The Plays of Anton Chekhov Read online

  Very probably The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s best-loved play; it is certainly his most frequently performed. Although far less complex than Three Sisters, it’s still deep and complicated enough, with some characters who don’t easily yield up their truths — Charlotta, Pishchik, Trofimov, and, most important of all, Lopakhin.

  Just as Serebryakov and Yelena are the characters in Uncle Vanya a misunderstanding of whom is sure to throw the play out of kilter, so Lopakhin is the pivotal figure of The Cherry Orchard. To present him unsympathetically, as the capitalistic agent of the family’s downfall, is to turn the play into what Chekhov called a ‘weepy’ drama he could barely recognize as his.

  Chekhov usually offered very little detail about his characters (in his Letters he writes, ‘Astrov whistles’, ‘Trigorin wears checked pants’) but was lavish with endearing comments about Lopakhin: ‘wears a white vest and yellow shoes ... takes big steps ... thinks while he walks’, and, most essentially, as Chekhov warned Stanislavky, ‘he is a decent person in every sense; his behaviour must be entirely proper ... and free of pettiness and clowning.’ In the play he is shown to be generous and kindly; both Lyubov and Pishchik speak highly of him, and, a hugely important point, Varya is still more than willing to marry him after we all learn that he’s bought the estate; and indeed, after his seemingly callous and gloating big speech, in which, I think, he speaks out of forgivable momentary elation and pride that he has climbed so far, it’s he who tries to comfort Lyubov. Why he doesn’t propose to Varya makes up a little comedy of errors, emerging from Chekhov’s sense of the way chance affects our lives, the capriciousness of existence: the wrong galoshes, the untimely call to Lopakhin from outside, an inopportune remark about the weather, an errant stick with which Varya whacks Lopakhin on the head; blunders, pauses extended too long, the right moment blurred and then lost, Lopakhin’s devotion to Ranevskaya operating as a psychological barrier to intimacy with Varya.

  The crux of the play, what makes it a Chekhov comedy, is, as I suggested earlier, Anya’s realization that the orchard’s beauty is no longer enough to justify their suffocating love for it. Once it was useful, providing the cherries and delicious jam, the recipe for which has been ‘forgotten’, Firs tells us. It’s a fateful word, testifying to the erosions of time, which in one way or another is always at least a partial subject of Chekhov’s plays. Trofimov may be a windy ideologue, but he can see that hanging onto the orchard is blocking Lyubov’s and Anya’s way to a new life. The estate has become more memory and metaphor than actuality, a real place. Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga: ‘The central female role is an old woman who lives entirely in the past and has nothing in the present.’ This isn’t quite right. She has Anya, who has recognized the need to let the orchard go, and her Paris lover, about whom, incidentally, Chekhov is never condemnatory, as he isn’t about Masha, Vershinin, Yelena, all adulterers in a technical sense. The play is indeed in part about the decline of one era and the onset of another, but in Chekhov’s hands there is no sociological or political inevitability to the process, only the existential pressures of time and fate.

  Tolstoy, who became more and more obnoxious as he aged, admired Chekhov’s fiction, but detested his plays, largely for their ‘immorality’, but also for their refusal to be useful. After Chekhov’s death he told an interviewer: ‘In a dramatic work the author ought to deal with some problem that has yet to be solved and every character ought to solve it according to the idiosyncrasies of his own character. It is like a laboratory experiment. But you won’t find anything of the kind in Chekhov.’

  No, we won’t, and we can be grateful for it.

  Richard Gilman

  FURTHER READING

  Andrew, Joe, Russian Writers and Society in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1982)

  Bely, Andrey, ‘The Cherry Orchard’ in Senelick, below

  Benedetti, Jean, ed., Dear Actress, Dear Writer: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper (London: Methuen, 1996)

  Bentley, Eric, ‘Craftsmanship in Uncle Vanya’ in In Search of Theater (New York: Vintage, 1953)

  Emeljanow, Victor, ed., Chekhov: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)

  Fergusson, Francis, ‘On The Cherry Orchard’ in The Idea of a Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949)

