Discuss ‘The Cherry Orchard’ as a comedy. (P.U. 2004)
Part 2
The Pastoral Element
Pastoral, of course, has taken many forms over the centuries. Wordsworth’s ‘nature’ poetry, for example, or Corot’s landscapes may not seem ‘pastoral’ in the classical sense at all. But there is some evidence to suggest that periods of rapid social transition are often accompanied in the arts by a renewal of interest (on the part of both artists and their audiences) in images of rural contentment. At its simplest, the contrast between an ideal of rustic goodness and the sophisticated vanities of the world may be the artist’s most natural moral reaction to the inevitably competing emerges takes a more complex form than this, the popular tendency at such times to equate the loss of an old way of life with a stock of potent psychological imagery. In The Cherry Orchard that imagery involves the orchard itself, identified by both Lyubov and Gayev with the purity of their childhood to which, in coming back to the orchard, Lyubov is trying to return. And, together with that, Chekhov quite self-consciously includes with his usual stage effects the pastoral shepherd’s pipe and wayside shrine. In effect, just before the onset of one of the most momentous social transition in modern history. Chekhov renovated stylized elements of an old pastoral mode for his own distinctly modern purposes: to define the yearning for lost innocence that is so central to Lyubov’s individual psychology, and to indicate by ironic disjunction from pastoral ideal the state of a culture in which innocence and energy have long since been lost.
Throughout his mature work, Chekhov is strongly aware of the formative traditions in his characters’ lives and the state of the civilization in which they live. But this cultural and historical interest is unusually easy to isolate in The Cherry Orchard since (like The Seagull) the play is constructed around a central image, not (as in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters) around a person or persons. On the whole, this has the disadvantage of robbing the drama of that interest in diverse individual personalities which makes Three Sisters (say) so complex and variable. But it does mean both that Chekhov can produce a tighter shape to his work and that he can focus more directly and emblematically on the social and cultural implications which he wishes to convey. The Cherry Orchard begins and ends with a stage without people: in each case there is only the ‘nursery’, cold and empty, with the cherry orchard sparkling through its windows. The orchard itself is the protagonist. For, right from the beginning of Act I, it is from the static spectacle of the orchard, white with frost, that the play takes its psychological shape:
A room that still goes by the name of the nursery. One of the doors leads to Anya’s room. It is dawn and the sun will soon come up. It is May. The cherry trees are in flower, but in the orchard it is cold, there is morning frost. The windows in the room are closed. Enter Dunyasha with a candle and Lopakhin with a book in his hand.
The sun is just rising as the act begins, so that the light defines the cherry orchard against the more shadowy interior foreground; and the whiteness of the blossoming trees and frosted earth gives the outdoor scene a static, timeless air. As the light gradually intensifies throughout the act, the cherry orchard pales back into the distance. (But no account of the play can afford to disregard this immediate visual presentation of the orchard, impersonal and almost magically suspended in the morning frost. For its strangely timeless quality and mute purity and mute purity become for a while, as in pastoral, the reference-points against which the ordinary human world seems burdened and exhausted by time).
The room in which Act I take place is a former nursery, a place full of memories. Lopahin and Dunyasha enter during those odd few minutes between night and day when times is most palpable:
Lopakhin: The train’s arrived, thank the Lord. What’s the time?
Dunyasha: Almost two o’clock. (Extinguishes the candle.) It’s already light.
And when Lopakhin begins his typically Chekhovian reverie, bringing a personal and social past simultaneously forward to sustain his anticipation of seeing Lyubov again, the complexity of human time is felt against the unvarying cycle of the cherry-blossoming, momentarily spellbound in three degree of frost:
Lopakhin: Lyubov Andreyevna has been living five years abroad, and I don’t know what she’s become now...She’s a very fine person. An obliging person, simple. I remember when I was a youngster about fifteen, my father—he’s dead now but at the time he was a shopkeeper in the village here— hit me in the fact with his fist. The blood ran out of my nose...We had come to the yard here for some reason, and he’d been drinking. Lyubov Andreyevna, as I remember right now, was still very young, such a slim woman she was. She led me over to the washstand here in this very room, the nursery. “Don’t cry, little peasant,” she says “it will heal before your wedding...” (Pause.)
