Waiting for Godot’s original French title was En attendant Godot, or While Waiting for Godot; Beckett himself unfortunately, and unaccountably, left out the En in his English translation, thereby considerably reducing the play’s complexity from its densely ontological original form — characters like Didi and Gogo, our surrogates, it can be said, are the ones for whom Godot doesn’t come — and we are shown how they fill up the time while waiting, ad-libbing for their very lives. In much the same way the Prozorov sisters, who also represent us, are the ones who don’t get to Moscow, and we are shown how they live until their illusory dreams of salvation in Moscow are ended, which is the end of the play. If there is a villain in Three Sisters it is surely Natasha, who steadily ousts the family from their home. She’ll be living there with her cowed husband (and maybe that lovely, unseen fellow Protopopov) when the sisters leave. Incidentally, a very inept critic of the period was named Protopopov.

 

 

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 Vladimirovich 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.