  Frayn, Michael, Chekhov: Plays, Introduction and ‘A Note on the Translation’ (London: Methuen, 1988)

  Friedland, Louis S., ed., Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964)

  Gilman, Richard, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

  Jackson, Robert L., ed., Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967)

  Karlinsky, Simon, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, tr. Michael Henry Heim with Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)

  Magarshack, David, Chekhov the Dramatist (London: John Lehman, 1952)

  Rayfield, Donald, Chekhov: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 1997)

  Senelick, Lawrence, ed. and tr., Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)

  Welty, Eudora, ‘Reality in Chekhov’s Stories’ in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Random House, 1977)

  Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, ed., Letters of Anton Chekhov (New York: Viking, 1968)

  CHRONOLOGY

  1836 Gogol’s The Government Inspector

  1852 Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

  1860 Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the House of the Dead (1860 — 61) Anton Pavlovich Chekhov born on 17January at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, the third son of Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a grocer, and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna, née Morozova

  1861 Emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. Formation of revolutionary Land and Liberty Movement

  1862 Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

  1863 — 4 Polish revolt. Commencement of intensive industrialization; spread of the railways; banks established; factories built. Elective District Councils (zemstvos) set up; judicial reform Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863)

  1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1864) by Leskov, a writer much admired by Chekhov

  1866 Attempted assassination of Alexander II by Karakozov Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

  1867 Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

  1868 Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

  1868 Chekhov begins to attend Taganrog Gymnasium after wasted year at a Greek school

  1869 Tolstoy’s War and Peace

  1870 Municipal government reform

  1870 — 71 Franco-Prussian War

  1873 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873 — 7) Chekhov sees local productions of Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector

  1875 Chekhov writes and produces humorous magazine for his brothers in Moscow, The Stammerer, containing sketches of life in Taganrog

  1876 Chekhov’s father declared bankrupt and flees to Moscow, followed by family except Chekhov, who is left in Taganrog to complete schooling. Reads Buckle, Hugo and Schopenhauer

  1877 — 8 War with Turkey

  1877Chekhov’s first visit to Moscow; his family living in great hardship

  1878 Chekhov writes dramatic juvenilia: full-length drama Father-lessness (MS destroyed), comedy Diamond Cut Diamond and vaudeville WhyHens Cluck (none published)

  1879 Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879 — 80) Tolstoy’s Confession (1879 — 82)

  Chekhov matriculates from Gymnasium with good grades. Wins scholarship to Moscow University to study medicine Makes regular contributions to humorous magazine Alarm Clock

  1880 General Loris-Melikov organizes struggle against terrorism Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif

  Chekhov introduced by artist brother Nikolay to landscape painter Levitan with whom has lifelong friendship

  First short story, ‘A Letter from the Don Landowner Vl
adimirovich N to His Learned Neighbour’, published in humorous magazine Dragonfly. More stories published in Dragonfly under pseudonyms, chiefly Antosha Chekhonte

  1881 Assassination of Alexander II; reactionary, stifling regime of Alexander III begins

  Sarah Bernhardt visits Moscow (Chekhov calls her acting ‘superficial’)

  Chekhov continues to write very large numbers of humorous sketches for weekly magazines (until 1883). Becomes regular contributor to Nikolay Leykin’s Fragments, a St Petersburg weekly humorous magazine. Writes (1881 — 2) play now usually known as Platonov (discovered 1923), rejected by Maly Theatre; tries to destroy manuscript

  1882 Student riots at St Petersburg and Kazan universities. More discrimination against Jews

  Chekhov is able to support the family with scholarship money and earnings from contributions to humorous weeklies

  1883 Tolstoy’s What I Believe Chekhov gains practical experience at Chikino Rural Hospital

  1884 Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours Chekhov graduates and becomes practising physician at Chikino. First signs of his tuberculosis in December Six stories about the theatre published as Fairy-Tales of Melpomene. His crime novel, The Shooting Party, serialized in Daily News

  1885 — 6 Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

  On first visit to St Petersburg, Chekhov begins friendship with very influential Aleksey Suvorin (1834 — 1912), editor of the highly regarded daily newspaper New Times. Chekhov has love affairs with Dunya Efros and Natalya Golden (later his sister-in-law). His TB is now unmistakable Publishes more than 100short stories. ‘The Requiem’ is the first story to appear under own name and his first in New Times (February 1886). First collection, Motley Tales

