This web site does not endorse the above advertisements.

The Cherry Orchard: Analysis

Introduction

For the season of 1902-1903, the Moscow Art Theater had a new building with revolving stage, advanced lighting effects, and spacious quarters for the actors. The Theater's directors very much hoped that Chekhov would give them a new play to inaugurate the season. But in January of 1902, Chekhov wrote to his wife: "I have no faith yet in the play. It has hardly dawned in my brain, like the first glow of sunrise, and I don't know myself what it is to be, what will come of it."

By the winter of 1902, Chekhov was extremely ill. Days on end he battled with his broken health and frequently he was too weak to take up the pen. The Cherry Orchard took Chekhov three painful years from conception to performance, and all the time he wrote he knew it would probably be his last major effort. When the play was finished, it was scheduled to open on January 17, 1904, Chekhov's birthday. This was also the date which marked Chekhov's twenty-fifth year as a writer.

To celebrate the date, Chekhov's friends planned a huge jubilee to take place between the third and fourth acts of the premiere performance. An impressive program of speeches and presentations was arranged, with many prominent people taking part in the tribute. Sometime during the course of the early acts, someone made an incredible discovery. Chekhov was not in the theater! It was not only his illness which kept him away, but his shyness and embarrassment at being singled out in public. When he was finally fetched to the theater, he stood on the platform, pale, weak, and consumptive, and received "an ovation, so lavish, warm and really so unexpected" that he would never get over it.

The Cherry Orchard was at first only a mediocre success. Stanislavsky, the Moscow Art Theater's director, had insisted on playing the piece as a social tragedy - as a depressing drama of the passing of the old order. The critics had followed Stanislavsky's lead in this interpretation and found the play tedious.

Chekhov was furious at the misinterpretation. He insisted over and over again: "I have written not a drama, but a comedy, in parts a farce." In discussing the gloominess of Stanislavsky's reading, Chekhov said: "Is this really my Cherry Orchard? Are these my types? With the exception of two or three roles, none of this is mine. I describe life. It is a dull, philistine life. But it is not a tedious, whimpering life. First they turn me into a weeper and then into a simply boring writer. . . . Criticism has tricked me out in the guise of some kind of mourner or other."

Apparently in later performances the Art Theater modified its interpretation, and when the play opened in Petersburg on April 2, 1904, it was a great success. The Cherry Orchard has stayed in the Art Theater' s repertoire and remains one of its most popular productions.

Today it is the most widely known, internationally, of Chekhov' s plays, and as his last play, it stands as his final dramatic statement.

Characters

Lyuboff Ranevskaya:

An elderly woman. A landowner. Her husband has died and her lover in Paris has deserted her. A good-natured, flighty woman.

Anya:

Luyboff's seventeen-year-old daughter. An innocent, idealistic girl in love with Trofimoff.

Varya:

Lyuboff's adopted daughter. At twenty-four, she manages the estate, dreams of going to a nunnery, but also loves Lopahin.

Leonid Gayeff:

Lyuboff's brother. A middle-aged man who talks too much and works not at all.

Yermolay Lopahin:

A rich merchant whose father and grandfather were serfs on Gayeff' s estate.

Pyotr Trofimoff:

A perpetual student of twenty-eight, who had been tutor to Mme. Ranevskaya's drowned son.

Boris Semyonoff-Pishtchik:

A neighboring landowner forever in debt, out of debt, and in again.

Charlotta Ivanovna:

An eccentric governess who performs tricks.

Semyon Epihodoff:

Clerk on Gayeff's estate. A stumbler and bumbler in love with Dunyasha.

Fiers:

A valet, an old man of eigthy-seven.

Yasha:

A young valet who has traveled with Mme. Ranevskaya and taken on airs.

Dunyasha:

A maid who imitates her employers.

Act I

Setting: A room that is still called the nursery. Dawn, the sun will soon be rising. It is May, the cherry trees are in blossom but in the orchard it is cold, with a moring frost. The windows in the room are closed.

Madame Lyuboff Ranevskaya has been away from her family estate in the provinces of Russia for more than five years. She had left it six years ago when in one month her husband died and her seven-year-old son, Grisha, drowned in the river. Lyuboff had been so distraught at the double tragedy that "she went away, went away without ever looking back."

She has been living in France all this time, but her brother Gayeff has summoned her home. The family has run out of money and in order to pay the mortgage the estate is to be auctioned in a few months time. Ranevskaya' s younger daughter Anya, who lives with her uncle Gayeff, had been sent with a governess to Paris to bring her mother home. When the play opens the train bringing them back has just arrived at the station two hours late.

