Reading Chekhov

I walked down the long corridor and eventually found a room where a fat, slatternly woman with long blond hair was sitting. The room was astonishing. It had been commandeered by grape ivy vines, which trailed and twined over the walls and ceiling, forming a kind of canopy and giving everything in the room a green tinge. The vines grew from two incongruously small plastic pots on a windowsill. The paucity of soil gave the plants a leggy and slightly deprived look, but in no way diminished their will to push on and cover the world with themselves. Earlier in the day, Nina and I had seen indoor plants living under the most luxurious conditions imaginable, in the conservatory of a palace built by a Prince Volkonsky-plants with glossy dark green leaves, set in large clay pots filled with dark, rich soil. But the leggy grape ivy tended by the slatternly woman belonged to the same universe of horticulture as the glossy plants tended by professional gardeners. "All Russia is a garden," begins Trofimov's great speech in The Cherry Orchard about his intimations of the happiness the future will bring to his country-a speech one doesn't quite know how to listen to in the light of the catastrophe that actually befell Russia.