  1887 Five students hanged for attempted assassination of Tsar; one is Lenin’s brother

  Tolstoy’s drama Power of Darkness (first performed in Paris), for which he was called nihilist and blasphemer by Alexander III

  Chekhov elected member of Literary Fund. Makes trip to Taganrog and Don steppes

  Second book of collected short stories In the Twilight. Ivanov produced — a disaster

  1888 Chekhov meets Stanislavsky. Attends many performances at Maly and Korsh theatres and becomes widely acquainted with actors, stage managers, etc. Meets Tchaikovsky Completes ‘The Steppe’, which marks his ‘entry’ into serious literature. Wins Pushkin Prize for ‘the best literary production distinguished by high artistic value’ for In the Twilight, presented by literary division of Academy of Sciences. His one-act farces The Bear (highly praised by Tolstoy) and The Proposal extremely successful. Begins work on The Wood Demon (later Uncle Vanya). Radically revises Ivanov for St Petersburg performance

  1889 Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (at first highly praised by Chekhov) Chekhov meets Lidiya Avilova, who later claims love affair with him. Tolstoy begins to take an interest in Chekhov, who is elected to Society of Lovers of Russian Literature ‘A Dreary Story’. The Wood Demon a resounding failure

  1890 World weary, Chekhov travels across Siberia by carriage and river boat to Sakhalin to investigate conditions at the penal colony (recorded in The Island of Sakhalin). After seven months returns to Moscow (via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)) Collection Gloomy People (dedicated to Tchaikovsky). Only two stories published — ‘Gusev’ and ‘Thieves’. Immense amount of preparatory reading for The Island of Sakhalin

  1891 Severe famine in Volga basin (Chekhov organizes relief) Chekhov undertakes six-week tour of Western Europe with Suvorin. Intense affair with Lika Mizinova Works on The Island ofSakhalin.‘The Duel’ published serially. Works on ‘The Grasshopper’

  1892 Chekhov buys small estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow; parents and sister live there with him. Gives free medical aid to peasants. Re-reads Turgenev; regards him as inferior to Tolstoy and very critical of his heroines ‘Ward No. 6’ and ‘An Anonymous Story’

  1893 The Island of Sakhalin completed and published serially

  1894 Death of Alexander III; accession of Nicholas II; 1,000 trampled to death at Khodynka Field during coronation celebrations. Strikes in St Petersburg Chekhov makes another trip to Western Europe ‘The Student’, ‘Teacher of Literature’, ‘At a Country House’ and ‘The Black Monk’

  1895 ‘Three Years’. Writes ‘Ariadna’, ‘Murder’ and ‘Anna Round the Neck’. First draft of The Seagull

  1896 Chekhov agitates personally for projects in rural education and transport; helps in building of village school at Talezh; makes large donation of books to Taganrog Public Library ‘My Life’ published in instalments. The Seagull meets with hostile reception at Aleksandrinsky Theatre

  1897 Chekhov works for national census; builds second rural school. Crisis in health with lung haemorrhage; convalesces in Nice ‘Peasants’ is strongly attacked by reactionary critics and mutilated by censors. Publishes Uncle Vanya, but refuses to allow performance (until 1899)

  1898 Formation of Social Democrat Party. Dreyfus affair Stanislavsky founds Moscow Art Theatre with Nemirovich-Danchenko

  Chekhov very indignant over Dreyfus affair and supports Zola; conflict with anti-Semitic Suvorin over this. His father dies. Travels to Yalta, where he buys land. Friendly with Gorky and Bunin (both of whom left interesting memoirs of Chekhov). Attracted to Olga Knipper at Moscow Art Theatre rehearsal of The Seagull, but leaves almost immediately for Yalta. Correspondence with Gorky

  Trilogy ‘Man in a Case’, ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’. ‘Ionych’. The Seagull has first performance at Moscow Art Theatre and Chekhov is established as a playwright