This kind of interest in time, in the fluidity of memory in bringing old situations forward into the present, is distinctive of Chekhov’s last plays. In this instance, human time is both complicated by nostalgia and fraught with irony. This ‘little peasant’ will later own Lyubov’s estate, and her troubles will be increased by his failure to have that ‘wedding day’. But it is the irrevocability of time that occupies our attention in Act I, as Lyubov and her entourage arrive back from the worldliness of Paris in the hope of a new life. When, towards the end of the act, the innocence of which it reminds Lyubov has an almost tragic past tense:
Varya: (quietly) Anya is sleeping, (quietly open the window.) The sun’s come up now, and it isn’t cold. Look Mamochka, what marvelous trees! And the air, too, dear God in heaven! The starlings are singing!
Gayev: (opens another window) The orchard is all in white. You haven’t forgotten, Lyuba, have you? That long avenue over there keeps running straight, straight as a cord stretched tight. It shines brightly on moonlit nights. You remember, you haven’t forgotten, have you?
Lyubov Andreyevna: (looks through the window at the orchard) Oh, my childhood, days of my innocence! In this very nursery I used to sleep, I used to look out at the orchard from here, and when I woke up each morning I felt happy, so happy. At that time too the orchard was exactly the same, nothing at all has changed. (Laughs jubilantly.) All in white, all! Oh, my orchard! After the dreary, rainy autumn and cold winter, I find you young once more, filled with happiness, and I know the angels in heaven have not deserted you... If only the heaviness I feel in my heart, the millstone I carry now, were suddenly taken away forever, if only I could forget my past!
The Element of Escapism
It is characteristic of Chekhov to avoid a surface nostalgia here (that emotion which is so attractive yet so dangerous in unskilled hands), and instead to make Lyubov’s longing for childhood—albeit somewhat theatrical—a longing for innocence and escape from time. The whiteness she prizes as purity in the orchards touches her because of the loss of that quality in her own life (just as Gayev, too, values the brilliance and symmetry that are missing from his). For although Lyubov Andreyevna is an attractive character, a woman of energy like that’, there is a worldliness and incipient vulgarity about her that reveal how far away she is, psychologically, from the cherry-orchard world of her youth. She feels the passing of time, not in terms of age, but in term of guilt—guilt about her lover, about the death of her son, about all that Paris has meant to her. And if, as the play goes on, she seems singularly inactive about the any attempt to save the orchard that means so much to her, it is First because she feels that she does not morally deserve the orchard, and second because that is not really where she belongs. In her deepest self she regards the experience of losing the orchard, of letting it slip through her hands, as a form of penance—the loss of the emblem of that innocence whose reality has long since gone. In any case, the call of her life—and love—is to Paris. The telegram that arrive at her estate, even before she arrive herself, are a persistent cause of tension, of a self-division into a defiant recognition of where her allegiances lie:
Lyubov: That telegram is from Paris. I get one every day. Both yesterday and today. That wild creature has fallen ill again, and he’s in trouble again...He begs forgiveness and implores me to go to him, and I really should go to Paris and spend some time near him. You disapprove, Petya, I can see from your face, but what else can be done, my dear, what can I really do? He is sick, he is alone and unhappy, and who is there to look after him? Who can stop him from doing the wrong things, and who will give him his medicine at the right time? Then why try to hide it or keep quiet about the way I feel? I love him, that’s clear. I love him, I love him...That man’s a millstone around my neck, I’m being dragged down with him, but I love that stone and I can’t live without it. (Presses Trofimov’s hand.) Don’t think badly of me, Petya, don’t say anything to me, don’t say anything...
Harvey Pitcher has given a convincing account of what he calls the ‘emotional network’ of this scene, where Lyubov Andreyevna first makes an appeal to Trofimov because he seems to have a stronger sense of right than she has and then, when he fails her, abandons herself to that other side of her nature which is impelling her towards Paris. In this episode (and elsewhere, through his association with Grisha, whose death Lyubov see as her ‘punishment’), Trofimov functions as an externalized figure of Lyubov’s own conscience. Recognizing her love for the man who has robbed and abandoned her, she instinctively fears what Trofimov will say; and in defiantly proclaiming her love to him, she is proclaiming it to her own conscience as well. She is no longer torn between shame and desire in deciding what to do; and after this, the lines recited in the background from A.K. Tolstoy’s ‘The Magdalene’ simply reinforce our impression that—paradoxical as it may seem—the cherry orchard, with all its metaphoric connotations of innocence for Lyubov, simply must be lost if she is to have peace of mind.
