INTRODUCTION

Resolutely undaunted by his obviously imminent demise, Chekhov planted his play delicately on what a modern critic calls "the knife edge between laughter and tears," fully expecting--or at any rate hoping--that the balance of pathos would tip the work into the realm of comedy. He had absorbed well the lesson of Nikolai Gogol, premiere Russian exponent of darkly poignant, often painful humor and a profound stylistic influence on Chekhov. Yet, from the time of the first reading, when the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre were reduced to tears by the final act, the play has labored against an almost irresistible tendency to see in it all the earmarks of romantic tragedy.

Certainly it is tempting to see in the play a sad tale of loss and death, and in the central family helpless victims of the relentless rise of the mercantile, industrial classes. The proximity of the Russian Revolution, which followed by less than fifteen years the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, leads one naturally to see in the work either a revolutionary call to arms--a summons to an oppressed populace to take up the axe and hew for their lives--or a poignant, prescient farewell to an class doomed to violent extinction. Stanislavsky responded to Chekhov's calls for laughter by writing back: "This is not a comedy or a farce [but] a tragedy, whatever way out for a better life you may have found in the last act."

Yet, Chekhov insisted, the work must be taken as a whole: Lopakhin, the peasant-made-good who buys the estate, is no grasping landlord foreclosing on a mortgage; Trofimov, the revolutionary student, is also a cynical and disillusioned youth blinded by hopeless adoration; the romantically doomed Ranevskaya is a spoiled, self-indulgent elitist who participates fully--if somewhat passively--in her own ruin. Even this ruin that hangs over the play proves to be merely another step in the march of time. Chekhov brilliantly sets his play against the dimly recalled Emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, which too was feared as a coming cataclysm that would engulf the nation. Yet life, as always in Chekhov, goes on--a barely perceived, deeply felt pattern of comings and goings, hopes and disappointments.

The play, then, as so many have come to realize in more modern productions, offers a breathtaking range of moods and visions. "Perceptions vary," writes scholar/critic Richard Gilman, and characters find themselves "facing one or another kind of future." Alongside the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, an avant-garde poet named Andrei Bely published an article on the play in a Symbolist journal. In it, he eloquently notes that in The Cherry Orchard, "An instant of life taken by itself as it is deeply probed becomes a doorway to infinity."

BIOGRAPHY OF ANTON CHEKHOV

"Chekhov's plays," said Stark Young, "carry realism to an honest and spiritual depth and candor, and to a relentless, poignant perfection and truth." Young found only in Shakespeare such "tragic excitement, pathetic beauty, and baffling logic of emotion" as he found in The Cherry Orchard. Yet when the play was first performed on January 17, 1904, it did not have the auspicious start fitting a work of poignant perfection and truth. Presented, with the author present, in conjunction with a surprise observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary career, the performance did inspire a great many tears. Indeed, sobs racked the house by the final curtain, many of them from Chekhov's fellow tuberculosis patients who had filled the back of the auditorium. This response, and a night of long, decorous speeches, infuriated the weakened dramatist. He despaired at what he perceived as the utter misconception of his work as sentimental twaddle by the Moscow Art Theatre. By the critical and literary establishment, however, The Cherry Orchard was met with a baffling--and baffled--coldness. Some complained that nothing happened. Others maintained that the theme of the decaying landowning class had already been exhausted by playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, among the most prolific of Russia's nineteenth-century dramatists.

Yet this apparent failure was by then part of a distressingly familiar pattern in which Chekhov's most ardent and forward-looking scripts were dismissed as empty or backward. The earliest productions of Chekhov's plays had so little success that he was repeatedly discouraged from continuing his stage-writing. Still, the attraction to the theater was so great that he kept returning--always with trepidation, always with great inner suffering. In 1896, the first performance of The Seagull opened at the Imperial Theatre and was a total failure. Hissed and jeered, Chekhov swore never to write another play even if he lived seven hundred years.

Then, October 1898 saw the debut of the Moscow Arts Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavsky; according to co-founder Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, it was almost immediately "on the verge of complete collapse." However, in December of that same year, the M.A.T. essayed a revival of The Seagull whose success would establish their finances and reputation. Ever after, in grateful appreciation, the theater kept as its logo an image of a seagull. Thus, directly after the opening of The Three Sisters in 1901, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko began to press Chekhov for a new play for the now-successful theatre company. Chekhov, though, was slow in beginning to write or even conceive this new play--in part because his poor health forced him to reside far from Moscow in the warmer Crimean climate of Yalta.

Chekhov's illness had begun in the winter of 1884, when he experienced the first unmistakable symptoms of tuberculosis. The more unmistakable because that same year, the already active author had graduated from medical school (also managing to publish his only novel, A Shooting Party). It was otherwise an inauspicious time in Russia for one interested in literature: Fyodor Dostoyevski had died in 1881 and in 1884 Ivan Turgenev passed away. Though it was never evident in any outward manifestation other than a few bleak stories, Chekhov's first tubercular hemorrhages must have been like a death knell. Already he was on the brink of two full-time careers--one as an author, the other as a doctor--driven by the need to support his parents and siblings. For Chekhov began his literary work in the second year of his graduateship at the University of Moscow while he was studying medicine, feeling compelled by necessity to write. He was responsible for supporting a large family, and writing short stories seemed the quickest way of doing it. Now his work seemed to have sown the seeds of his own death.

The roots of his necessity, however, lay deeper than the immediate plight of his family. The Chekhov's pedigree was purely peasant, which left them with few resources. Chekhov's grandfather had been able to save enough money to buy freedom for himself and his family in 1841, about twenty years before the abolition of serfdom in Russia. Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in the bustling Azov seaport of Taganrog, where his father was able to find work and save enough money to open a shop, which was the family's only income. Chekhov and his five siblings spent all their time working to help their father with the business. Or not quite all: the city had choirs, in which young Anton sang; it also had a music hall and a lively Russian theater, where he first developed the knowledge of world theater and of low-comic vaudevilles that informed all of his writing, prose or drama.