At the house, the great homecoming is eagerly awaited by Lopahin, a rich merchant, Fiers, an ancient and deaf family valet, Dunyasha, a maid who has taken on the pretensions of a lady, and Epihodoff, the verbose clerk of the estate. The other members of the household have gone to meet the train.

The group finally arrives from the station and there is much commotion. Ranevskaya eagerly and sentimentally pokes around the house in which she grew up and raised her family. Anya, exhausted from her four-day train trip, is desperate for sleep and yet rejoices to be home again and see her sister Varya and her Uncle Gayeff. The others busy themselves with carrying luggage and exchanging news.

Anya and Varya have a tender reunion in which Anya tells of her dreadful trip to Paris: "We arrived in Paris; it was cold there and snowing. I speak terrible French. Mama lived on the fifth floor; I went to see her; there were some French people in her room, ladies, an old priest with his prayer book, and the place was full of tobacco smoke - very dreary. Suddenly I began to feel sorry for Mama.... Her villa near Mentone she had finally sold, she had nothing left, nothing. And I didn't have a kopeck left. It was all we could do to get here." But despite the poverty, Mme. Ranevskaya has been spending her money as though she is still a very rich woman.

Varya, who is extremely religious and at twenty-four has been left to manage a bankrupt estate, has fallen in love with the merchant Lopahin - but he has no time for her. Lopahin is the son and grandson of serfs who had worked for Ranevskaya's family. Being extremely ambitious and having acquired refinement, Lopahin has been a great success as a merchant. He is very rich, very gentlemanly, although he has not quite reached the point of understanding the books he reads nor appreciating the beauties of nature.

Lopahin is leaving the next day for business in Kharkov. But before he leaves he tells Mme. Ranevskaya his plan for saving the estate: "Your estate is only thirteen miles from town. They've run the railroad by it. Now if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were cut up into building lots and leased for summer cottages, you'd have at the very least twenty-five thousand roubles per year income.... The location is wonderful, the river's so deep. Except, of course, it all needs to be tidied up, cleared - for instance, let's say, tear all the old buildings down and this house, which is no good any more, and cut down the old cherry orchard-"

The reaction is shock and incredulity: "If there's one thing in the whole province that's interesting - not to say remarkable - it's our cherry orchard"; "the orchard is even mentioned in the encyclopedia"; "what rot!" Lopahin urges that this is the only way to save themselves from bankruptcy, but the family scoffs and changes the subject.

As various members of the household retire for the night, Gayeff and Lyuboff reminisce about their childhood and dwell on the beauties of the orchard in bloom. Suddenly, Trofimoff, Grisha's old tutor, appears. He is still a student but he has begun to age. His "hair's not very thick any more" and he wears glasses. The sight of her dead son's tutor brings back the whole flood of emotion which had driven Lyuboff away, but she is gracious to Trofimoff.

Later, when Gayeff discusses the family's plight with his nieces, he reassures them with three alternative plans. He will make a loan from a friend on a promissory note; Lopahin will lend them money; Anya will go to Yaroslav to try to borrow money from a rich old aunt living there. All three plans are absurd, but the girls convince themselves that things will work out.

As Varya tells Anya of the difficulties she has had running the estate without money, Anya falls asleep. Varya leads her into the bedroom and Trofimoff, left alone, exclaims tenderly: "My little sun! My Spring! "

Comment

That anyone could have interpreted The Cherry Orchard as a somber tragedy is remarkable in light of the numerous comic characterizations we are given in the first act alone. At the very outset we see Dunyasha, a maid, attempting to imitate a delicate lady. Her hands shake, she pretends she is going to faint, she does herself up like a lady of leisure. And Dunyasha's suitor, the ludicrously verbose Epihodoff, is a comic character of farcical dimensions.

Called twenty-two misfortunes, Epihodoff stumble over something every time he turns around, drops whatever he happens to be carrying, and talks nonsense at a nonstop rate.

Charlotta, the would-be governess, is a walking sight gag. She sports on a chain a little dog who eats nuts, she ceaselessly performs tricks, and she dresses in absurd clothes with a lorgnette dangling from her belt.

Yasha, the butler, is Charlotta's male counterpart. Having traveled in Europe with Mme. Ranevskaya, he now affects incredible airs. He flits about in an airy manner and thinks himself quite the handsome gentleman. When he is told that his mother has been sitting in the servant's hall for two days waiting for his return he mutters: "The devil take her! . . . A lot I need her!" Yasha is a caricature of pretention and phoniness.