If this whole area of suggestion is explored in some details, it highlights several features of Chekhov’s dramatic art: the forceful visual suggestion of his stage images, the way that suggestion is complicated by the dialogue which takes place across and around it, and the simultaneous dramatization of social fact and the very personal psychological situation of individual characters. It is the work of a consummate artist whose control is everywhere evident in the work at large. For Lyubov’s lost innocence is, in a sense, embodied before both her and us in Anya, the daughter who bears so much likeness to Lyubov’s younger self. In Act I all hope seems centered on her. Significantly, the shepherd’s pipe plays as she retries to bed, and the last words of the act are a spoken tribute to her (ordinary metaphors, perhaps, but meaningfully suggestive of natural radiance in this carefully established context):
Trofimov: (deeply moved) Light of my life! My springtime! When, therefore, Anya subordinates her natural goodness to a shaky ideal in welcoming the ‘new dawn’ with Trofimov, the sense of defeat is both personal (in what it implies for Lyubov, whom Anya comforts at the end of Act III with promises that are plainly empty) and in a broad sense cultural. Anya succumbs to the new ideology; the pastoral shepherd’s piping is not heard again after the end of Act I.
Stage Directions
Chekhov is renovating certain elements of pastoral to define a process of cultural transition. The whole opening scene of Act II, as a pictorial composition, is pastoral in character—the initial illusion of purity about the pastoral setting becoming only gradually and subtly ironic as we discern the presence of the ‘great town’ in the background. Then, more particularly, the ironic intention manifests itself through the disintegration of the pure and exact visual impression into an incongruous awkwardness of movement and modernity of dialogue when the action actually begins. The entire opening scene, beginning with the visual contrivance in the stage directions, demands the most absolute precision for its effect:
A field. A very small, old chapel—bent out of shape and deserted a long time ago. Near it are an old bench, a well, and large stones that apparently were once used as tombstones. A road to Gayev’s estate can be seen. Towering popular trees loom darkly on the side, where the cherry orchard begins. In the distance is a row of telegraph poles, and far, far away on the horizon—appearing indistinct—is a large town, clearly seen only in very fine, clear weather. It is shortly before sunset. Charlotta, Yasha, and Dunyasha are sitting on the bench. Yepichodov stands nearby and plays guitar, as the others sit lost in thought. Charlotta, wearing an old peaked cap, has taken a gun from her shoulder and is adjusting the buckle on the sling.
These stage directions are, clearly, much more elaborate than is usual and more precise in their disposition of the figures and properties. Chekhov mentions them specifically in a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko: “In the Second Act I substituted for the river an old chapel and a well. This is better. But in the second act you will make provision for a real green field, and a path, and an horizon wider than is usual on the stage”. This ‘wider horizon’ provides an urban perspective to the pastoral image, foreshadowing the end of a country idyll. Even more importantly, the human grouping in the foreground (framed, in this case, by the wayside shrine and the well, so clearly reminiscent of pastoral) recall Watteau’s famous painting, Les Charmes de la vie, bringing to mind also the subtle melancholy of that picture. Like Watteau’s figure with the lute, Epihodov is set apart with his guitar, while the others are clustered on the garden seat. The settings seems initially to invite delight and the pleasures of courtly love. But while there is a love-triangle of a kind between Yasha, Dunyasha and Epihodov, it is not one that radiates innocence and joy. The divisions of attention and intention among this peculiar assortment of characters have the same effect as the preoccupied bodily attitudes of Watteau’s figures. Just as Watteau’s figures are subtly turned away from one another, Chekhov’s characters are absorbed in their separate thougths; and both scenes make us feel the absence of any truly functioning community between individual persons. The painting and the stage setting have in common on air of mournful distraction and even lassitude in the characters, which suggests their oppression by something both inside and outside themselves. Like Yasha’s and Yepichodov’s singing, something in the stage setting is vaguely off-key: there is a sense of disquiet, and each figure” plunged in thought”, seems oddly absorbed in himself.
