Anton Chekhov

Grisha, the dead nanny and the dim Anastasy recollected by Gayev. 'I'm so glad you're still alive,' Ranevskaya says to Firs. But these obituaries are tossed off, not taken to heart; even Ranevskaya's aggrieved recollection of her dead past is cut off by the merry music of the Jewish orchestra. Finally, Charlotta mocks the pervasive sterility by nursing a baby made out of an empty parcel. The most touching eulogy is pronounced by the clownish Pishchik over himself.

The consummate mastery of The Cherry Orchard is revealed in an authorial shorthand that is both impression­istic and theatrical. The pull on Ranevskaya to return to Paris takes shape in the telegram prop: in Act One, she tears up the telegrams; by Act Three, she has preserved them in her handbag; in Act Four, the lodestones draw her back. The dialogue is similarly telegraphic, as in Anya's short speech relating how she found her mother in Paris: 'Mama was living on a fifth floor, I go upstairs, with her there are some French people, ladies, some old Catholic priest with a little book, and it's smoky, tawdry'. In a few strokes, a past is encapsulised: a high storey, bespeaking Ranevskaya's reduced circumstances, her toying with religious conversion, the louche atmosphere full of cigarette smoke.

Each character is distinguished by an appropriate speech pattern. Lyubov Ranevskaya (whose first name means 'love') constantly employs diminutives and terms of endearment; for her everyone is golubchik, 'dovie'. She is also vague, using adjectives like 'some kind of (ikakoy-to), suggestive of her passive nature. Gayev is a parody of the after-dinner speaker: emotion can be voiced only in a fulsome oration, thick with platitude. When his flow is staunched, he falls back on billiard terms or, like a Freudian baby arrested at the oral stage, stops his mouth with caramels, anchovies and Kerch herrings. An untoward situation prompts him to say not 'What?' (Chto?) but the more effete 'How's that?' (Chego?)

Pishchik, always waiting, like Micawber, for something to turn up, has high blood pressure; so Chekhov the doctor makes sure he speaks in short, breathless phrases, a hodgepodge of old-world courtesy, hunting terms, and newspaper talk. Lopakhin's language is more varied, according to his addressee; blunt and colloquial with servants, more respectful with his former betters. As a businessman, his language is concise and well-structured, except when dealing with Vorya, when he lapses into a bleat: 'Me-e-eh.' He cites exact numbers and uses a com­mercial vocabulary, and frequently consults his watch.

Trofimov, like Gayev, is fond of rhetoric, but his is a melange of literary and political war-cries. The stirring phrase about a 'shining star, glowing there in the distance! Forward! No dropping behind, friends' is patched together from Pushkin, Pleshcheyev and the Decembrists. He waxes most poetical with Anya, whom Chekhov has speak in iambs. Yepikhodov invents a style all his own, dropping formal locutions into colloquial discourse.

Firs' speech is pithy and demotic: his laconic remarks always bring a situation back to earth. His particular tag, Ekh_y ty nedotyopa long bemused commentators. Some thought nedotyopa to be an obscure peasant word collected by Chekhov in the country; others believed he made it up. Translators have rendered it as everything from 'lummox' 'duffer' 'joblot' and 'good-for-nothing' to 'silly young cuckoo'. Literally, it means something in the process of being chopped by an axe, but left unfinished: perhaps 'half-baked' comes closest in English.

Memorably, 'Ah, you're half-baked' is the last line in the play. Its regular repetition suggests that Chekhov meant it to sum up all the characters. Like the chopping left undone, they are inchoate, some, like Anya and Trofimov, in the process of taking shape, others, like Gayev and Yepikhodov, never to take shape. The whole play has been held in a similar state of contingency until the final moments, when real chopping begins in the orchard and, typically, it is heard from offstage, mingled with the more cryptic and reverberant sound of the snapped string.

9

The Theatrical Filter

All one needs is your name on the poster - and there's a full house, and the actors pull themselves together: they treat each of your phrases, every word, with real reverence and don't allow them­selves a single omission. The provincial director I. A. Rostov tsev to Chekhov, 1900