As if these four were not enough, there is the ludicrous neighbor, Boris Borisovich Semyonoff-Pishtchik -his name alone is a one-line gag. Pishtchik is a good-natured bumbler who fumbles his way through life's vicissitudes. He wavers between utter poverty and incredible good fortune. Right now he is poor, and beseeches the bankrupt Lyuboff for a loan. (She is so foolish, she gives it to him.)

The major characters themselves, whom we are invited to take seriously, are riddled with quirks and absurdities. Gayeff has grown so foolish that at fifty-one one almost thinks him senile. He is forever popping hard candies in his mouth, and from nowhere will suddenly enact an imaginary billiards game. In the middle of a sentence he will interrupt with: "I cut into the side pocket." Gayeff talks too much, to the point of prattling. At one point his sentiment so carries him away that he addresses a long and meaningless speech to an old bookcase.

Gayeff's sister is also foolish. In a state of utter poverty she is yet throwing money about as in the days of plenty. Ranevskaya is sweet and charming, but ludicrously out of touch with the realities of the world about her. She had married a lawyer and not a nobleman, and, as her brother comments: "behaved herself, you could say, not very virtuously."

And yet, despite their foibles and absurdities, these people are not altogether comic. They are gentle, well-meaning people whose entire leisured way of life is about to be destroyed by the practicalities of a new generation that has no time for their foolishness.

The impending sale for the orchard and estate is the central event to which each character relates. And each one's mode of relating to the sale serves as a characterization. Old Fiers, an ancient valet, lives wholly in his past. Deaf and grumbly, he remembers the orchard when it produced wagonloads of processed dried cherries which were shipped for profit to Moscow and Kharkov. Lyuboff and Gayeff equate the orchard in bloom with their childhood happiness and innocence. For them "it was just as it is now, then, nothing has changed." Of course, everything has changed, but they have foolishly failed to recognize it. Lyuboff cannot even think about the descending doom. Gayeff prods himself into dreaming up impractical solutions.

Varya, who has been saddled with the estate's management, would like to be rid of it one way or another so that she would be free to travel from "one holy place to another."

Lopahin, who has generously "forgotten" that his father was a serf on the estate, offers the only solution that is in tune with the times. He has no attachment to the estate and sees it as a fine moneymaking venture.

Thus we have a continuum of relationship. Fiers thinks of the trees in their original capacity of fruit-bearing, income-bringing crops; Lyuboff and Gayeff remember them as beautiful works of natural art to be appreciated by their own leisured sensibilities; Varya finds the orchard a trying, expensive burden; and Lopahin envisions great profit, not as Fiers does from their fruit, but from their destruction.

Of all the symbols Chekhov used, the orchard is the most fully incorporated into the structure of the play and the revelation of its characters. In this first act the orchard serves as a focal point around which the characters arrange themselves, thus revealing themselves. Later in the play the orchard will function as a sociological and philosophical emblem.

Act II

Setting: A field. An old chapel, long abandoned, with crooked walls; near it a well, big stones that apparently were once tombstones; an old bench. A road to Gayeff's estate can be seen. The sun will soon be down.

Enough time has passed to allow for Anya's trip to Yaroslavl to ask the rich old aunt for help. She has promised to send some money. Yasha, the dandy butler, has seduced Dunyasha but she has not completely discouraged Epihodoff from his suit. Anya has fallen in love with the student Trofimoff.

The act opens with the four comic characters, Charlotta, Dunyasha, Epihodoff, and Yasha sitting on the bench in the field. But as soon as they start talking we recognize the sadness which has touched all of their lives. They are as poignant as they are silly. Charlotta, who is adjusting the strap of the rifle she wears on her shoulder, suddenly launches into her sad tale. "I have no proper passport, I don't know how old I am - it always seems to me I'm very young." When Charlotta was little her father and mother were traveling performers and she joined in their act. When they died, she was brought up by a German woman but she has no idea who her parents were or even if they were married. "I'd like so much to talk but there's not anybody. I haven't anybody."

Even Epihodoff, "twenty-two misfortunes," is touching in his foolishness. That morning he had awakened to find a huge spider on his chest, and when he took a drink of kvass there was a cockroach floating in it. "I am a cultured man," he asserts, "but the trouble is I cannot discover . . . whether to live or shoot myself."