In 1876, everything changed. The sixteen-year-old Anton stayed behind in Taganrog to finish high school while the rest of his family moved to Moscow. They had gone bankrupt and had to sell their possessions, abandon the life they knew, and leave behind the only history and ties young Chekhov had experienced. He would never forget how the house and shop were auctioned out from under his family. Years later, when he came to write first a short story, then a play about an aristocratic family forced into desperate circumstances by financial crisis, he remembered still and could understood intimately what it meant to have to sell everything and leave--rich or poor, it was a human ordeal.

The high school education Chekhov received in the provinces was conventional but highly effective. While he was never enthralled by many European writers, his work shows that Chekhov was permanently influenced by his grammar school curriculum. In particular this included the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Bible, and Shakespeare; to which mixture he later added French novelists Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Of particular interest, Zola believed the writer was a scientist who observed society like a dissecting scientist, which harmonized with Chekhov's own temperament and training.

For while Chekhov was always compelled by writing, medicine too, interested him deeply. He determined to qualify as a doctor and write only in his spare time. However, he was more immediately successful as a writer than a doctor. By the time he received his medical degree, Chekhov was the veteran of several years of short story writing; in 1886 he began to attract the notice of established writers and was commissioned to write serious, substantial stories for the St. Petersburg newspaper Novoye Vremya. In 1887 came his first commissioned play, Ivanov for the Moscow Korsh Theatre, which got only limited acclaim. A year later he was awarded the Russian Academy of Science's Pushkin Prize for his book of short stories, "In the Twilight" and his one-act farces The Bear and The Proposal--which drew extensively on his childhood love of vaudeville and popular music hall routines--also had significant success. He thereupon became well- enough paid to write only what and when he wanted.

Spurred, however, by accusations that he was an artist with no social conscience, Chekhov undertook a dangerous trip across Siberia to conduct, alone, a sociomedical survey of the penal colony of Sakhalin. The misery he found as he chronicled the prisoners and exiles at a rate of 160 a day appalled and disgusted him, and haunted the rest of his life. The journey also exacerbated his tubercular condition, and he was forced to return home--where in 1892 he bought an estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow. There he occupied himself with gardening and with being an enlightened landowner. He tried to prevent outbreaks of famine and cholera in his district and built three local schools. He subscribed to gardening journals and puttered and planted. One might argue that the seemingly interwoven, circular structure of many of his works owes more to the principles of garden design--where ends merge with beginnings--than to the linear conventions of literary narrative. Chekhov planted whole forests, and a cherry orchard of his own. Forced to move to the milder climes of Yalta in 1898 (in an attempt to cure his ailment), he sold Melikhovo. Soon, the joy of planting his new garden was overshadowed by the tragedy of the lost estate, as the new purchaser felled most of the timber that Chekhov had planted. This too would haunt him when he came to write The Cherry Orchard.

During his stay in Melikhovo, Chekhov had continued to write--most notably his serio-comic look at contemporary theater, The Seagull. It was Chekhov's good fortune that among the greatest admirers of his genius was Moscow Arts Theatre director Nemirovich-Danchenko, who prevailed on his partner Stanislavsky to revive The Seagull for their first season. The production's success ensured the play's viability, the M.A.T.'s continued existence, and the possibility of further plays from Chekhov's pen. It also initiated a fruitful and often confrontational relationship that would secure the reputation of all concerned and endure for the rest of Chekhov's lifetime. Chekhov's association with one of the most progressive theaters in Russia gave him an ally in his determination to subjugate the actor to the text and the words to the overall mood of the staging. More than any of his Russian predecessors, Chekhov succeeded in accomplishing an unanticipated theatrical revolution by finding a sympathetic theater.

Though they would go on to produce the rest of his plays, his association with Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the M.A.T. proved also one of Chekhov's greatest frustrations. Both producers believed that they were entitled to interpret Chekhov's plays as they liked--which often jarred with what the author wanted. The interpretation of Chekhov's plays by the M.A.T. led to constant conflicts between its two directors and their treasured author.

These differences became particularly extreme during the rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. The play was so delicate, poetical and profound that Stanislavsky was first afraid to handle it, then determined to stage it as a realistic and tragic threnody to a dying class. The bittersweet, sometimes farcical comedy that Chekhov had envisioned had turned into a tear-stained valediction. In a letter to Olga Knipper (famous actor, member of the MAT, the original Ranevskaya, and after 1901 Chekhov's wife) Chekhov complained: "It's all wrong, the play and the performance. That's not what I saw, and they couldn't understand what I wanted."

It took Chekhov several years to write The Cherry Orchard, alternating between periods of lighthearted enthusiasm and a frustrated despondence that he considered laziness. His illness kept him weakened as well, limiting his working hours. By the summer of 1902, he still had not told anyone the title of his new play. It was only to comfort his wife, recovering from a miscarriage, that he finally let her in on the secret, asking "Do you want me to tell you the name of my new play?" Olga later recalled that though they were alone in the room, Chekhov would not say the title out loud, but whispered it to her. He was thrilled with the very sound of the title, later laughing delightedly when he revealed it to Stanislavsky. He particularly enjoyed the substitution of "orchard" for the more practical "plantation," feeling he had perfectly and symbolically captured the impracticality of an entire way of life.

Although the critics were divided in their appraisal, the opening of The Cherry Orchard on January 17, 1904 (Chekhov's birthday), was a climactic theatrical event and the play was almost immediately presented in most of the important provincial cities in Russia. Only a short time elapsed before it began to receive recognition abroad. In the meantime, Chekhov left to consult with a specialist in Berlin, followed by an ill-conceived trip to the German spa of Badenweiler. There, his health worsened precipitously, and medical facilities were insufficient to deal with his advance tuberculosis. In June he began to hemorrhage badly, then a heart attack relegated him to his bed.

Sometime after midnight on July 2, 1904, Chekhov asked his sister to send for a doctor, whose arrival he greeted with the typically laconic "I'm dying" rendered thoughtfully in his best German. Refusing oxygen but accepting a glass of champagne, he sipped, smiled, and silently died--the smile still on his lips. As his wife sat alone with her dead husband, a large black moth fluttered by the window and the cork exploded from the champagne bottle, effects that the playwright would have delightedly included in such a scene.