  1899 Widespread student riots

  Tolstoy’s Resurrection serialized

  Chekhov has rift with Suvorin over student riots. Olga Knipper visits Melikhovo. He sells Melikhovo in June and moves with mother and sister to Yalta. Awarded Order of St Stanislav for educational work

  ‘Darling’, ‘New Country Villa’ and ‘On Official Duty’. Signs highly unfavourable contract with A. F. Marks for complete edition of his works. Taxing and time-consuming work of compiling first two volumes. Moderate success of Uncle Vanya at Moscow Art Theatre. Publishes one of finest stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Completes ‘In the Ravine’. Begins serious work on Three Sisters; goes to Nice to revise last two acts

  1900 Chekhov settles in the house built by him in Yalta. Actors from the Moscow Art Theatre visit Sevastopol and Yalta at his request. Low opinion of Ibsen

  Sees Uncle Vanya for first time

  1901 Formation of Socialist Revolutionary Party. Tolstoy excommunicated by Russian Orthodox Church

  Chekhov marries Olga Knipper

  Premiere of Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre, with Olga Knipper as Masha. Works on ‘The Bishop’

  1902 Sipyagin, Minister of Interior, assassinated. Gorky excluded from Academy of Sciences by Nicholas II

  Gorky’s The Lower Depths produced at Moscow Art Theatre Chekhov resigns from Academy of Sciences together with Korolenko in protest at exclusion of Gorky. Awarded Griboyedov Prize by Society of Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers for Three Sisters

  Completes ‘The Bishop’. Begins ‘The Bride’, his last story. Begins The Cherry Orchard

  1903 Completion of Trans-Siberian Railway. Massacre of Jews at Kishinev pogrom

  Chekhov elected provisional president of Society of Lovers of Russian Literature

  Completes ‘The Bride’ and the first draft of The Cherry Orchard. Arrives in Moscow for Art Theatre rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard; strong disagreement with Stanislavsky over its interpretation

  1904 Assassination of Plehve, Minister of Interior, by Socialist revolutionaries. War with Japan

  Chekhov dies of TB on 15 July at Badenweiler in the Black Forest (Germany)

  Premiere of The Cherry Orchard at Moscow Art Theatre

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The text used for this translation is that of the edition published under the aegis of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, A. P. Chekhov, Polnoye s
obraniye sochineniy i pisem (Complete collected works and letters), vols 12 and 13 (Moscow 1978).

  My translation is as exact as I can make it. But though I probably belong to the more literal rather than the freer school of translators, my aim has been that this version can plausibly be spoken as well as read. It is worth saying that the diaereses marked by three full stops in the text are those in the original Russian text to mark a break or pause, which have been retained.

  I have almost always left non-Russian words and phrases in the text and translated them in the notes. The originals of Chekhov’s many references to and quotations from literature and songs have mostly been tracked down by scholars (even Chekhov could not always give his sources) but I have given a note only for the better known; the details of a forgotten song are not going to be illuminating.

  A note on the vexed question of Russian names: all Russian Orthodox (and non-Orthodox) had and have a single first (Christian) name followed by a patronymic deriving from the father’s first name. Thus in Ivanov Sasha Lebedeva is formally Aleksandra Pavlovna Lebedeva. But Aleksandra can generate a shoal of recognized, often affectionate diminutives: in this play alone, Sasha, Shura, Shurka, Shurochka, Sashenka. Diminutives can be scornful or patronizing too. Patronymics are often abbreviated, so that Sergeyevich, for example, becames Sergeich. There are the French versions of names, too. I have tended to leave names in the forms Chekhov used. The various alternatives for each character are listed in the appropriate list of characters.

  Then there are the ‘tears’ in stage directions. In a letter of 23 October 1903 to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov expresses his concern about Anya in The Cherry Orchard being played in a tearful way, making the point that he often uses the phrase ‘skvoz’ slyozy’ (literally ‘through tears’ and so ‘in tears’) in stage directions to indicate mood rather than actual tears. This must go beyond The Cherry Orchard. I have translated the phrase throughout as ‘with tears in his/her eyes’ — leaving it to the reader to determine the precise intention.