When other members of the household arrive, talk immediately turns to the momentary auction of the orchard. Lopahin urgently insists they say yes or no to the summer-cottage proposal. Luyboff immediately changes the subject. Lopahin tells them that a rich merchant is coming to the auction in person to buy the estate. Lyuboff and Gayeff mutter about the aunt in Yaroslavl and will hear no more: "Summer cottages and summer residents - it is so trivial, excuse me," dismisses Lyuboff. Wanting Lopahin to stay ("With you here it is more cheerful anyhow"), Lyuboff begins to tell him of her sinful life.

"I've always thrown money around like mad . . . and I married a man who accumulated nothing but debts. My husband died from champagne . . . I fell in love with another man . . . I lived with him, and just at that time . . . right here in the river my boy was drowned . . . I shut my eyes, ran away . . . and he after me. I bought a villa near Mentone, because he fell ill there." For three years Lyuboff exhausted herself tending her sick lover. Finally she had to sell the villa for debts and when they went to Paris the lover robbed her of everything and then threw her over for another woman. Lyuboff had tried to poison herself, "so stupid, so shameful," and suddenly she wanted to return home. Just now Lyuboff has received a telegram from Paris: "He asks forgiveness, begs me to return." She tears up the telegram.

Lopahin is moved to his own confession: "It must be said frankly this life of ours is idiotic - my father was a peasant, and idiot, he understood nothing, he taught me nothing, he just beat me. . . . At bottom I am just as big a dolt and idiot as he was."

Even Fiers is bewildered by his life. In the old days "the peasants stuck to the masters, the masters stuck to the peasants, and now everything is all smashed up, you can't tell about anything."

The young people, Varya, Anya, and Trofimoff, interrupt the melancholy. Trofimoff, with his scholarly air, derides the old way of life, and the inability to work for a better way. "The great majority of the intelligentsia that I know are looking for nothing, doing nothing, and as yet have no capacity for work." They "treat the peasants like animals . . . about science they just talk, about art they understand very little." While the intelligentsia talk, the workmen live in moral and physical squalor "And apparently with us, all the fine talk is only to divert the attention of ourselves and of others."

When Trofimoff and Anya are left alone (which they rarely are because Varya follows them about) they discuss their idealistic goals "to sidestep the petty and illusory." Anya is transported by his fervor: "What have you done to me, Petya, why don't I love the cherry orchard any longer the way I used to?"

He tells her that "from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from every trunk" human beings who had been slaves are looking at her. The past can only be atoned for by suffering and work, and then perhaps the future will be better. The intense talk of a better world is interrupted by Varya calling them, lest they should be alone too long.

Comment

Chekhov's gentle sympathy shines through this act. No one except the pretentious Yasha is held wholly in contempt. It is the poignancy of these people's suffering, loneliness, and isolation which lends the air of tragedy to their comic exteriors. They are too foolish at times to be wholly tragic, but they are also too filled with human misery to be wholly comic.

Each member of the household, from the muttering Fiers to the once munificent Lyuboff, is shown in a sympathetic light. Fiers, whose marriage had been planned before Lyuboff's father was born, still lives in a world governed by the rules of slavery. He cannot adjust, in his old age, to the new rules and relationships. He is a relic that no one wants anymore.

Charlotta, for all her eccentricities, lives in desperate isolation: "Where I came from and who I am I don't know." Dunyasha, who as a girl was taken into the master's house, has "lost the habit of simple living." She is afraid of everything. Her affectations have made her frail. Lopahin, rich, ambitious, sure of his direction, is not yet sure of himself: "I wasn' t taught anything, my handwriting is vile, I write like a pig - I am ashamed for people to see it." Trofimoff, pontificating and superior, has a dream of a righteous world to which he is willing to dedicate his life. And Lyuboff, flighty, scatterbrained, and thoughtless, has sacrificed her life to a selfish, deceptive lover who broke her spirit, emptied her purse, and deserted her.

While these people go through their overt comic businesses (Lyuboff giving gold to strangers at the same moment she borrows for her own food; Gayeff playing his imaginary billiards games; Fiers making absurd answers to questions he cannot hear), while they appear to be ludicrous, there is a strong undercurrent of pathos, of sympathy for frailty which cannot be ignored.

On the surface, little happens to advance the action. Gayeff and Lyuboff still act as though a miracle will descend and save them and their estate. Lopahin still urges immediate action on the cottage rentals. Varya still waits for Lopahin's proposal. But the sense of approaching doom lends a tension and urgency to the act. The very inaction provides the drama.