Similarly, he could not better have orchestrated his arrival back in Moscow for the funeral. The coffin arrived in a van labelled "Oysters;" bands of mourners followed the wrong coffin. The playwright's own family was at first prevented from joining the cortege--nobody could prove who they were. Finally arriving at the cemetery, drunken mobs of mourners swarmed the graveyard, leaving it a wrecked heap. Yet the plays--from the first hesitant steps in Platonov to the valedictory lines of The Cherry Orchard--remain as the most enduring of monuments to the goodness and genius of Anton Chekhov. As he wrote eloquently to a friend, "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom--from violence and falsehood in whatever form these may be expressed." It was a grail he kept ever before him; one that shines brightly in his final play.

CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR WORKS

• 1883 Platonov (play)
• 1884
  • Tales of Melpomene (book of short stories)
  • A Shooting Party (symbolist novel)
• 1885 On the High Road ( one-act play)
• 1887
  • Ivanov (play)
  • The Swan Song (play)
• 1888
  • The Bear (one-act play)
  • The Proposal (one-act play)
• 1889
  • Uncle Vanya (play)
  • Tatyana Repin (one-act play)
• 1890
  • A Tragic Role (one-act play)
  • The Wedding (one-act play)
• 1891
  • The Duel (story)
  • The Anniversary (one-act play)
• 1892 Ward No. 6 (story)
• 1893 The Island Sakhalin (seminal work of social geography)
• 1895 The Black Monk (story in which a doomed orchard plays a symbolic part)
• 1896
  • The Seagull (play)
  • My Life (story)
• 1897 Peasants (story)
• 1889
  • About Love (story)
  • A Visit to Friends (story, source for The Cherry Orchard)
• 1899 Lady with the Lap Dog (story)
• 1890's The Night Before the Trial (one-act play)
• 1900-1902
  • The Three Sisters (play)
  • The Bishop (story)
  • The Bride (story)
• 1903 Smoking Is Bad for You (one-act play)
• 1904 The Cherry Orchard (play)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Anton Chekhov was born the year before serfdom was finally abolished in his homeland, and one year after his death brought the abortive 1905 revolution that would soon precipitate the most monumental change of all in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. His lifetime spanned some of the most momentous times in the long and storied history of Greater Russia.

Tsar Nicholas I succeeded his elder brother Alexander to the imperial Romanov throne in 1825 amidst the confusion attending a revolt known as the Decembrist uprising. Having never received a monarch's training, he nonetheless ruled with some initial success, within the limitations of his autocratic mentality and the expectations of his day. Among his first tasks was punishing the Decembrists, who, brought to trial, gave testimony that amounted to a penetrating criticism of Russian institutions. Nicholas recruited Michael Speranski, a liberal councilor, to recodify Russian laws in the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Empire of Russia. Though no startling liberal interpretation was noticeable in this collection, the new tsar's recognition of the chaotic state of Russian law was a step toward a more enlightened future.

So disturbing to his peace of mind were the Revolutions of 1848 that Nicholas I attempted to insulate Russians from revolutionary ideas. Russia's massive peasant population was already suffering from autocracy as much as from disease, poverty, and malnutrition when Nicholas I and his advisors adopted three major instruments of repression: censorship, the secret police, and Siberian prison camps. For thirty years the tsar's policies combatted outward opposition in the form of frequent peasant uprisings (a total of 712, half of which were suppressed by the police and the other half by troops). Other social ferment arose from new social and political theories, which spread through secret societies of the intelligentsia. These focused their energy against the reaction seeking to freeze society in the mold of 1825, for the suggestion of serf emancipation and land reform violated centuries of agricultural and social tradition.

Reaction and censorship failed too to curtail a brilliant literary ferment. Above all, the great Alexander Pushkin employed his literary genius to attack prevailing social standards. Not even the tsar escaped the sharp satires of this multi-faceted author who, discouraged by the failure of the Decembrist uprising, criticized the institutions of Russia in the manner of philosophies. Throughout the 1840s, other writers likewise discarded Romantic frameworks for a more realistic approach to life. These realists, describing conditions of misery among the people, sought to arouse public consciousness and the spirit of reform.

At last, reform arrived on a massive scale. The death of Nicholas I in 1855 marked the beginning of a remarkable era for Russia. The new Tsar, Alexander II (1855-81) was thirty-seven years old when his father left the throne; his accession was marked with a great relaxation of that police repression that had chilled the Russian intellect and oppressed the populace at large. He promptly justified the best hopes of the intelligentsia by relaxing press censorship, opening universities to enrollment by all classes, and removing nearly all restrictions upon foreign travel. One major holdover remained: the deeply entrenched system of serfdom that bound the vast majority of Russia's population in virtual slavery.

By 1856 all the conscience and intelligence of Russia favored the abolition of serfdom. The serfs in the fields were not actually slaves, as they retained a prescriptive claim to the land which they and their forebears occupied. "We are the lord's, but the land is ours," ran their saying. But they were bound absolutely to that land and the will of their overlords, for whom they worked in conditions of appalling poverty. Serfdom was thus grievous for the serfs; but often enough under the existing system, it was also proving grievous for the masters. Two-thirds of the estates on which the serfs were located were mortgaged up to (if not beyond) their full value; roughly the same number of privately owned serfs were themselves mortgaged by their owners. The Russian nobility--idle, dissolute, free spending, and economically inefficient, was running itself into the ground. Thus on March 3, 1861 (two years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing America's slaves), Tsar Alexander II published his edict abolishing serfdom and emancipating Russia's peasantry.

