Chekhov was anxious to avoid the stage clichés of the kulak, the hardhearted, hard-fisted, loudmouthed merchant, in his portrayal of Lopakhin; after all, Lopakhin shares Chekhov’s own background as a man of peasant background who worked his way up in a closed society. He can be the tactless boor that Gaev insists he is, exulting over his purchase of the orchard and starting its decimation even before the family leaves. But, in the same breath, he is aware of his shortcomings, longs for a more poetic existence, and has, in the words of his antagonist Trofimov, “delicate, gentle fingers, like an artist . . . a delicate, gentle soul.” And for all his pragmatism, he too is comically inept when it comes to romance. His halfhearted wooing of Varya may result from a more deep-seated love of her foster mother.
Ironically, it is the impractical Ranevskaya who pricks Lopakhin’s dreams of giants and vast horizons and suggests that he examine his own gray life rather than build castles in the air. She may be an incorrigible romantic about the orchard and totally scatterbrained about money, but on matters of sex she is more clear-sighted than Lopakhin, Trofimov, or Gaev, who considers her “depraved.” Prudish as a young Komsomol, Trofimov is scandalized by her advice that he take a mistress; 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 Gaev and Ranevskaya to the orchard or the pragmatic and “socially responsible” attitude of Lopakhin and Trofimov. By 1900 there were many works about uprooted gentlefolk and estates confiscated by arrivistes. Pyotr Nevezhin’s Second Youth (1883), a popular melodrama dealing with the breakup of a nest of gentry, held the stage until 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 the Russian critic A. R. Kugel was right when he wrote, “All the inhabitants of The Cherry Orchard are children and their behavior is child-ish.”1 Certainly, Chekhov seems to have abandoned his usual repertory company: there is no doctor, no mooning intellectual complaining of a wasted life (Yepikhodov may be a parody of that), 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. Soliloquies have been replaced by monologues that are patently ridiculous (Gaev’s speeches to the bookcase and the sunset) or misdirected (Trofimov’s speech on progress). The absurdly named Simeonov-Pishchik, 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 cheap perfume, recalls Chichikov’s servant Petrushka in Dead Souls, who permeates the ambience with his eflluvium. Gogol, rather than Turgenev, is the presiding genius of this comedy.
All the characters are misfits, from Lopakhin, who dresses like a rich man but feels like a pig in a pastry shop, to Yasha and Dunyasha, servants who ape their betters, to the expelled student Trofimov, aimlessly hustled from place to place, to Yepikhodov, who puts simple ideas into inappropriate language, to Varya, who is an efficient manager but longs to be a pilgrim, to the most obvious example, the uprooted governess Charlotta, who has no notion who she is. Early on, we hear Lopakhin protest, “Got to remember who you are!” Jean-Louis Barrault, the French actor and director, suggested that the servants are satiric reflections of their master’s ideals:2 old Firs is the senile embodiment of the rosy past Gaev waxes lyrical over; Yasha, that pushing young particle, with his taste for Paris and champagne, is a parody of Lopa-khin’s upward mobility and Ranevskaya’s sophistication; Trofimov’s dreams of social betterment are mocked by Yepikhodov reading Buckle and beefing up his vocabulary.
If there is a norm here, it exists offstage, in town, at the bank, in the restaurant, in Mentone and Paris, where Ranevskaya’s lover entreats 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.” Besides 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 Varya; the famous Jewish orchestra; Gaev’s deceased parents and servants; the staff, eating beans 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 characters’ 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 Andreev. As Henri Bergson insisted,3 any living being who tries to stand still in the evolving flow of time becomes mechanical and thus comical in action. How do the characters take a position in the temporal flow—are they delayed, do they moved with it, do they try to outrun it? Those who refuse to join in (Gaev 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, the servants are uppity but no help to anyone, all the characters are expelled at the end, but their personal habits have undergone no reformation. Ranevskaya returns to her lover; Gaev, at his most doleful moment, pops another candy in 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 implies, 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 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 play first opened, the critic M. Nevedomsky remarked that the characters are “living persons, painted with the colors of vivid reality, and at the same time schemata of that reality, as it were its foregone conclusions.” 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 the mystical.”4