It has often been said that Trofimoff, in his two long speeches, is Chekhov's spokesman. Although it is highly unlikely that Chekhov would use as his mouthpiece a pompous, verbose, perpetual student who declares himself to be "above love," there is no doubt that in Trofimoff's dreams we hear some of Chekhov's pet criticisms of Russian society. How can man have pride "if in the great majority he is crude, unintelligent, profoundly miserable." "One must work and must help with all one's might those who seek the truth." The intellectuals talk a great deal, "talk of nothing but important things, philosophize, and all the time everybody can see that the workmen eat abominably, sleep without any pillows, thirty or forty to a room, and everywhere there are bedbugs, stench, dampness, moral uncleanliness."

These speeches of Trofimoff and the later one about possessing living souls "that depraved all of you who lived before and are living now" were even stronger in earlier versions of The Cherry Orchard. For obvious reasons, amidst the political ferment in Russia in 1904, the censor deleted the most offensive and vitriolic lines. Enough remains, however, to show clearly that while Chekhov sympathized with the frailties of the members of Gayeff' s household, and while he does not condemn, he had a different vision from theirs of what a happy world would be like.

Act III

Setting: The drawing room, separated by an arch from the ballroom. A chandelier is lighted. An orchestra is playing. It is evening. In the ballroom they are dancing grand rond.

Although there is no money to pay the musicians, Lyuboff has planned a ball with a local orchestra. The guests are not the landed neighbors - they no longer come to the house - but the post-office clerk, the stationmaster, and the servants.

It is evening of the day the estate is to be auctioned, and the household waits impatiently for the return of Gayeff and Lopahin who have gone to town for the sale. Everyone is quarrelsome and on edge.

Pishtchik, as always in need of money, has a run-in with Trofimoff, who tells him: "If the energy you have wasted in the course of your life trying to find money . . . had gone to something else, you could very likely have turned the world upside down."

To ease the tension, Charlotta performs some of her famous tricks and everyone is momentarily diverted.

But as soon as she leaves the bickering resumes. Trofimoff teases Varya by calling her "Madame Lopahin." Varya retorts: "Perennial student! You have already been expelled from the University twice." The truth is, of course, that Lopahin has been too busy to propose, and Varya can't find enough money to retreat to a nunnery.

In the comings and goings between the ballroom and drawing room, Lyuboff and Trofimoff are alone for a moment. They argue with vehemence, and each ridicules the essence of the other's life. Trofimoff patronizes: " Whether the estate is sold today or is not sold - is it not the same? . . . One mustn't deceive oneself, one must for once at least in one's life look truth straight in the eye." Lyuboff bitterly replies: "You boldly decide all important questions, but tell me, my dear boy, isn't that because you are young and haven't had time yet to suffer through any one of your problems?"

Trofimoff has no sympathy for Lyuboff. He cannot concern himself with her anguish at the sale of the orchard. Nor can he tolerate her illusions about her sick lover who has begged her to return to Paris and look after him. "He is ill, he is alone, unhappy and who will look after him there . . . who will give him his medicine on time? . . . It's a stone about my neck . . . but I love that stone and live without it I cannot" Trofimoff has no patience: "Why, he picked your bones. . . . He is a petty scoundrel, a nonentity." Lyuboff, threatened and pained, yells: "There is no purity in you; you are simply smug, a ridiculous crank, a freak."

The argument was like a moment of truth in charade. As he dashes out, Trofimoff trips and falls down the stairs. The stationmaster recites a poem, the dancing resumes, Fiers prattles on about the old days, Pishtchik once more asks for a loan as he waltzes.

And then suddenly Varya begins to fight with Epihodoff. Screaming, she orders him to leave. He finally does. But thinking he is coming back, Varya picks up a stick lying in the corner and smashes it over his head as he re-enters the room. But it is not Epihodoff she strikes, it is Lopahin come back from the auction.

As everyone flutters about Lopahin for the news, Gayeff comes in crying and exhausted. Lyuboff begs Lopahin for the news. "Is the cherry orchard sold?" "It's sold." "Who bought it?" "I bought it."

Lopahin tells how the auction went and suddenly cannot resist his gloating triumph. "I bought the estate where grandfather and father were slaves, where you wouldn't even let me in the kitchen. . . .Come on, everybody, and see how Yermolay Lopahin will swing the ax on the cherry orchard, how the trees will fall to the ground!"

Lopahin swaggers a bit and orders the music to "play up." Lyuboff, left alone in the drawing room, cries bitterly. Anya comes in and tries to comfort her: "We will plant a new orchard, finer than this one."

Comment

Directors have frequently interpreted Lopahin's triumphant strutting at the end of the act as an indication that he is a moustache-twirling type of villain. But Chekhov did not envision him that way at all. In a letter to Stanislavsky, he instructed: "Lopahin is a merchant, of course, but he is a very decent person in every sense. He must behave with perfect decorum, like an educated man, with no petty ways or tricks of any sort."

