THE CHERRY ORCHADE : ANTON CHEKHOV
About The Author
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov : was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience.
Chekhov at first wrote stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations that influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.
CHARACTER LIST
Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya – a landowner. Ranyevskaya is the linchpin around which the other characters revolve. A commanding and popular figure, she represents the pride of the old aristocracy, now fallen on hard times. Her confused feelings of love for her old home and sorrow at the scene of her son's death, give her an emotional depth that keeps her from devolving into a mere aristocratic grotesque. Most of her humor comes from her inability to understand financial or business matters.
Peter Trofimov – a student and Anya's friend. Trofimov is depicted as an "eternal" (in some translations, "wandering") student. An impassioned left-wing political commentator, he represents the rising tide of reformist political opinion in Russia, which struggled to find its place within the authoritarian Czarist autocracy.
Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pishchik – a landowner and another old aristocrat whose estate has hit hard times. He is constantly discussing new business ventures that may save him and badgering Ranyevskaya for a loan. His character embodies the irony of the aristocracy's position: despite his financial peril, he spends the play relaxing and socializing with the Gayevs.
Yermolai Alexeievitch Lopakhin – a merchant. Lopakhin is by far the wealthiest character in the play, but comes from the lowest social class, as his father was a peasant and his grandfather was a serf. This contrast defines his character: he enjoys living the high life, but at the same time is uncomfortably conscious of his low beginnings and obsession with business. He is often portrayed on stage as an unpleasant character because of his greedy tendencies and ultimate betrayal of the Gayev family, but there is nothing in the play to suggest this: he works strenuously to help the Gayevs, but to no avail. Lopakhin represents the new middle class in Russia, one of many threats to the old aristocratic way of doing things.
Charlotta Ivanovna – a governess. By far the most eccentric character, Charlotta is the only governess the Gayevs could afford and is a companion for Anya. She is a melancholy figure, raised by a German woman without any real knowledge of who her circus entertainer parents were. She performs card tricks and ventriloquism at the party in the third act and accepts the loss of her station, when the family disbands, with pragmatism.
Yepikhodov – a clerk. The Gayev's estate clerk is another source of comedy. He is unfortunate and clumsy in the extreme, earning him the insulting nickname "Twenty-Two Calamities" (the nickname varies between translations) mostly invoked by Yasha. He considers himself to be in love with Dunyasha, whom he has asked to marry him.
Dunyasha – a housemaid. Like Lopakhin, she is another example of social mobility in Russia at the time. A peasant who is employed as the Gayev's chambermaid, Dunyasha is an attention seeker, making big scenes and dressing as a lady to show herself off. She is in some respects representative of the aristocracy's impotence, as a lowly chambermaid would not in the past have had the freedom to dress like a lady and flirt with the menservants. Although pursued romantically by Yepikhodov, she is in love with Yasha, attracted to the culture he has picked up in Paris.
Firs – a manservant, aged 87. An aging eccentric, Firs considers the emancipation of the Russian serfs a disaster, and talks nostalgically of the old days when everybody admired their masters and owners, such as Gayev's parents and grandparents. His senility is a source of much of the play's poignancy, symbolizing the decay of the old order into muttering madness.
Yasha – a young manservant, accompanying Lyubov on her way back from Paris and desperate to return. Yasha represents the new, disaffected Russian generation, who dislike the staid old ways and who will be the footsoldiers of the revolution. A rude, inconsiderate and predatory young man, Yasha, like Dunyasha and Charlotta, is the best the Gayevs can afford. He toys with the girlish affections of Dunyasha, the maid.
A Stranger – a passer-by who encounters the Gayevs as they laze around on their estate during Act II. He is symbolic of the intrusion of new ideologies and social movements that infringed on the aristocracy's peace in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
The Stationmaster and The Postmaster – Both officials attend the Gayevs' party in Act III. Although they both play minor roles (the Stationmaster attempts to recite a poem, and the Postmaster flirts with Dunyasha), they are mostly symbols of the deprecation of the aristocracy in 1900s Russia – Firs comments that, whereas once they had barons and lords at the ball, now it's the postman and the stationmaster, and even they come only to be polite.
Grisha – The son of Lyubov, drowned many years ago before her sojourn to Paris. She is reminded of his existence through the presence of Trofimov, who was his tutor.
Guests, servants, and others.
SUMMER AND ANALYSIS
Madame Ranevskaya owns an estate in the Russian country. She returns to this estate from Paris, where she has been staying. Upon her return to the estate she is accompanied by numerous people, including her brother Gaev, her daughter Anya, and her adopted daughter Varya. Also in attendance is her loyal footman, Firs, who is in his late eighties but doggedly determined to serve his mistress.She is told by the merchant Lopahin, an old friend of the family who was once looked after by Madame Ranevskaya, that she will have to sell the cherry orchard on her estate in order to pay off her debts.He advises her to lease out some of the land and to build summer cottages on the estate, which can be rented out to holidaymakers, so she can keep her childhood home and make it financially viable. However, she refuses, partly for sentimental reasons: she is convinced she can see the ghost of her mother among the trees of the cherry orchard.A tutor named Petya Trofimov arrives, and we learn that Trofimov tutored Ranevskaya’s son Grisha, who drowned five years ago, not long after his father, Ranevskaya’s husband, died. Following these tragedies, Ranevskaya left for Paris. Gaev, meanwhile, has his own plans for how to solve the family’s financial difficulties, one of his ideas being to marry Anya off to a wealthy man.