The peasants became the free subjects of the Tsar. Each ex-serf householder was made the owner of his cabin and a small garden plot around; but the great reaches of arable land were divided. One half was turned back to the direct possession of the former serf-owners; the rest was handed over, not to the peasants individually, but to the local village community, or mir. It was this communal entity that became responsible for distributing land and maintaining local order, so individual liberties remained minimal. Further, it was a bitter disappointment to former serfs to see their former land added to the domains of their ex-masters, while they were responsible for paying a heavy indemnity for the rest. The released serfs became discouraged with the difficulty of paying for their farms and flocked into the towns, where they later became exploited as industrial workers.

As for the landowners, they now found their remaining estates utterly demoralized. Efficient hired labor was hard to get. Soon there were more mortgages and bankruptcies among the nobility than ever, as immortalized in The Cherry Orchard. The victims were then ready to attribute all the troubles wrought by their own prodigality and inefficiency to the Tsar's flirtation with liberalism But liberals had tasted the success of reform and insisted upon further change. The young men who now filled the universities in increasing numbers to study science, education, law, and medicine swelled the group seeking further liberal government reforms.

Three distinct party groups emerged to agitate for the various reform programs: the Slavophiles, the Liberals, and the Radicals. The Slavophiles emphasized conservative evolution and stemmed directly from the philosophic school of the same name, who believed Russia must not look to the West for models but had a special destiny of her own. Liberals, descended in some part from the earlier Westernizers, recruited followers from among the lower gentry and the professional men in the middle class. They hoped to assemble a free constitutional assembly. More extreme demands came from the Radicals--students, writers, and some professional men who believed in revolutionary change at all costs. Extremists within this party, who called themselves Nihilists, attracted considerable attention with their belief that society must be made to conform to the demands of pure reason and science. At the most extreme reach of political thought were the Anarchists, who felt violence and terrorism were the only paths to justice and freedom.

Despite the reforms he extended, Alexander II ultimately found that he had failed to satisfy Liberals and Radicals alike. Riots in the universities, outspoken criticism from the various literary and revolutionary societies and the press discouraged the tsar, who lived in fear of violent upheaval. After multiple attempts on his life, the liberal tsar became pessimistic about reform and returned to repressive measures. In response, liberals demanded a constitution and political liberty for Russia. Their ultimate goal was a social revolution. Alexander II bent somewhat before this storm of criticism, but ironically, he was killed by a terrorist bomb while visiting men who had been wounded in a previous bombing because of his relaxed police restrictions.

Alexander III, who succeeded his father as Tsar in 1881, felt the need to avenge his father's death and embarked upon a policy of reaction and militant nationalism. He found in his tutor, Konstantin Pobiedonostev (a grim, puritanical professor of Russian civil law), an apt administrator for reaction. As Pobiedonostev stated clearly in his Reflections of a Russian Statesman, he felt parliamentary government was a great hoax. He considered the press evil except as an organ of state propaganda; trial by jury he saw as a farce; and schools, if they had to exist, must not teach irreligious science. Autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism were key themes. Secret police attended university classrooms, press restrictions returned, and citizens were denied the right of assembly. Opposed to this reactionary tide stood the intelligentsia, strengthened by a small but growing industrial working class and a vast mass of land-hungry peasants unsatisfied by the initial conditions of their limited emancipation.

Upon the death of Alexander III his son and successor to the throne, Nicholas II, promised "to follow his father in everything." The new tsar faced an increasingly difficult situation, and he lacked the will or ability to deal with it. Tsar and nobility became the common enemy of the peasantry and the workers. The liberal-socialist opposition revived, as did class conflict. Once again, a massive exploited underclass lived and worked at odds with a small, elite gentry who lived off of their labor. An impassable chasm separated the two, who differed in looks, manners, speech, and attire. Starving peasants without shoes died in their bare wooden huts of typhus, dysentery, cholera, or simple famine, decorously out of sight of the merchants and nobles who dined in finely appointed dachas or picnicked at health resorts on champagne, salmon, caviar.

Conditions in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century favored industrial expansion. A mammoth labor supply of former serfs and their descendants, many of whom had moved to cities for work, the spread of railroads and factories, and ever-increasing demand meant that there could finally exist industrial growth. Soon enough, the long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions crystallized into a labor movement, which hardened into an active, vocal, organized opposition. Factories, moreover, were ideal breeding grounds for such oppositional fervor.

As time went on, students joined the strikes, which took on a specifically political nature. Student demonstrators were liable to especially harsh treatment, often being drafted into the army as privates. A well-known literary representative of this type of politically active student is Petya Trofimov, the "eternal student" in The Cherry Orchard. We learn that he has "already been sent down from the university twice", and "landed in some pretty queer places," presumably as a budding revolutionary. Certainly his speeches were considered inflammatory enough that the tsar's censor removed several passages from the play's draft.

All grievances found expression one way or another in political parties. Left wing liberals endorsed a revolution to achieve a constituent assembly which would frame a constitutional monarchy, grant universal suffrage, and deal with the agrarian problem by dividing the large estates. Right wing liberals wished to avoid a revolution but desired a constitutional government. Socialists adhered fundamentally to the principles of Karl Marx, though they divided broadly into two parties, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, demanded a small, tightly organized party and a militant program to seek the dictatorship of the proletariat at the earliest moment. The Mensheviks, lead by Martov, wished to attain the same goal through education and evolution. They were willing to work with non-socialist parties to sweep away autocracy and educate the masses for gradual conversion to socialism.

As World War I erupted in 1914, autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism remained the touchstones of Russian policy. The tsar's margin of security slowly diminished in the face of the developing agrarian and industrial conditions, and eroded still further as the country took massive casualties to no apparent purpose. The war interrupted progress towards higher living standards for urban and agricultural workers. Before it ended, a militant minority of the Russian people resolved to change their political, social, and economic problems by any means, and in 1917 Russia exploded in revolution. With the aristocracy discredited and the old ways smashed, Chekhov's plays were eagerly embraced as manifestos of change.