Like Watteau’s Gilles, Chekhov’s composition shows his feeling for the fate of those secondary characters, like the artificer and the clown, who have been genially parasitic on a high culture which is now entering a phase of decline. For before the lifelessness of a culture is generally recognized, these people instinctively reflect the fact by a certain stiffness of posture and (in some cases) artlessness of gesture. (Their demeanor reveals the emptiness of their art, which, in no longer serving something vital, no longer serves them. Thus, it is no small calculation on Chekhov’s part that Act II should begin with Charlotta—governess, conjurer and ventriloquist—captured at an artlessly confessional moment, speaking (unheard) to other subordinate and dependent people, all of whom seem, despite their stylized postures, lonely and bereft of resource):
Charlotta: (in a thoughtful mood} I don’t have a genuine passport. I don’t know how old I am, but I keep on thinking I’m very young. When I was a small little girl, my father and mamasha used to travel from fair to fair and give shows—very good ones too. Oh I used to jump around, doing salto-mortale and all sorts of tricks. And when papasha and mamasha died, a certain German woman took me into her home and started teaching me. All right. I grew up and then became a governess. But where I come from and who I am—I don’t know...Who were my parents, maybe they weren’t even married...I don’t know. (Takes a cucumber out of her pocket and begins eating it.) I don’t know anything. (Pause.) I’d really like to start a conversation, but there’s no one to start with...I don’t have anybody at all.
Yepichodov: (plays the guitar and sings)
“What care I for the world and its tumult,
What care I for my friends or my foes...”
How pleasant it is to play the mandolin!
Dunyasha: It’s a guitar, not a mandolin. (Looks at herself in a small mirror and powder herself.)
It is part of the comic convention that the sorrows of which Charlotta speaks are itemized rather than felt, partly balanced by, and partly deflected into, her cucumber-eating. The expressions of melancholy are stylized. But the fact that feelings are formalized in this arrangement does nothing to discount the fact that they are there. Though lacking the emphasis on personality and the sense of life’s active cruelty which we associate with tragedy, the scene gives classical expression to a state of cultural decay by which the characters are tangibly but unconsciously oppressed. With the setting sun, in deliberate contrast to the sunrise of Act I, Chekhov prepares imaginatively for the demise of the landed class in this play and for the loss of everything which that class has contributed, positively, to the culture.
Act III as a whole assumes a processional character which is consistent with this stylized beginning: three groups of figures in turn arrive to converse by the abandoned shrine, before the sun finally sets and the string is heard snapping in the sky. The last of these groups includes Trofimov, the ‘perpetual student’ whose opinions (were it not for their often ironic context in the play) are fairly close to what Chekhov’s letters suggest were his own. Trofimov’s speeches widen the specific social reference of the play:
Trofimov: The educated people I know, the vast majority at any rate, aren’t in search of a single thing, and they certainly don’t do anything. So far they lack even the ability for real work. They call themselves the intelligentsia, but they speak to their servants as inferiors and treat their peasants as if they were animals. They are poor students, they read absolutely nothing serious, and they do precisely nothing. They only talk about science, and as for art, they understand next to nothing.
Irony
But it is characteristic of Chekhov’s irony—here and throughout his work—that this character, who so often accords with his own attitudes, is a conspicuously inadequate person, embodying more than anyone the inactivity of which he speaks. What Trofimov advocates in his most rhetorical speeches is embodied before him in Lopakhin; and though he himself cannot recognize it. Chekhov clearly does so in creating that symbolic stalemate between Lopakhin and Lyubov on the subject of Russia’s ‘giants’:
Lopakhin: You know, I get up before five in the morning, and I work from morning till night. Now, I’ve always got money on hand—my own and other people’s—and so I can see what kind of people are around. You have only to start doing something or other to realize how few honest, decent people there are. Sometimes when I can’t get to sleep, I keep thinking, “Dear Lord in heaven, you gave us these enormous forests, boundless fields, broad horizons, and living among them we really ought to be giants ourselves...”
Lyubov Andreyevna: Now you find giants indispensable...Oh, they are very nice only in fairy stories; anywhere else they can scare you. (Yepichodov crosses at the depth of the stage, playing his guitar. Lyubov Andreyevna is deep in thought.) There goes Yepichodov...
Anya: (deep in thought) There goes Yepichodov...
Gayev: The sun has set, ladies and gentlemen.