Lopahin is nearly as startled by the turn of events as is the rest of the household. He has not been secretly planning all along to bid for the estate. His ecstacy at having been the highest bidder for the land on which his father and grandfather were slaves is as moving as the misery which it causes Mme. Ranevskaya. Lopahin's mercantile visions for the orchard: "We are going to build villas and our grandsons and great-grandsons will see a new life here-" are no less laudable than Lyuboff's dreams of selfishly preserving the beauty of her childhood memories.

Chekhov does not take sides here, and to interpret Lopahin as a villain is to mistake the playwright's intention. There are two forces, two visions at work, one must give way to the other. Neither is perfect. Lopahin is incapable of appreciating the peace and natural harmony of the orchard in bloom. For him it represents his family's enslavement. Lopahin has his eyes on the future. People from the city will want summer cottages to enjoy their new leisure, and Lopahin will provide them with their cottages. Many will learn to enjoy the country retreat which once was the privilege of a very few.

Lyuboff cannot care for these many. It is her orchard, her life, which has been sold. Although the estate has gone to waste, and the cherries no longer ripen, the orchard is yet beautiful. Lyuboff cannot part with this beauty or the way of life it represents.

Chekhov presents these two opposing forces with no intended judgment. Each has its merits and faults. Lopahin has no sense of the natural beauty he will destroy, no understanding of the graceful, leisured life it embodies. And yet he is moving with the times. He is a man of the middle-class future, with all its vigor and aesthetic grossness. Lyuboff, emotional, educated, generous, cannot envision this future. She values the beauty and the grace. Here is the predicament. Chekhov offers no easy solution. A lesser dramatist would have made Lopahin an out-and-out villain, thus providing a conventionally maudlin drama of those dispossessed in a period of transition. Chekhov does not allow us such an easy way out. We must face the gigantic dilemma much as it must be faced in real life. Nothing is all good or all bad - all happy or all sad, and whichever side we choose, we will find much that is to our dissatisfaction.

The structure of the act, leading up to Lopahin's entrance is much like a burlesque injected with sudden moments of poignancy and truth. The ridiculous "ball" with the postman and railroad clerk as reluctant guests, Charlotta' s vaudeville tricks, Trofimoff's slapstick fall down the stairs, Varya' s cracking Lopahin accidentally on the head - all these lend an air of chaos and farce. But mixed in with the hubbub are moving confessions: Lyuboff' s feeling of doom that today her fate will be decided; Varya's humiliation that for two years people have been waiting for her to marry Lopahin and he has not even proposed; Lyuboff's confrontation with Trofimoff - her misguided heart versus his unfeeling intellectuality.

With Lopahin's announcement the hectic charade finishes. Everyone leaves. The battle has been decided. Lyuboff, left alone in the deserted drawing room, weeps. But Anya's comfort has after all much truth in it: "Mama, you' ve your life still left you, you've your good, pure heart ahead of you."

Chekhov, then, does not allow Mme. Ranevskaya to be tragic even at her darkest moment. She does still have her life and her health, it is after all only her residence which must change, and she has a pure heart, misguided of course, but yet pure and generous. The loss of her orchard is not, in the end, the loss of her life.

Act IV

Setting: The same setting as Act I (a room that is still called the nursery). There are neither curtains on the windows nor are there any pictures on the walls. Only a little furniture remains piled up in one corner as if for sale. A sense of emptiness is felt. Near the outer door is a pile of suitcases. The denuded room is busy with activity and the hum of people preparing to leave.

It is October. Two months have passed since Lopahin bought the estate, and everyone is preparing to leave. Lopahin, worn out with "dilly- dallying" around the country, is off to Kharkov on business. Trofimoff is returning to Moscow to take some more courses at the University. Gayeff has accepted a position in a bank (which no one thinks he will keep very long). Anya is going to stay in town and study for the high school examination. She dreams of passing her future evenings reading "lots of books." Varya is going to a town seventy miles away to be a housekeeper. And Lyuboff (with Yasha in tow) is returning to Paris with the money from the Yaroslavl great-aunt. Arrangements have been made to send sick old Fiers to a hospital and Yasha in charge of his departure, announces he has already been sent.

Lopahin has bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the multiple departures. But no one will have a drink with him. Trofimoff, who anxiously searches for a pair of misplaced rubbers, stops to preach at Lopahin: "Cure yourself of that habit - of arm waving. And also of building summer cottages. . . . Just the same, however, I like you. You have delicate soft fingers like an artist, you have a delicate soft heart."

Lopahin offers Trofimoff some money for his trip. But the student turns pompous again and rejects it: "I am a free man. And everything that you all value so highly and dearly, both rich man and beggars, has not the slightest power over me."

As the two men talk the sound of an ax on a tree is heard in the distance. Anya immediately appears: "Mama begs of you until she's gone, not to cut down the orchard." Lopahin complies, muttering: "What people, really!"

Gayeff and Lyuboff move around the house saying goodbye to their old memories. They are not, after all, so terribly depressed. Gayeff chirps gaily: "Yes, indeed, everything is fine now. Before the sale of the cherry orchard, we all were troubled, distressed, and then when the question was settled definitely, irrevocable, we all calmed down and were even cheerful." Lyuboff agrees: "Yes. My nerves are better . . . I sleep well."

Into the departure preparations bursts Pishtchik, breathless and elated: "Some Englishmen came and found on my land some kind of white clay." Pishtchik has leased them the land for twenty-four years and now has a great deal of money. He is running about the countryside paying off his debts.

As train time grows very near, Lyuboff says she has only two worries. First, that Fiers is sick - but she is reassured that Yasha has sent him to the hospital that morning. And second, that Varya is withering from her lack of activity. Lopahin, with little persuasion, agrees to propose to Varya. But when they are left alone, Lopahin talks of the weather and Varya of a broken thermometer. The moment passes and the proposal never comes.

With a final farewell to the house, the entire entourage leaves. The last one to go is Lopahin, who securely locks every window and door.

Then follows a sad and surprising stage direction: "The stage is empty. You hear the keys locking all the doors, then the carriages drive off. It grows quiet. In the silence you hear the dull thud of an ax on a tree, a lonely, mournful sound. Footsteps are heard. From the door on the right Fiers appears. He is dressed as usual, in a jacket and a white waistcoat, slippers on his feet. He is sick."

Fiers realizes he has been forgotten, and fretting that Gayeff has not put on his heavy coat he lies down on a sofa, muttering to himself: "You haven't got any strength, nothing is left-nothing." He lies very still. The only sound then is the thud of an ax on a tree, far away in the orchard.

Comment

The last moments of The Cherry Orchard are startling and extremely moving. Only a brilliant dramatist would have conceived of Fiers' "imprisonment."

For the most part, the last act moves along with an air of bustle and excitement. Everyone has found somewhere to go and appears to be pleased to be going. For Lopahin and Pishtchik the ending is entirely happy. Gayeff looks forward with excitement to his job at the bank. Lyuboff is presumably returning to her lover, that stone around her neck she cannot live without. Anya looks forward dreamily to a life of study and knowledge. Trofimoff is returning to his perpetual studies. We feel satisfied. The transition has not been so terrible after all. The sense of doom prevailing since the first act is now cleared up and no one has been too badly hurt. Then suddenly Fiers stumbles in - the living embodiment of the superannuated past. And with a great stab of pain we realize it has not been so easy after all.

An entire way of life and the thousands of people who lived it are falling beneath the ax. What will they do with themselves? How will they live? Gayeff will never be able to keep that job; how will he support himself when he loses it? When Lyuboff's lover dies or turns her out again on what will she focus her life? Varya, who dreamed of nunnery, will wither away in another province serving as a housekeeper. Anya, with a full life ahead of her, surely cannot spend all her time reading books. How will she pass her days and nights?

The predicament is not readily soluble, and Chekhov will not give us any easy answers. As the critic John Gassner says: "Checkhov maintained a sensitive equilibrium between regret for the loss of old values and jubilation over the dawn of a new day. And it is the quality of detachment that also enabled him to equalize pathos and humor, and to render a probing account of the contradictions of human character."

As his last play, The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov's final statement on a new dramatic method. It is a play of indirect action - nothing happens on the stage. Whatever action there is, is reported. And even the final " shot," which Chekhov could not resist in earlier plays, becomes a far away sound of axes on trees. The play is devoid of melodrama, external action, and easy answers, and yet it absorbs, excites, provokes a tension common to melodramatic thrillers with contrived twists. All this Chekhov accomplished through absorbing characterization, thick-textured character counterpoint, and a presentation of an insoluble life problem.

Analysis Of Selected Characters

Ranevskaya

Lyuboff is a woman growing old in a world she does not recognize. According to Chekhov she is "an old woman, wholly of the past, with nothing in her of the present." She is utterly foolish in her profligate generosity. No matter how dire her straits, she is ever "the soft touch." As much as Lyuboff cherishes the old house, once it is sold she feels greatly relieved to be freed of the anxiety it causes her.