SYNOPSIS

• Mme. Ranevskaya (Lyuba Andreyevna)
• Anya, her daughter
• Varya, her adopted daughter
• Gayev, her brother
• Yermolai Lopakhin, a businessman
• Petya Trofimov, a student, former tutor
• Simeonov-Pishchik, a landowner
• Charlotta Ivanovna, German governess
• Yepikhodov, estate clerk
• Dunyasha, a chambermaid
• Firs, an old footman
• Yasha, a young valet
• other citizens

The nursery and grounds of Madame Ranevskaya's ancestral estate in the provinces of Russia, c. 1903.

Early one May morning, after a long absence (during which she lived in Paris with her lover), Madame Ranevskaya comes home to her family estate. With her arrives her daughter, Anya, and Anya's German governess Charlotta. They are greeted by Varya, Lyubov's adopted daughter who manages the remnants of the once-grand estate; Gayev, Lyubov's brother; Lopakhin, a sometime peasant become a wealthy neighbor; members of the staff; and other neighbors and friends.

Amidst her recollections of her girlhood nursery, Ranevskaya is reminded that the estate will be sold to clear debts in August, unless the family can raise sufficient funds. Lopakhin offers to lend Lyubov 50,000 rubles to cover the debts and save the estate--if she will permit the land to be divided into lots for summer tourist homes. This, however, involves cutting down the estate's famous cherry orchard. Several other plans to save the estate arise: Gayev will try to secure a loan: Lyubov will talk further to Lopakhin; or perhaps Anya will visit her wealthy great-aunt, a countess in distant Yaroslavl. Nothing is resolved.

Later in the summer, courtship seems to preclude business. As the new valet Yasha competes with the estate clerk Yepikhodov for the attentions of Dunyasha the maid, and Varya tries to prevent a union between her sister and the perpetual student Trofimov (former tutor to Ranevskaya's infant son, who drowned at age six), Lopakhin tries vainly to get the Ranevskys to be more practical but Lyubov confesses that she squandered her fortune on her unfaithful lover in Paris. Everybody assumes that Varya will marry Lopakhin, though there has been no proposal. Firs, an aged servant, longs for "the good old days" before the serfs were emancipated, but Trofimov dreams of progress. He is glad the estate will be sold, for to him every leaf in the cherry orchard tells of a serf's complaints and sufferings.

August arrives and the estate must be auctioned to meet mortgage payments. Gayev attends the sale, hopeful that the great-aunt's money will suffice. At the mansion a farewell party is underway even though there are no funds for the orchestra. The household dance and quarrel until Lopakhin returns with Gayev from the auction to announce that he has bought the estate where his family once were serfs. Seeing Lyubov's sorrow, Lopakhin remorsefully wishes that "this miserable disjointed life could somehow be changed." Anya comforts her mother, promising that together they will build a new, happy life.

In the fall, Lyubov readies for her departure to Paris, where she will live on the money from the great-aunt. Anya will accompany her and attend school. Gayev has a job as a bank clerk, Trofimov as a translator. Lopakhin hires Yepikhodov to work for him, and promises to find a new position for Charlotta. Lyubov is worries about Firs, but is told that he is in the hospital. Once the Ranevskys and their entourage depart, however, Firs finds himself alone, locked in the deserted house. Axe strokes resound outside, as the woodsmen begin at last to cut down the cherry orchard.

SOURCES

There were several experiences in Chekhov's own life that directly inspired the writing of The Cherry Orchard. When he was sixteen, Chekhov's mother went into debt after having been cheated by some builders she had hired to construct a small house. A former lodger, Gabriel Selivanov, offered to help her but secretly bought the house for himself. At about the same time, his childhood home in Taganrog home was sold to pay off its mortgage. These financial and domestic upheavals imprinted themselves on his memory and would reappear in the circumstances governing the action of The Cherry Orchard.

Later in his life, living on a country estate outside Moscow, Chekhov developed an interest in gardening and planted his own cherry orchard. After having to move to Yalta for health reasons, Chekhov was devastated to learn that the purchaser of his former estate had felled most of the orchard. Returning on one trip to his childhood haunts in Taganrog, he was further horrified by the devastating effects of industrial deforestation. It was in those woodlands and the forests of his holidays in the Ukraine that he had first nurtured his ecological passion. A lovely and locally famous cherry orchard stood on the farm of family friends where he spent childhood vacations, and in his early short story "Steppe," Chekhov conjures a young boy crossing the Ukraine amidst fields of cherry blossoms. Finally, the first inklings of the genesis for the play that would be his last came in a terse notebook entry of 1897: "cherry orchard." Today, Chekhov's Yalta garden survives alongside The Cherry Orchard as a monument to a man whose feeling for trees equalled his feeling for theatre. Indeed, trees are often unspoken, symbolic heroes and victims of his stories and plays; so much so that Chekhov has to be singled out as Europe's first ecological author.

Characters for The Cherry Orchard were also drawn from past experience. When he was in Europe in 1901, Chekhov wrote to his wife about the Russian women living a dissipated life there; originally, Ranevskaya was designated in his notebooks as just such an elderly Russian woman. Chekhov also told Stanislavsky about a Russian landowner who stayed in bed all day if he was not dressed by his servant--an obvious prototype for Gayev's passive personality. Characters like the French-spouting, Russia-hating Yasha were derived from familiar types prevalent in the popular theater of Chekhov's youth, which--along with vaudeville entertainments--was a strong influence in determining the shape and content of The Cherry Orchard. He even referred to the work-in-progress as a vaudeville in his letters and notes.

Several of Chekhov's own short stories provided him with other source material for The Cherry Orchard. Among them were "Late-Blooming Flowers" and "Other People's Misfortunes," but especially "A Visit to Friends," which he wrote in 1898. In this tale Podgorin, a lawyer, is urged by old friends to help them prevent the loss of their estate, which is due to be auctioned in August--circumstances that gave shape to the play as well. Several of the characters in "A Visit to Friends" resemble characters later used in The Cherry Orchard, most notably a woman who cries out to Podgorin, "I cannot live without Kuzminki! I was born here, it's my home, and if it's taken from me, I shan't be able to go on, I shall die of despair." This character evidently provided the outlines for the similarly devoted Lyubov and Anya.