Yepichodov steps forth as if in answer to Lyubov’s call: the most absurd representative of the old order, passing across the stage in the last rays of light. The sounds of his guitar give way to silence, which, in turn, is broken by the sound of the snapping string. David Magarshack has pointed out how much the force of this movement depends on Chekhov’s stilling his characters into a state of ‘suspended animation’, a trance-like frame of mind which is somehow induced by the spectacle of Yepichodov silhouetted against the setting sun and signaled First by Lyubov’s and Anya’s dreamily repeating “There goes Yepichodov and then by Gayev’s softly chanted apostrophe to Nature. As the sun sets over Epihodov the characters against sit “plunged in thought”. But this time it is with an unspoken community of feeling, at least for the duration of the string snapping in the sky. Here, especially, one is aware of Chekhov’s special instinct for dramatic timing. The subtly ritual casting of the act has prepared for some such moment, and it comes immediately after a discussion of the ‘giants’ which Lopakhin, at least, thinks Russian ought to be, which heightens our awareness of what these people actually are. The sound of the snapping string feels like the triumph of some impersonal process over these characters’ lives. It is like a forewarning of the judgment of history on their lifelessness and decadence. And as soon as that sound is heard in the play, a whole series of changes occurs. A wayfarer enters, begging and then ridiculing Varya’s money; Lopakhin taunts her openly about the general presumption that they will marry, which he has never quite done before; and Trofimov decisively wins Anya’s loyalty. Although Lopakhin’s ‘giants’ would at least be decent and incorruptible men, and although Trofimov the idealist prophesies happiness, there is nothing in the play’s structure to endorse either hope. In fact, the rising moon, the poplars, Epihodov’s melancholy tune, and the echo of Varya’s voice at the end of the act—’Anya ! Anya !’—say otherwise.
At this point from the beginning of Act III, Chekhov has effectively moved the drama beyond the situation in which the pastoral suggestions had their meaning. With the fate of the old class all but sealed, he turns more directly to give an image of shifting power and social disintegration. From a beginning in which what is essentially a family is re-united in a setting of shared memories, the play accumulates people—only to loosen the bonds between them: and, as part of that process, the emphasis shifts from Lyubov’s personal longing for lost innocence to the power-dynamics of social change. In Acts I and II Yasha and Dunyasha, coming only gradually into their own right as characters, are disruptive presences among the cherry-orchard people, breaking up any sense of those people as forming a stable, self-contained community. Though officially subordinate in station, they dress and act like the class they serve; and often Yasha’s service to that class is performed insolently and ironically. In Act III, however, with the introduction of the post-office clerk and station-master as reluctant guests at Lyubov’s and Gayev’s loss of power and the greatest importance of a new factor in the determination of status—money. In no other of Chekhov’s plays is money so important, so insidiously dominating the characters’ lives. Pishchik can think of nothing else, as he himself says. And the unusually nervous balance of relationships in Act III derives from the fact that, although the scales of power are presumed to have tipped with the sale of the orchard, no one knows exactly which way.
Like its counterparts in Chekhov’s other major plays, Act III brings the drama to a climax by collecting its characters together in strained and untypical circumstances. Almost always, these occasions have the inbuilt irony of being gatherings that should not have taken place. Like Serebryakov’s meeting to propose the sale of the estate in Uncle Vanya, or the accidental fire in Three Sisters (so wholly inappropriate to the sisters’ state of feeling at that moment that it seems as if it has been lit ‘on purpose’ to spite them), the part in Act III of The Cherry Orchard takes place at ‘the wrong time’ to have the orchestra, and ‘the wrong time to give a dance’. In every detail the occasion is an affront to all that Lyubov and Gayev have represented in the past:
The drawing room. In the distance, through the archway, the ballroom can be seen. The chandelier is lighted. The Jewish orchestra mentioned in the second act is heard playing in the entrance hall. It is evening. In the ballroom they are dancing a grand rond. The voice of Simeonov-Pishchik is heard, “Promenade a une paire!” They enter the drawing room: Pishchik and Charlotta Ivanovna are the first couple; Trofimov and Lyubov Andreyevna the second; Anya and the post office civil servant, the third; Varya and the stationmasters, the fourth; and so on. Varya if weeping quietly, and as she dances, she wipes her tears away. Dunyasha is in the last couple. They walk around the drawing room, and Pishchik shouts, “Grand rond balancez!” and “Les cavaliers a genoux et remerciez vos dames !” Firs, wearing a dress coat, brings in a tray with seltzer water, Pishchik and Trofimov enter the drawing room.
The very presence of the post-office clerk and the station-master is a sign of change, a disappointment in terms of what has been prepared for by the double drawing-room, the arch and the burning chandelier. After the outdoor setting of Act II, this indoor scene is burdened with the accessories of a past age, oppressing the non-aristocratic present with their disproportionate formality and weight. The dance, designed to promote high spirits, can only manage a forced gaiety, beneath which lie frustration and a flickering aggression. No one in the room (except perhaps the silly Dunyasha) is really happy, and only a convention of mock abuse, freely indulged in, covers—or partly covers—the personal aggressions that are going on:
Trofimov: (teases) Madame Lopakhina! Madame Lopakhina!...
Varya: (angrily) You’re a used-up old gentleman!