The second act of The Cherry Orchard takes place in some fields lying outside of the estate. Lopahin, Ranevskaya, and Gaev join Yepihodov, a local clerk, and Dunyasha, a maid from the estate. Ranevskaya has received a letter from her lover in Paris, who wants her to return to him. Lopahin continues to urge the family to take up his idea for how to make the estate financially stable, but they still refuse to listen to his advice.Meanwhile, Trofimov and Lopahin disagree over the best kind of future for Russia: Lopahin, ever the entrepreneur, argues for a capitalist future whereas Trofimov is all in favour of all-out revolution. Anya is drawn to Trofimov’s politics, and to him, but he has his mind only on revolution and cannot think about love or marriage.
The third act focuses on a party at the estate. Trofimov argues with Ranevskaya, who rejects his idea that he should give up the cherry orchard: it has too much importance for her family’s history. The news arrives that the orchard, which has been put up for auction, has been sold, and Lopahin reveals he is the purchaser. He now owns the orchard where his ancestors once toiled as lowly serfs.
The fourth act concerns Madame Ranevskaya’s departure from the house that has been hers throughout her life (but is no more), as she prepares to return to Paris. The sound of the axe chopping down the cherry trees can be heard outside even before she is out of the house. In one final, darkly comic moment, Firs wonders into the empty house, and we realise that Ranevskaya has forgotten to take him with her.
ANALYSIS
The Cherry Orchard is about a country in crisis, undergoing a dramatic shift between an old, traditional way of life and a whole new system. A year after the play premiered, there would be a failed Russian revolution, a sort of ‘dry run’ for the Bolshevik uprising in 1917 that would lead to the establishment of Communism in Russia.How Chekhov goes about representing this struggle between the old and the new is worthy of analysis. The Cherry Orchard has been called the first great Expressionist play, because Chekhov sometimes uses exaggeration for symbolic effect: as Michael Pennington and Stephen Unwin point out in their analysis of the play in A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, the size of the cherry orchard is too great for such a place actually to exist.
But it represents the vast estates of old, aristocratic Russia, so it needs to be big for this point to be clear to us. Similarly, Trofimov’s talk of revolutionary politics was deliberately exaggerated and made absurd, Pennington and Unwin tell us, so Chekhov could get such talk past the theatre censors; but the character is making a serious point, and many of his views would feed into the Russian Revolution thirteen years later.Despite such moments of exaggeration, however, Chekhov approaches the topic of this clash between old and new values with sympathy and subtlety. Lopahin seems genuinely to want to help his old friend and one-time mother-figure to keep the cherry orchard, and is exasperated when she fails to heed his advice (though he still cheerily snaps up the orchard at the ensuing auction, outbidding Gaev’s meagre sum).
And Ranevskaya herself, who could easily provoke ridicule for sentimentally clinging to her childhood home and living beyond her means in Paris, and for failing to ignore tOther symbolic touches are easier to decipher: Gaev’s obsession with miming billiards and describing tricky moves in the game is symptomatic of the sort of life he has led: unlike Lopahin and other (former) serfs, he has enjoyed a life of leisure and hasn’t had to work hard for a living.
There is a sense in which, to him, life remains a game, a diversion, a series of moves where the outcome isn’t especially important (as his casual approach to finding a solution to the family’s financial trouble reveals).
But what makes The Cherry Orchard such a rich and enjoyable piece of drama is the faint hint of the absurd in such details, so that they simultaneously operate on a symbolically true, but also borderline farcical, level.he practicalities of economy (the word, we should remember, literally comes from the ancient Greek meaning ‘management of the house’), is someone who also invites our sympathy, not least because of the family tragedies that precipitated her flight to Paris in the first place.By the same token, Ranevskaya, for all her attachment to the house and the cherry orchard, nevertheless leaves it at the end having forgotten Firs, her loyal servant, leaving him behind on his own. As Pennington and Unwin note, this is a comic moment, but it is comic because it foreshadows later twentieth-century plays by Pinter and Beckett, being almost proto-absurdist in its tone.
Other symbolic touches are easier to decipher: Gaev’s obsession with miming billiards and describing tricky moves in the game is symptomatic of the sort of life he has led: unlike Lopahin and other (former) serfs, he has enjoyed a life of leisure and hasn’t had to work hard for a living.There is a sense in which, to him, life remains a game, a diversion, a series of moves where the outcome isn’t especially important (as his casual approach to finding a solution to the family’s financial trouble reveals).But what makes The Cherry Orchard such a rich and enjoyable piece of drama is the faint hint of the absurd in such details, so that they simultaneously operate on a symbolically true, but also borderline farcical, level.
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