Anton Chekhov

If there is a norm here, it exists off-stage, in town, at the bank, in the restaurant full of soap-smelling waiters, in Mentone and Paris where Ranevskaya's lover pleads for her return, or in Yaroslavl where Great-aunt frowns on the family's conduct. Chekhov peoples this unseen world with what Vladimir Nabokov might call 'homunculi.' In addition to the lover and Auntie, there are Ranevskaya's alcoholic husband and drowned son, Pishchik's daughter and the Englishmen who find clay on his land, rich Deriganov who might buy the estate, the Ragulins who hire Vary a, the famous Jewish orchestra, Gayev's deceased parents and servants, the staff eating peas in the kitchen, and a host of others to indicate that the cherry orchard is a desert island in a teeming sea of life. Chekhov had used the device in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, where Vanya's dead sister, the prepotent Protopopov, Mrs Colonel Vershinin, and Kulygin's headmaster shape the character's fates but are never seen. In The Cherry Orchard, the plethora of invisible beings fortifies the sense of the estate's vulnerabil­ity, transience, and isolation.

Barrault also pointed out that 'the action' of the play is measured by the outside pressures on the estate. In Act One, the cherry orchard is in danger of being sold, in Act Two it is on the verge of being sold, in Act Three it is sold, and in Act Four it has been sold. The characters are defined by their responses to these 'events', which, because they are spoken of, intuited, feared, longed-for but never seen, automatically make the sale equivalent to Fate or Death in a play of Maeterlinck or Andreyev. As Henri Bergson insisted,⁴ anything living that tries to stand still in fluid, evolving time becomes mechanical and thus comic. How do the characters take position in the temporal flow - are they retarded, do they move with it, do they try to outrun it? Those who refuse to join in (Gayev and Firs) or who rush to get ahead of it (Trofimov) can end up looking ridiculous.

Viewed as traditional comedy, The Cherry Orchard thwarts our expectations: the lovers are not threatened except by their own impotence (Lopakhin, Trofimov), the servants are uppish but no help to anyone (Yasha, Dunyasha), all the characters are expelled at the end, but their personal habits have undergone no reformation. Ranevskaya returns to her lover; Gayev, at his most doleful moment, pops another caramel into his mouth; Lopakhin and Trofimov are back on the road, one on business, the other on a mission. Even the abandonment of Firs hints that he cannot exist off the estate, but is, as Ranevskaya's greeting to him implied, a piece of furniture like 'my dear little table.' This resilience in the face of change, with the future yet to be revealed, is closest to the symbolist sense of human beings trapped in the involuntary processes of time, their own mortality insignificant within the broader cur­rent. A Bergsonian awareness that reality stands outside time, dwarfing the characters' mundane concerns, imbues Chekhov's comedy with its bemused objectivity.

It also bestows on The Cherry Orchard its oddly free- floating nature, the sense of persons suspended for the nonce. The present barely exists, elbowed aside by memory and nostalgia, on the one hand, and by expectation and hope on the other. When The Cherry Orchard first opened, the critic Nevedomsky remarked that the characters are simultaneously 'living persons, painted with the colours of vivid reality, and at the same schemata of that reality, as it were its foregone conclusions.'⁵ Or as Kugel put it more succinctly, 'the inhabitants of The Cherry Orchard live, as if half asleep, spectrally, on the border-line of the real and mystical'.⁶

Chekhov's close friend, the writer Ivan Bunin, pointed out that there were no such cherry orchards to be found in Russia, that Chekhov was inventing an imaginary land­scape.⁷ The estate is a wasteland in which the characters drift among the trivia of their lives while expecting something dire or important to occur. As in Maeterlinck, the play opens with two persons waiting in a dimly-lit space, and closes with the imminent demise of a character abandoned in emptiness. Chekhov's favourite scenarios of waiting are specially attenuated here, since the suspense of 'What will happen to the orchard?' dominates the first three acts, and in the last act, the wait for carriages to arrive and effect the diaspora frames the conclusion.

But the symbolism goes hand-in-glove with carefully observed reality: they co-exist. According to the poet Andrey Bely, the instances of reality are scrutinised so closely in this play that one falls through them into a concurrent stream of 'eternity.' Hence the uneasiness caused by what seem to be humdrum characters or situations: