Anton Chekhov

Ironically, it is the impractical Ranevskaya who pricks Lopakhin's dreams of giants and vast horizons and suggests that he examine his own grey life rather than build castles in the air. She may be an incorrigible romantic about the orchard and totally scatter-brained about money, but on matters of sex she is more clear-sighted than Lopakhin,

Trofimov, or Gayev who brands her as 'depraved.' Prudish as a young Komsomol, Trofimov is as scandalised by her advice that he take a mistress, as he had been annoyed that Varya should distrust his moments alone with Anya.

In short, any attempt to grade Chekhov's characters as 'right-thinking' or 'wrong-headed' ignores the multi- faceted nature of their portrayal. It would be a mistake to adopt wholeheartedly either the sentimental attitude of Gayev and Ranevskaya to the orchard or the pragmatic and 'socially responsible' attitude of Lopakhin and Trofimov. By 1900 there was any number of works about uprooted gentlefolk and estates confiscated by arrivistes, including several plays by Ostrovsky. Pyotr Nevezhin's Second Youth (1883), a popular melodrama dealing with the breakup of an aristocratic clan, held the stage till the Revolution, and Chekhov had seen it. That same year Nikolay Solovyov's Liquidation appeared, in which an estate is saved by a rich peasant marrying the daughter of the family. Chekhov would not have been raking over these burnt-out themes, if he did not have a fresh angle on them. The Cherry Orchard is the play in which Chekhov most successfully achieved a 'new form', the amalgam of a symbolist outlook with the appurtenances of social comedy.

Perhaps A. R. Kugel was on the right track when he wrote, 'All the inhabitants of The Cherry Orchard are children and their behaviour is childish'.² Certainly, Chekhov seems here to have abandoned his usual reper­tory company: there is no doctor, no mooning intelligent complaining of a wasted life (Yepikhodov the autodidact may be a parody of the superfluous man), no love triangles (except the comic one of Yepikhodov-Dunyasha-Yasha). The only pistol is wielded by the hapless dolt Yepikhodov, and Nina's mysterious enveloping 'talma' in The Seagull has dwindled into Dunyasha's talmochka, a fancy term for a shawl, which she sends him on a fool's errand to fetch. Soliloquies have been replaced by monologues which are patently ridiculous (Gayev's speeches to the bookcase and the sunset) or misdirected (Trofimov's speech on pro­gress). Simeonov-Pishchik, with his absurd name (some­thing like 'Fitzwarren-Tweet'), his 'dear daughter Dashenka,' and his rapid mood shifts would be out of place in Three Sisters. The upstart valet Yasha, who smells of chicken-coops and patchouli, recalls Chichikov's servant Petrushka in Dead Souls who permeates the ambience with his effluvium. Gogol, rather than Turgenev, is the presiding genius of this comedy.

The standard theme of New or Roman comedy, the source of modern domestic drama, is that of the social misfit - miser or crank or misanthrope - creating a series of problems for young lovers. Confounded by a crafty servant who, under the aegis of comedy's holiday spirit, oversteps his rank, the misfit is either reintegrated into society or expelled from it. The result is an affirmation of society's ideals and conventions. By the late eighteenth century, this formula was beginning to break down: in Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro, the clever servant finds his master's aims too much in conflict with his own. The dissolution of the social fabric is prefigured by the growing tensions within the comic framework.

The Cherry Orchard carries forward this dissolution. All the characters are misfits, from Lopakhin who dresses like a rich man but feels iike a pig in a pastry shop,' to Yasha and Dunyasha, servants who ape their betters, to the expelled student Trofimov ('Fate simply hustles me from place to place') to Yepikhodov who puts simple ideas into inappropriate language, to Varya who is a perfect manager but longs to be a pilgrim, to the most obvious example, the governess Charlotta, who has no notion who she is. Early on, we hear Lopakhin protest, 'Have to know your place!' Jean-Louis Barrault, the French actor and director, has suggested that the servants are satiric reflections of their master's ideals: old Firs is in the senescent flesh the roseate past that Gayev waxes lyrical over; Yasha, that pushing young particle, with his taste for Paris and champagne, is a parody of Lopakhin's upward mobility; Trofimov's dreams of social betterment and reading-rooms for workers are mocked by Yepkihodov reading Buckle and beefing up his vocabulary.³