He bows and pompously exits.
NOTES
1 Although the joke surname, from nyukhat, to take snuff, to sniffle, is retained, the absurd Christian name Markel is now changed to the common Ivan.
2 Latin: I have spoken and my soul is the easier for it!
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
“The next play I write will definitely be funny, very funny, at least in concept,” Chekhov declared to his wife, on March 7, 1901, after Three Sisters had opened. The concept, as the author sketched it to Stanislavsky, would incorporate a footman mad about fishing, a garrulous one-armed billiard player, and a situation in which a landowner is continually borrowing money from the footman. He also envisaged a branch of flowering cherry thrust through a window of the manor house.
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 after his father’s bankruptcy had been painful. The imminent loss of one’s residence looms over his early plays, 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, smoked, and couldn’t do without society, a sympathetic sort tailored to the Maly Theatre’s Olga Sadovskaya, who specialized in biddies and beldams. When the Maly Theatre refused to release her, Chekhov reshaped the role until it was suitable for someone of Olga Knip-per’s age. Only then did he conceive of Lopakhin. Varya first appeared as a grotesquely comic name, Varvara Nedotyopina (Varvara Left-in-the-Lurch): nedotyopa eventually became the catchphrase of old Firs.
As Chekhov’s letters reveal, he stressed the play’s comic nature, and was put out when the Moscow Art Theatre saw it as a tearful tragedy. Even if some of Chekhov’s complaints can be dismissed as a side effect of his physical deterioration, there is no doubt that the Art Theatre misplaced many of his intended emphases. He seems to have meant the major role to be the peasant-turned-millionaire Lopakhin, played by Stanislavsky. However, Stanislavsky, a millionaire of peasant origins, preferred the part of the feckless aristocrat Gaev, and handed Lopakhin over to Leonid Leonidov, a less experienced actor. Olga Knipper, whom the author saw in the grotesque role of the German governess, was cast as the elegant Ranevskaya. Immediately the central focus shifted to the genteel family of landowners, because the strongest actors were in those parts. Later on, fugitives from the Revolution identified so closely with Ranevskaya and Gaev that they disseminated a nostalgic view of the gentry’s plight throughout the West. Soviet productions then went to the opposite extreme, reinterpreting Lopakhin as a man of the people capable of building a progressive society, and the student Trofimov as an eloquent harbinger of that brave new world.
Choosing sides immediately reduces the play’s complexity and ambiguity. Chekhov had no axe to grind, not even the one that chops down the orchard. Neither Lopakhin nor Trofimov is invested with greater validity than Ranevskaya or Gaev. Trofimov is constantly undercut by comic devices: after a melodramatic exit line, “All is over between us,” he falls downstairs, and, despite his claim to be in the vanguard of progress, is too absent-minded to locate his own galoshes. Even his earnest speech about the idle upper classes and the benighted workers is addressed to the wrong audience: how can Ranevskaya possibly identify with the Asiatic bestiality that Trofimov indicts as a Russian characteristic? Only in the hearing of infatuated Anya do Tro-fimov’s words seem prophetic; at other times, his inability to realize his situation renders them absurd.