Chekhov has been one of the world's most influential writers, having shaped indelibly the work of some of the twentieth century's best-known authors (including: O'Neil, Beckett, Albee, Miller, Odets, Williams, Hellman, Mamet, and Shepard). Yet his own writing was only moderately influenced by his predecessors or contemporaries. Some impact can be traced to his youthful training in Greek and Roman philosophers and the Bible, and he admitted to deep admiration for the writing of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Gogol, whose works gave some to shape the philosophic outlook and satirical comedy of The Cherry Orchard. Mostly, he credited the influence of the great master of short stories, Frenchman Guy de Maupassant, and for technical elements and general approach the innovator of Naturalism, Emile Zola. Zola believed the writer akin to a scientist conducting an autopsy, which Chekhov as a doctor found particularly persuasive.

PRODUCTION HISTORY

In 1901, Chekhov announced "I have moments when I feel a very strong desire to write a four-act vaudeville or comedy for the Moscow Arts Theatre. And I will, if nothing stops me, only I shan't submit it before the end of 1903." The comedy won out, for he next wrote: "I dream of writing a funny play with the devil causing chaos." The play itself was begun in 1902, yet Chekhov wrote with little enthusiasm, convinced he had outlived his time as a writer. "Every sentence I write strikes me as good for nothing," he confessed--the same uselessness of which Firs accuses himself in the final line of The Cherry Orchard.

Nonetheless, work progressed, and Chekhov even took an unaccustomed interest in choosing his title. His title is in fact far subtler in Russian, for Chekhov decided that it would not be the normal Vishnevy sad, with the stress on the "i" but Vishni—vy sad--the owners' affected pronunciation hinting that the orchard was decorative merely. Furthermore, sad means not really "orchard" but "garden," though the family boasts of thousands of trees supplying fruit that was pickled for the whole country. Avid gardner that he was, Chekhov knew that a such a thing could not happen.

As The Cherry Orchard was nearing completion, Chekhov forewarned Stanislavsky's wife that "Not a drama but a comedy has emerged from me, in places even a farce." Aware of her husband's propensity for reading doom and misery into his scripts, he took care to stress the play's designation as a comedy. To no avail. The first person to read the play was Chekhov's own wife, the leading actress Olga Knipper. She expressed her delight at the play and the tears it evoked. Eventually all the other members of the company had the same reaction to the play, and Stanislavsky wrote back: "This is not a comedy or a farce, as you wrote, it is a tragedy, whatever way out you may have found for a better life in the last act."

In October the finished copy of The Cherry Orchard was sent off to Moscow, and three weeks later the playwright himself went there, full of trepidation, to assist in the production and fight any tearful interpretation: "Why," he had asked assistant director Nemirovich-Danchenko, "do you telegraph me to say there is a lot of weeping in the play? Where are these weeping people? Just Varya, but that is because she is a cry-baby by nature, and her tears must not make the spectator sad." Though stage directions might indicate "on the verge of tears," he claimed "that shows a person's mood, not real tears."

There were endless discussions but little progress, and the author and producer began to despair of achieving any real harmony. Not only did Chekhov object to the entire tone of the production, but he attempted minutely to guide the choice of actor for each part and their performance of it, as well as commenting on scenic design and other elements of Stanislavsky's mise-en-sc�ne. Chekhov failed to get his way over most of the casting, however, including the parts played by his wife and by Stanislavsky. He felt Lopakhin, not Gayev, stood at the emotional center of the play and wanted the actor-director to take the role; for Ranevskaya, he long felt his wife was too young, though he relented at length.

The poignant anguish and sense of loss which everyone was determined to find in the play found further reinforcement in the circumstances of its first performance. The premiere took place on January 17, 1904, which happened to be Chekhov's forty-fourth birthday. It was also chosen (though a year prematurely) to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his career as a writer. Despite the fact that he was terminally sick, the author was called on stage to receive the tributes proper to such an occasion. The man whose hatred of formal speeches had created Gayev's address to the bookcase just heard by the entire theater had to stand for hours listening to formal panegyrics of praise. Chekhov's ordeal was not eased by the fact that they play had been produced in a way contrary to his own intentions. The near-farce he had envisioned had turned into a valediction of tears. Yet stand he did, smiling all the while, genuinely touched by the show of appreciation.

While The Cherry Orchard on that first night achieved a moderate success, Chekhov did not live to see the real triumph enjoyed by his last work. As time passed, and the production matured, many of the actors were able to reveal their real talent. This was particularly true of Olga Knipper, who played Ranevskaya into her eighties, but also of most of the rest of the cast. In the meantime, the breakup of the symbolist movement on the eve of World War I, and the Bolsheviks' use of theaters as ideological centers during the Revolution, turned The Cherry Orchard first into an unquestioned classic, then into a vehicle for illustrating the inevitability of the old order's collapse.

Abroad, productions of The Cherry Orchard, which have varied between the opposing camps of comedy and tragedy established by the first staging, have depended chiefly on two distinct elements: the theatrical climate and the quality, even availability, of adequate translations. Not surprisingly, the first foreign performances were in Eastern Europe, but in 1906 the Moscow Arts Theatre toured to Berlin to perform the play in Russian. The performance was shattering; afterward, the usually stoic Gerhardt Hauptmann, weeping, proclaimed that it was the greatest stage experience of his life. Others, such as the poet Christian Morgenstern, were likewise moved to tears. And there was no Chekhov to complain.

The English first knew The Cherry Orchard through George Bernard Shaw's rapturous praise of the piece, then obliquely in his adaptation of it, Heartbreak House. But in 1911 England became the first major Western European country to stage The Cherry Orchard--in a sentimental translation by Constance Garnett that would establish the elegiac Chekhov tradition for almost half a century. Further, the Edwardian actors solemnly misinterpreted the play's morality: the actress playing Dunyasha was shocked at Charlotta's possible illegitimacy, while others shied away from the implications of Ranevskaya's arrangement with her Paris beau. Critics found the play "stationary," or "queer, outlandish, and even silly." They cited its "fantastic trivialities." Some few charitably assumed the play was "a display of Russian temperament that no English actor was ready for," offering a survey of modern Russian thought. Half the audience had left the theater by the third act, but tastes would ultimately catch up with the play's innovations and subtleties.

