think that is the discipline to respect. It works because it is not a symbol anyone in the play can use. Meyerhold, who thought the Moscow production buried the play’s poetry under naturalistic noise, wrote to Chekhov, “Your play is abstract, like a Tchaikovsky symphony”.

The other people

Lubov Ranevskaya

Lubov’s son drowned in the river by the house, she has been robbed by a lover in Paris, and she tears up his telegrams and then goes back to him: “That love is a stone round my neck”. She is generous, thoughtless and sharp, and the play’s charm depends on her.

Gaev and Varya

Gaev’s billiard calls, “Double the red into the middle”, are what he says instead of feeling. Varya, the adopted daughter, carries the keys and throws them on the floor when the sale is announced. Lopakhin picks up those keys.

Trofimov and Anya

Trofimov gives the play’s most stirring speeches, “All Russia is our orchard”, and cannot find his goloshes. Loehlin records that the censor forced changes to two of his speeches. Anya has promised her mother a new garden, says “Good-bye, old life!”, and is heard calling gaily from outside while Lubov and Gaev weep within.

The last play

Chekhov wrote it in Yalta through 1903, with tuberculosis advancing. In July he blamed slow progress on “laziness, fine weather, and the difficulty of the subject”. By September he had been “taken ill, with coughing and weakness”. By 30 October he was “utterly alone here”, waiting for a response. The Moscow Art Theatre opened it on 17 January 1904 by the Russian calendar (30 January by ours). By that calendar it was his own forty-fourth birthday. The evening was also made a celebration of twenty-five years of his writing, with addresses and curtain calls which, the biographical sketch in Garnett’s Letters says, exhausted him. To F. D. Batyushkov he wrote that the ovation was “so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected”. In June he left with Knipper for Badenweiler in the Black Forest, and he died there on 15 July. The doctor who wrote a sick old man lying down in a locked room had less than six months left after seeing it staged. I would not read the ending as a self-portrait. But no one writes “Life’s gone on as if I’d never lived” lightly in that condition.

What a director must decide

Whose play it is. Stanislavsky gave it to the gentry. A production that gives it to Lopakhin, as Chekhov asked, has a different ending. Charles Laughton played him at the Old Vic in 1933, Albert Finney at the National in 1978.
How funny. Hubert Butler’s translation for the 1933 Old Vic production brought out the comedy. Directors have kept reopening the question, among them Andrei Șerban at Lincoln Center in 1977, with Irene Worth and Raul Julia.
What the string sounds like. Every production has to commit to a real noise for an effect the text leaves unexplained.
Trofimov’s weight. After 1917 he can look like a prophet of revolution, and on the page he looks like a man hunting for his goloshes.
Firs at the end. Does he sleep or die? A stage direction that says only that he lies without moving has to be played one way or the other.

The English of it

The free text on Gutenberg sits inside a collection, Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series (#7986), translated by Julius West, who died in 1918. The links here go to the play’s own place in that volume, not its first page. It is complete in four acts and quick to read, with a lively colloquial ear. Its weaknesses are many and small. Firs becomes Fiers, Varya is sometimes Barbara, Gaev’s sister calls him Leon. Lopakhin’s Hamlet-quoting joke comes out as “Oh, feel me, get thee to a nunnery”, West’s try at a pun, where Garnett simply has “Ophelia”. The bank offers Gaev “Six thousand roubles a year” in Act Two and “sixty thousand roubles a year” in Act Four. A stage direction has him covering his face “with her hand”. And Lopakhin’s bucket falls “down a well”, where Constance Garnett’s translation, also free at Standard Ebooks, has it fall in the pits, which is a different and more ominous sound. Garnett in turn adds a “harp-string”. Use West for the links, Garnett to compare.

For performance, buy a modern version. Laurence Senelick’s (Norton) is the scholar’s, in Norton’s stage edition. Michael Frayn’s (Methuen) was used for Peter Hall’s National Theatre production of 1978. Ronald Hingley’s served Michael Blakemore’s National production of 1973.

How to read it

Read the stage directions. Half the comedy is in the telegraph poles, the squeaking boots and the cucumber Charlotta takes from her pocket.
Add up the money. Keep the numbers beside you; they are exact and they are damning.
Then read the letters. Chekhov’s last are in Garnett’s Letters, #6408, and they are short.