This propensity for aggression infects nearly all the characters, but it is most obvious in Charlotta—that curiously displaced and autonomous person, obscure as to class, mannish, and yet not without a feminine quota of loneliness. Charlotta works with artifice, she is skilled in illusion; and it is by illusion that she distracts attention from the painful fate hanging over the cherry orchard. In her check trousers and grey top hat, and springing into the air to shouts of ’Bravo!’, she is an unrealistic figure, belonging, one comes to see, to the stylized tradition of mime. Yet the significance of her tricks is important and intriguing:
Charlotta: (holds the pack of cards on the palm of her hand; to Trofimov) Tell me quickly, what card is on top?
Trofimov: Well, hmm? Well, the queen of spades.
Charlotta: And here it is! (To Pishchik.) Well, what do you say the top card is now?
Pishchik: The ace of hearts.
Charlotta: And here it is! (Claps her hands and the pack of cards disappears.) Oh, what fine weather today! (She is answered by a mysterious woman’s voice that apparently comes from under the floor, “Oh, yes, the weather is incredible, dear leady.”) Oh, you’re so fine, indeed you’re my ideal...
The voice: “I like you very much, too, dear lady.”
The station master: (applauds) Bravo, our Miss Ventriloquist, bravo!
The rapid succession of one trick after another and Charlotta’s triumph in her power of command make this a tour de force of personal assertion which has also an edge of aggression about it. In the circumstances, with Lyubov helplessly awaiting news of what has happened to the estate. Charlotta’s demonstration of her power to will the world as she wants it, and her willing a kind of anarchy, feels to the audience like an act of psychic violence. The violence is cleanly achieved: it is probably not even conscious. But Chekhov makes it impossible for us not to feel that Charlotta in some sense wills her employers’ loss of power. It is, after all, just such a cruel, almost predestined operation of ‘chance’ and sudden overthrow of the old order which gives Lyubov’s estate to Lopakhin.
Chekhov is unusually alert to this kind of latent aggression in subordinate people; and the First definite news that the orchard has been sold provokes laughter from Yasha and, most surprising of all, irony from Firs. From then on the cherry-orchard people can do nothing but lose. And this process of loss culminates in the burlesque of Varya’s taking a stick to Yepichodov: her last frustrated gesture of authority, as Lopakhin—the new owner of the cherry orchard—enters and is almost struck by the stick. I mentioned earlier Chekhov’s sure sense of timing. Here, as Lopakhin announces that he has bought the orchard, Chekhov depends for an effect on bringing the whole ongoing momentum of the drama itself to a halt: there is neither action nor dialogue as the shock reverberates across the stage. Only after Varya has thrown down her keys does the action resume its progress, but now with Lopakhin in command and not Lyubov. The final shift of power takes place, definitely, in that one moment, after which Lyubov is left with nothing but her private hope of going to Paris and Anya’s well-intentioned but empty promises.
As far as the characters are concerned, the drama at this point is effectively finished; and the last act is in many ways thinner than the other three. What it does, however, is to shift the emphasis away from people and towards social fact. The very setting of the scene is more impersonal, with the cold, hard reality of Lyubov’s loss embodied in the new starkness of the former ’nursery’.
The setting is the same as in the first act. There are no window curtains or pictures. The few remaining pieces of furniture have been piled into one corner, as if for sale. There is a feeling of emptiness. Suitcase, travelling bags, etc., have been piled up near the outer door at the rear of the stage.
Sense of Emptiness
The sense of space on the stage is a sense of emptiness, an emptiness in which Lopakhin and Yasha with their glasses of champagne are somewhat at a loss. The house already has an abandoned and hollow air. As in Act I, the weather is sunny and still, with three degrees of frost; but the significance of such weather now is simply that it is “just right for building”. A pervasive shift has taken place in the culture represented in the play, from originally aristocratic to bourgeois values. Yet Chekhov’s response remains ambivalent. He is too much of a realist not to place some value simply on the continuity of life, even as the play clearly expresses his regret at the cultural implications of the change:
Trofimov: Your father was a peasant, mine was a druggist, and these simple facts prove—exactly nothing. (Lopakhin takes out his wallet.) Oh, leave it alone, do...Even if you gave me two hundred thousand, I wouldn’t take it. I’m a free person. And everything you value so highly and is held so dear by all of you, both rich and poor, not one of these things can sway me one iota. Why, they have a much power as a fluff of eiderdown floating in the air. I can make a go of it without you, I can even pass you by. I’m strong and proud. Humankind is on its way to a higher truth, to the greatest happiness possible on this earth, and I’m in the vanguard!