Life has not treated Lyuboff gently. She has lost husband, son, lover, fortune, and home. But she survives rather well, devoting herself to love and sentiment. Lyuboff is a good and gentle woman, not unintelligent, but somehow out of touch with reality. She is surely more to be pitied than censured as a surrogate of a superannuated society.

Lopahin

In the rich merchant we find the embodiment of the new man, the man of the future. He not only is devoid of sentiment, he is too busy for love. The orchard, with its glorious past, means nothing to him and the sooner he can get the ax to it, the better.

Lopahin is in no sense cruel or heartless. He sympathizes with the family's distress (though he cannot empathize with it), and he wishes he could help them, or that they would not be so foolish. He is a gentleman, educated and decorous. Sensitive about his serf origins, he delights in the pride he brings to his ancestors by the purchase of the estate. He is loved by a religious and honorable woman, and this in itself is a measure of his worth.

Gayeff

Gayeff is sentimental, garrulous, good-natured, and slightly old-maidish. He must constantly be reminded to stop talking so much, and he is still fussed over by Fiers as though he were a young child. Gayeff has never worked and has never been married - he is untouched by responsibility. His great passion is billiards and he plays imaginary games incessantly. Like so many men of his generation, he is educated, genteel, but unable to find anything whatsoever to do with his life.

Trofimoff

Unlike Lopahin, who is building for the future, Trofimoff talks about the future. He has grandiose and visionary views of what the ideal society will be like, but for himself he has yet to take part in its evolution. The perpetual student, taking cover behind his books, Trofimoff has yet to plunge into life. He is "above love," above generosity and sentiment, and he has no patience with human foibles. He is a harsh spokesman at a time when action and gentleness is required.

Varya

The adopted daughter is a strange mixture. She is obsessed and tyrannical about the running of the estate. She bursts into tears or angry tirades with little provocation. She loves Lopahin and is humiliated by his indifference and yet at the same time she cherishes her religious dreams of escape to a nunnery. Varya is not very likeable. She is neither gentle and charming like her sister, not prepared for the future like Lopahin.

Review Questions And Answers

1. How is the cherry orchard used as a symbol?

Answer When the orchard was in bloom at the height of its productivity, it was a source of great income for its rich owner (and a source of drudgery for the owners' serfs). At one time the orchard represented the possession of human souls for private gain - an ugly emblem of the days of slavery.

After the emancipation, the orchard's productivity waned. The formula for drying the cherries was lost, crops came in only every other year, and when they did ripen they were unsellable. At this point the orchard stood for a foundering society, a society forbidden slavery but unable to function without it. The trees still bore their blossoms, however, and those who could not longer live from their profit could dwell on their beauty. During the days of unproductive blooming, the orchard served as a memory of the old, leisured, well-ordered, moneyed day and provided a source of great visual beauty.

A thing no longer productive cannot survive forever in a progressing world. So as the emancipated generation grows to manhood the relics of their enslavement must be cut down to make room for the new order. The orchard at the end stands for all the things which must fall in the name of progress (and all the values - good and bad - which fall with them). The rising generations, not as refined as the old masters, will be vigorous, hardworking, productive. That the new generation will destroy the natural beauties belonging to one man in order to accommodate not so beautifully many men is unaesthetic but probably necessary. At any rate, as the trees fall someone will suffer: in this case the residents of Gayeff's estate.

2. How does Chekhov make use of "invisible" characters?

Answer There are two important members of the cast who are never seen on stage nor mentioned in the program. One is the rich old aunt from Yaroslavl and the other is Mme. Ranevskaya's lover.

Without the aunt, Gayeff and Lyuboff would have had to abandon hope early in Act I. But given a slight possibility of some miracle, they continue to manufacture dreams and avoid action. Had the aunt not sent the 15, 000 roubles, they would never even have thought of bidding at the auction and might, with no alternative at all, have listened to Lopahin. As it was, the aunt provided hope and then alternative, the two preventives of action.

Lyuboff's lover is vital as a source of bankruptcy and cause for her absence for so many years. The play is structured around Lyuboff's arrival and departure and the selfish, unhealthy lover provides a motivation for both.

Chekhov, Anton, Works of Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard. , Monarch Notes, 01-01-1963.

Home     Ibsen     Chekhov     Strindberg     Brecht     Beckett     Williams     Wilson     Ludlum     Churchill     Exit

This web site does not endorse the advertisements below.