In 1933 Sir Charles Laughton appeared as Lopakhin in London in a landmark production of The Cherry Orchard directed by Tyrone Guthrie--the first Russian play to be put on at the historic Old Vic Theatre. Critic Desmond MacCarthy called this the best English production of The Cherry Orchard, for he felt it captured the delicate timing and changes of tone essential in interpreting Chekhov's dialogue. MacCarthy praised Laughton's ability to show "Lopakhin's muddled inconsistent attitude towards the Ranevskys." Rather than devote the production to the minutiae of realism or the proper use of samovars, as the Russian tradition had established, Guthrie explored the characters' disjointed emotional fluctuations. Exasperation could coincide with "almost superstitious admiration;" here was a staging that appreciated the play's intricately structured emotional weave, what Nemirovich-Danchenko called its "lacework" pattern.

In the United States, Chekhov's plays were read long before they were produced, and most critical opinion dismissed them. Everybody, however, praised the ensemble acting of the Moscow Arts Theatre when The Cherry Orchard toured America in 1924, even though it was performed in Russian. The naturalist acting, sets, and other elements were still novelties. Leading critic Heywood Broun was convinced that Chekhov spoke a universal language, and found that there were moments when he was "moved more profoundly than ever before in theatre." Only after the ponderous performances of the Moscow Arts Theatre abroad had given way to more confident English and American productions, such as that by Eva LaGalliene in 1928, did critics and directors in this country begin to see the comedy implicit in The Cherry Orchard. With one noted exception: in 1950, a production of the play opened that established an unexpected standard for comic potential. Directed by Joshua Loan and renamed The Wisteria Trees, the production reset the play on a Louisiana plantation in 1905. By all accounts, it was a debacle.

French actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault had more success, winning great acclaim for his 1954 production, which he considered the greatest of Chekhov's plays. Barrault sought to reduce the emphasis on the play's social commentary without in any way lessening Chekhov's ideological impact. Rather, he felt, it works like acupuncture: the effect out of all proportion to the force exerted. Principally, he saw the play's three male protagonists--Gayev, Lopakhin, and Trofimov-in terms of time, as symbolic visions of past, present, and future. Many subsequent directors and critics have adopted this view about the characters themselves and about the play (as one centered on streams of time and its passing). In structuralist France, Barrault's assertion that "not a single thing can be crossed out" of the economically written script made The Cherry Orchard a play that met all the criteria of masterful art set by the likes of Racine and Flaubert.

The ever-inventive director Peter Brook embarked on his first Chekhov in 1981, when he chose to mount The Cherry Orchard in Paris. The production (remounted at BAM in 1988 after tours through Africa and the Middle East) was originally played in French with an international cast including Brook's wife Natasha Parry as Ranevskaya, Niels Arestrup as Lopakhin, and Michael Piccoli as Gayev, with the accessories stripped to a faded carpet, a few cushions, and some straight-back chairs. Brook sought to prevent the essentials from being lost in a welter of set pieces, so he did away with walls and abstracted the space entirely. Some hailed it as a formal breakthrough that put the emphasis back on the language and action, but Robert Brustein noted that the play lacked any strong take on its central figures--especially missing an attitude towards Lopakhin. Without this, it became unbalanced and "pedestrian." Though Brook asserted in his notes that the play "is not gloomy, romantic, long and slow. It's a comic play about real life," the production did not embrace the characters' clownish qualities and so became rather somber and severe.

In his abstraction, Brook owed much to a production which Italian visionary Giorgio Strehler directed in Milan in 1955 and again in 1974. Of particular importance was Strehler's naturalistic acting emphasis in combination with a highly symbolic setting. This "lyrical realism" was a mixture of Stanislavskian techniques with those of epic theatre, extending the resonances of the play into a poetic evocation of striking force. Strehler saw the play as presenting the day-to-day lives of individuals tragically trapped in antagonistic social and historical circumstances. To realize this in performance, he developed a now-celebrated theory of three Chinese boxes:

In the first box we approach the play on the level of reality: that is to say through the story of a family, its life at a particular moment; in the second we shift to a historical level and the conflict and struggles of the individual characters we see reflected the social and political conflicts of the period; in the third we are operating in the context of universal--let us call them abstract--values. The challenge--by all accounts, triumphantly met by Strehler in the 1974 production--was to realize all three levels of significance in equal depth.

To do so, he used a highly abstract setting designed by Luciano Damiani and based on Chekhov's initial images in describing the play. Over a large white cloth-draped square--on which were set a few pale piece of wooden furniture--hung an enormous white veil, projecting well over the seats. This created both a visual and aural effect, as hundreds of paper leaves rustled and tumbled on the veil as it was raised and lowered during the performance. Finally, Strehler picked up on the image of the nursery, which he felt was central to the play. Child-size furniture that evoked the past and a stream of toys were among ways the production suggested a return to childhood and showed how Chekhov reflected on life as a game.

Also significant for helping reconsider elements of the play was Peter Hall's 1978 London production, which appeared first at the National Theatre to nearly universal acclaim. Abandoning the precious and stodgy translations of the past, Hall used a version by then-fringe playwright Michael Frayn, which critics deemed "lucid and alive." A marvelous cast included Dorothy Tutin as a still young and sexual Ranevskaya, Albert Finney as a powerful Lopakhin, Ben Kingsley as Trofimov, and the inimitable character actor Ralph Richardson as Firs. But it was Robert Stephens in the role of Gayev who drew most attention and most threw a fresh light on the play. Like Stanislavsky in the original production, Stephens created a Gayev who was both a believable, sympathetic, real human--obsessed with the details of billiards as an escape from a world that frightens him--and yet a selfish, almost cruelly indulgent caricature of doddering self-absorption. A dandy with no ability to care for himself and no real purpose in the world, an emotional infant: Stephens took risks with the part that lent it a monumental and tragic air beyond the character's accustomed role and status in the play's world.