Lopakhin: Will you get there?
Trofimov: I will. (Pause.) I’ll either get there or show others the way to get there.
There is heard the sound of an axe striking a tree in the distance.
Lopakhin: Well, good-bye, dear boy. It’s time to go. You and I stick our noses in the air and look down on each other, but life goes on without giving a hoot about us. When I work and keep at it steadily for some time, thoughts come more easily, and it seems to me I too know why I exist. But think how many people there are in Russia who just exist, brother, and for what—it’s beyond me. Well, it doesn’t matter, that isn’t what keeps the wheels greased and spinning. Leonid Andreich has taken a job at the bank, they say, at six thousand a year... He just won’t stick to it, you know, he’s much too lazy...
In this exchange between Lopakhin and Trofimov, two aims or styles of life are brought into confrontation, but it is a confrontation without malice. It is the last salutation between men bent on opposite ways, and it rises to the occasion with an uneasy but touching reconciliation: ‘We turn up our noses at one another, but life is passing all the while’. Trofimov has the vague idealism of the old class. Lopakhin the quiet, instinctive pragmatism of the new. Lopakhin has money and a certain confidence in the utility of work; but his is also the axe that fells the cherry trees. Trofimov has only a great dream; and, while it is in one way a democratic dream, it is in its self-aggrandizing pride and self-assurance unmistakably aristocratic in origin. Each man is presented to us as to some extent self-deceived. Lopakhin is unable to see the destructive side of his ‘work’, and when he says, “When I am working hard... it seems to me as though 1 too know what I exist for”, he half-recognizes that the real purpose of life eludes him. Trofimov naively trusts in his dream; but it seems, to say the least, a highly precarious dream when set again the down-to-earth question “Will you get there?” and the distant sound of the axe.
Yet it is significant that this note of impartiality is struck in a scene involving these particular characters, Trofimov and Lopakhin. Chekhov’s ethical sense demands that he recognize Lopakhin’s basic decency and that he admire Lopakhin’s ability to get things done. To do so, he sets him beside Trofimov—a character who is emotionally cold and therefore not one to whom we give warm sympathy, but an idealist in his own terms and an associate of the old class. In this way a certain balance is achieved between the claims of the old order and the new, and Chekhov’s presentation of the situation is demonstrably fair. For sometime, in fact, the play carefully elicits responses and counter responses so as to prevent the feelings of anyone character of group of character from holding complete sway. Lyubov and Gayev are seen to be saddened by the loss of the orchard, but they are also relieved, and not just because the tension is over but because their personal lives are somehow freed. They are freed too late perhaps, and certainly in an ambiguous way, but freed nonetheless. Lopakhin, on the other hand, having triumphed in the purchase of the orchard, seems to have no private energy left. The scene where he cannot bring himself to propose to Varya, tactfully constructed as it is, makes us feel more than ever that there is something unfree about Lopakhin’s emotional life. It is never made clear whether that lack of freedom derives from a sense of personal insecurity which makes him afraid of marriage, or from a sentimental attachment to Lyubov which makes Varya seem inferior, or simply from his being too occupied with other things. But Chekhov makes us feel all along that Lopahin will not propose to Varya, and he confirms that feeling immediately before the ‘proposal’ scene when the champagne glasses are prematurely emptied by a thirsty Yasha. And in the course of the scene itself, Lopakhin’s inability to propose is suggestively associated with an unconscious reluctance to be controlled by those who controlled his forefathers, when he hears whisperings of connivance behind the closed door.
Dialogue of Opposing Values and Claims
It is characteristic of Chekhov to keep up this dialogue of opposing values and claims for as long as his dramatic situations will allow. The emptiness of the house, left to stand during the winter to be knocked down in the spring, when ‘new life’ theoretically begins, makes us feel the departure from the cherry orchard to be the sad finale to a whole era of Russian life. Yet still the voices are set in dialogue:
Anya: Good-bye, house! Fare thee well, old life!
Trofimov: Welcome, new life!...
There is not one response but many, deftly intertwined:
Lopakhin: And so, till spring then. Come along, everybody...Until we meet again!... (Goes out.)
Lyubov Andreyevna and Gayev are left alone. They seem to have waited for this moment and throw their arms around each other. They sob quietly, with restraint, afraid they might be overheard.
Gayev: (in despair) My sister, my sister...
