Anton Chekhov

The final tableau, with the sisters clinging to one another and intoning, Tf only we knew, if only we knew,' has been played optimistically, as if the dawn of a bright tomorrow did lie just beyond the horizon. But the time to come that Olga evokes has lost the rosy tinge of Vershinin's and Tusenbach's improvisations. Like Sonya's aria in Uncle Vanya, it predicts a void, that must be filled. The disillu­sionment of the four hours' traffic on the stage and the four years' passage of time has aged the sisters, but not enlightened them. They still, in William Blake's words, 'nurse unacted desires,' still are not on speaking terms with their lives. Directors who want an upbeat ending eliminate Doctor Chebutykin from this moment, but Chekhov placed him there to prevent this final descant from being taken at face value. The music-hall chorus he sings had Russian lyrics (which would be known to everyone in the original audience), 'I'm sitting on a curb-stone / Bitterly crying/'Cause I don't know much'. The implied mockery shows Olga's 'If we only knew, if we only knew' to be an absurd wish. It is a laconic equivalent of the final chorus in Oedipus the King: 'Count no man fortunate till he is dead'. Sophocles warned human beings not to assume they know their place in the divine scheme of things. Chekhov's antiphonal chorus of Olga and Chebutykin hymns the impossibility of such awareness, and the need to soldier on, despite that disability.

8

'The Cherry Orchard'

Symbolism is the inadvertant rainbow on the waterfall of reality. Andrey Bely, 'Theatre & Modern Drama' (1908)

'The next play I write will definitely be funny, very funny, at least in concept,' Chekhov stated to his wife (7 Mar 1901), once Three Sisters had opened. This concept, as the author sketched it to Stanislavsky, would incorporate a footman mad about fishing (a part written for Artyom, the original Chebutykin), a garrulous, one-armed billiard player (to be enacted by Vishnevsky), and a situation in which the landowner is continually borrowing money from the foot­man. He also envisaged a branch of flowering cherry thrust through a window of the manor house.

Actually, Chekhov's notebooks reveal that The Cherry Orchard had taken root even earlier, with the governess Charlotta, another farcical type, and the idea that 'the estate will soon go under the hammer' the next ramifica­tion. The theme had a personal application. For the boy Chekhov, the sale of his home had been desolating. This imminent loss of one's residence looms over Without Patrimony, becomes the (literal) trigger of Uncle Vanya, and gives an underlying dynamic to Three Sisters.

The endangered estate, in Chekhov's early plans, was to belong to a liberal-minded old lady who dressed like a girl (shades of Arkadina), smoked and couldn't do without society, a sympathetic sort tailored to the Maly Theatre's Olga Sadovskaya, who specialised in Ostrovskyan hags. When the Maly Theatre refused to release her, Chekhov rejuvenated the role until it was suitable for someone of Olga Knipper's age. Only then did he conceive of Lopakhin. Vary a first appeared as a grotesquely comic name Varvara Nedotyopina (Barbara Left-in-the-Lurch): nedotyopa eventually became the catchphrase of old Firs.¹

As it eventually took shape, The Cherry Orchard opens with a return and ends with a departure. Lyubov Ranev- skaya's homecoming from Paris brings together on the family estate a cluster of characters attached to her by family or sentimental ties: her brother Gayev, her foster- daughter Vary a, her daughter Any a, Trofimov the tutor to her dead son, various servants and hangers-on. Chief among them is Lopakhin, a former serf turned millionaire, who hopes to save the bankrupt estate by convincing its highborn owners to convert it into building lots for summer cottages. Gayev, however, is repelled by the vulgarity of the idea, and Ranevskaya refuses to accept the imminence of the estate's loss. On the very day of the auction-sale, she throws a party, which is interrupted by Lopakhin's trium­phant announcement that the estate was knocked down to him. With the breakup of the old homestead, the characters scatter to different fates: Ranevskaya goes back to Paris, Gayev drifts into a bank job, Anya and Trofimov join their lives to work for the future good of mankind. In a final attempt to propose marriage to Vary a, Lopakhin evades the issue, condemning her to be a spinster housekeeper. After they have all disappeared, only Firs, the superannu­ated retainer, is left to haunt the premises, a forgotten remnant of the past, as the first blows of the axe are heard in the orchard.