Other notable productions have reimagined important elements of the play, including characters, themes, and scenic expressions. One instance of this was in 1977 at New York's Lincoln Center, directed by Andre Serban. In it, grande dame of the theater Irene Worth played a stately Ranevskaya, full of what Robert Brustein called "gyrating melancholia," while the young Meryl Streep made her Varya a "languid, self-dramatizing ninny." The production took a strongly political approach to the play as a whole, without any sentimental associations around characters or their lives. The radical result was both funny and painful.

In 1954, John Gielgud directed a "sparkling" version of The Cherry Orchard in England that managed to be both infintely funny and touching, combining in suprising measures a powerful impact with careful verbal fluency. It was a production that further confirmed the movement towards letting the comedy of the piece come laughing through any tears it might also generate. In stark contrast was a 1973 production under the direction of the capable Michael Blakemore, which ended up being merely an exercise in style and sophistication with neither heart nor immediacy. Constance Cummings made an ineffectual Ranevskaya without relation to her environment; Lopakhin was played as "an elegant, well-mannered businessman," and Michael Hordern's Gayev struck one critic as infinitely "cuddly" and infinitely far from "the cranky, vacant, and somewhat snobbish character Chekhov wrote" (New Republic, 1973). With a serviceable translation by scholar Michael Hingley, Blakemore and his cast managed to produce a light comedy, but found none of the "inner demons" that can also inhabit the play.

Not so a vaguely seedy, predictably edgy Goodman production of David Mamet's translation, for which Gregory Mosher directed such local talent as Mike Nussbaum as Simyonev-Pishchik. This explored all the easy colloquialism of the play as well as its darker side. Even darker, however, was Lucien Pintilie's extremely radical, utterly original, perfectly faithful production of Jean-Claude van Itallie's translation at the Arena Stage in 1988. The performances struck some as shrill, but Pintilie's mastery of space and image created a unified world that left audiences in no doubt as to the eerie, poetic resonance of Chekhov's masterpiece. As in Strehler's production, the cast was surrounded by children's toys and miniature furniture; this time, however, the ghost of the drowned Grisha comes out to play. For the exterior scenes, sheaves of wheat came up through the floor; a broken chandelier littered the stage as the family packed to leave; and when Firs lay down at the close, the wheat returned to gather his body in a haunting final moment.

Most recently, controversial production of The Cherry Orchard was directed by Libby Appel in 1993 at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. Although the show was considered a success by audiences and the press, there were two focal points for criticism: Paul Schmidt's vigorously American translation and the multicultural casting. Janet Allen wrote: "Most theatre patrons agree that race should not be a barrier in how we perceive art; in fact, only brave few are willing to articulate their racial concerns about the play, feelings that, in terms of aesthetics, are certainly not politically correct."

While audiences had trouble in this instance, they did not with A.C.T.'s 1996 production, also using Schmidt's translation. This offered a poignant look at revolutionary change with an almost perfectly balanced cast: Ken Ruta a laughing bear as Gayev, Gordana Rashovich a romantic Ranevskaya, and Jack Wetherall solidly occupying the play's center as a Lopakhin with a heart of gold. Once again the performers were in a bare, abstract space filled with toy trains, rocking horses, and other emblems of childhood and a vanished past. But the real star of the show was held to be Schmidt's "sleek, idiomatic" translation (Daily Californian, 1996). The same "uncompromising" and "vivid" translation, in fact, that now stars at Court Theatre.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The entire play is so simple, so wholly real, but to such a point purified of everything superfluous and enveloped in such a lyrical quality, that it seems to me to be a symbolic poem.
-Nemirovich-Danchenko, 1904

Chekhov is an incomparable artist, an artist of life. And the worth of his creations consists of this--he is understood and accepted not only by every Russian, but by all humanity.
-Leo Tolstoy on Chekhov.

To take these undone humanities and make them ring with reality and excite us through them with love of our fellows is possible only to a genius. He excels Dickens in fidelity to life, and compares with him in creative exaltation, sympathy with human suffering, and good-natured insight into the follies of human beings.
-Sydney Carroll, Morning Post, July 13, 1920

There is nothing in English literature in the least like The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov has shed over us a luminous vapor in which life appears as it is, transparent to the depths. We feel our way among submerged but recognizable emotions. I felt like a piano resonating after a masterful concerto.
-Virginia Woolf, New Statesman, July 24, 1920

The beauty and poignancy of an atmosphere, an idea, a person, a moment, are put before us without anything which we recognize as theatrical, but with the brightness of the highest art. The charm of the Russian gentry, even in decay, is somehow put upon the stage in such a way that their futility is never dreary, but moving, and their ineptitude is touched with the tragedy of all human failure.
-Edmund Wilson, Dial, March, 1923

Of all playwrights Chekhov approaches nearest to the Shakespearean insight into the mind of humanity. Like Shakespeare he is a master of the common touch. The least of his creatures share some thought, some habit, common to humanity.
-Time and Tide, October 21, 1933

The Cherry Orchard is the most profound of the hundreds of plays written about 'the mortgage'.
-John Chapman, Daily News, 1944

In the blackest moments it is inevitably doomed to the comic gesture. Chekhov achieves a very rare blend of sympathetic and judicial comedy. Chekhov criticizes his characters both in their relation to the material world and in their relation to each other.
-Dorothy Sayers, Goldstone, 1965

Only the impressionist technique could have provided his drama with that structural quality in which the microcosm of apparently haphazard detail could...suggest the macrocosm of the larger reality of life.
-Nicholas Moravcevich, Bristow, 1977

Only a great artist such as Chekhov could succeed in portraying the cosmic aspects of metaphysical questions which have been plaguing man for centuries. -Kirk, 1981

Without compromising the play's emotional scope or vivid sense of character, Schmidt has fashioned a Cherry Orchard that speaks clearly to a contemporary audience.
-Chris Vognar, review of A.C.T. production, 1997.

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