Lyubov Andreyevna: Oh, my beautiful orchard, my dear sweet orchard!...My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye!... Good-bye!...
Anya: (offstage, cheerfully and appealingly) Mama!...
Trofimov: (offstage, cheerfully and excitedly) Hullo!...
This counterpointing of youth and age, hope and elegy, perfectly balances two alternative social possibilities. It is a tribute to Chekhov’s intelligence that that balance should persist to the very end. But as all the voices dissolve into silence and the dull thud of the axe, the moment has come for him to abandon the previous restraints on his own sympathies:
They go out. The stage is empty. The sound of all the doors being locked is heard, then of carriages being driven away. It grows quiet. In the stillness a dull thud is heard, the striking of an axe into a tree. It sounds solitary and dolorous. Footsteps are heard. From the door, right, appears firs. He is dressed, as always, in a jacket and white waistcoat, and he is wearing slippers. He is ill.
The sounds retreating, then silence, and finally the axe and the solitary footsteps, all echo life deserting the cherry orchard and the destruction of the orchard itself. And with the appearance of Firs, old, sick and lying motionless on the stage as the curtain drops, a chapter of history does seem to be coming to a close.
It is true that this image of Firs at the very end of the play softens and distorts our sense of the Russian past, evoking too simple a pathos. Since the cherry orchard itself is, from one point of view, a somewhat biased emblem of the past (its value, though ultimately ambiguous, is intrinsically established in its beauty, its glistening whiteness), the play’s ending, which has historical, as well as cultural, implication, needs to be firmer. Firs, also, is a risky figure for Chekhov to give much importance to because he is so much a stock creation, producing only a limited comedy and always tempting Chekhov to indulge over-simple effects. We might compare the sense of the past as embodied in Firs with the sense of even the very recent past in Three Sisters, where it takes such a complex form in Olga’s Masha’s and Irina’s personalities, or with the late story ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’, where a past style of life is seen incongruously penetrating the one that has replaced it. Fortunately, Firs lying on the stage is not the only impression with which The Cherry Orchard leaves us. Above him is the sound of the string snapping in the sky, and behind him the resounding strokes of the axe.
Social Drama
Given the usually robust conventions of the stage, the drama of The Cherry Orchard is unusually subtle, unusually formalized. Even the sequence of sounds with which it ends, which J.L. Styan calls “the most darling...the naturalistic theatre has known”; has a curiously ambivalent effect which is difficult to define. The sound of the snapping string, with its mournful and yet impersonal quality, was an artistic possibility already present in Chekhov’s mind as early as 1887, where it appears in the story “Happiness”. But it finds its fullest realization here in the stylized world of The Cherry Orchard. For, although the sound was one Chekhov actually heard as a boy, its significance to his imaginations was obviously both semi-mysterious and profound. It seems to have made him feel, or perhaps simply expressed for him as nothing else could have done, some harsh and sad intuition about the world and about people’s lives within it which would otherwise have remained inexpressibly abstract. In The Cherry Orchard it combines a number of meanings. In the simplest terms, and together with the sounds of the axe on the tree, it expresses symbolically the end of a particular era: it makes us seem actually to hear social changes taking place, making them unusually palpable. At the same time, it also impersonalizes our responses, taking them away from the characters as individual people, and concentrating our attention more abstractly on their predicament and on the process by which they have been displaced. After the simplification of feeling introduced by the final scene with Firs, that is in part what the play needs. But the ambivalence of the sound, coming inexplicably ‘out of the sky’ and yet ‘mournfully dying away’, captures something deeper in the whole spirit of the play which relates to Chekhov’s wider interest in cultural decay. Nothing could be further from the truth than the suggestion that The Cherry Orchard is simply a social drama weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of social change in late nineteenth-century Russia and accordingly alternating poetic elegy with sequences of farce. Nor, as I hope I have shown, is the play an evocative piece of ‘mood’ with little intellectual substance. Its triumph is to express, as Watteau’s paintings so often express, both the social and psychological manifestations of a situation in which a sustaining and ordering culture has become defunct. And, to express this, it brilliantly assimilates comic and tragic possibilities to one another until practically every scene is both light in texture and pervaded by a subtle melancholy—a true merging of tragic and comic possibilities. The Cherry Orchard, then, may be unusually stylized. But the vitality it brings to elements of a neglected mode of pastoral, the rightness of what happens to its created people in terms of their individual psychology and their cultural predicament, and the cultural assessment which Chekhov undertakes in the play, give us some measure of what an instinctive and alive artist he was.
