Chekhov’s 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.5 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 favorite scenarios of waiting are especially 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.
However, the symbolism goes hand-in-glove with carefully observed reality: they coexist. Hence the uneasiness caused by what seem to be humdrum characters or situations. Act Two, with its open-air setting, demonstrates this concurrence of reality and super-reality. Chekhov’s people are seldom at ease in the open. The more egotistic they are, like Arkadina and Serebryakov, the sooner they head for the safe haven of the house or, like Natasha, renovate nature to suit their taste. The last act of Three Sisters strands its protagonists in an uncongenial vacancy, with yoo-hoos echoing across the expanse.
By removing the characters in The Cherry Orchard from the memory-laden atmosphere of the nursery (where children should feel at home), Chekhov strips them of their habitual defenses. In Act Two the characters meet on a road, one of those indeterminate locations, halfway between the railway station and the house but, symbolically, halfway between past and future, birth and death, being and nothingness. Something here impels them to deliver their innermost thoughts in monologues: Charlotta complains of her lack of identity, Yepikhodov declares his suicidal urges, Ranevskaya describes her “sinful” past, Gaev addresses the sunset, Trofimov speechifies about what’s wrong with society, Lopakhin paints his hopes for Russia. As if hypnotized by the sound of their voices reverberating in the wilderness, they deliver up quintessences of themselves.
At this point comes the portentous moment of the snapped string. The moment is framed by those pauses that evoke the gaps in existence that Andrey Bely claimed were horrifying and that Beckett was to characterize as the transitional zone in which being made itself heard. Chekhov’s characters again recall Maeterlinck’s, faintly trying to surmise the nature of the potent force that hovers just outside the picture. The thought-filled pause, then the uncanny sound and the ensuing pause conjure up what lies beyond.
Even then, however, Chekhov does not forgo a realistic prextext for the inexplicable. Shortly before the moment, Yepikhodov crosses upstage, strumming his guitar. Might not the snapped spring be one broken by the clumsy bookkeeper? At the play’s end, before we hear the sound plangently dying away, we are told by Lopakhin that he has left Yepikhodov on the grounds as a caretaker. Chekhov always overlays any symbolic inference with a patina of irreproachable reality.
The party scene in Act Three is the supreme example of Chekhov’s intermingling of subliminal symbol and surface reality. Bely saw it as a “crystallization of Chekhov’s devices.” It so struck the imagination of the young director Meyerhold that he wrote to Chekhov, on May 8, 1904, that “the play is abstract like a symphony by Chaikovsky . . . in [the party scene] there is something Maeterlinckian, terrifying.” He later referred to “this nightmarish dance of puppets in a farce” in “Chekhov’s new mystical drama.”6
The act takes place in three dimensions: the forestage, with its brief interchanges by individual characters, the forced gaiety of the dancing in the background, and the offstage auction whose outcome looms over it all. Without leaving the sphere of the mundane, we have what Novalis called “a sequence of ideal events running parallel to reality.” Characters are thrust out from the indistinct background and then return to it. Scantily identified, the postal clerk and the stationmaster surge forward, unaware of the main characters’ inner lives, and make unwitting ironic comment. The stationmaster recites Aleksey Tolstoy’s orotund poem, “The Sinful Woman,” about a courtesan’s conversion by Christ at a lavish orgy in Judaea. The opening lines, describing a sumptuous banquet, cast a sardonic reflection on the frumps gathered on this dismal occasion. They also show the earlier interview between the puritanical Trofimov and the self-confessed sinner Ranevskaya to be a parodic confrontation between a Messiah in eyeglasses and a Magdalene in a Parisian ballgown. The act culminates in the moving juxtaposition of Ranevskaya’s weeping and Lopakhin’s laughter, as the unseen musicians play loudly at his behest.
The return to the nursery, now stripped of its evocative trappings, in Act Four, confirms the inexorable expulsion. In Act One, it has been a room to linger in; now it is a cheerless space in which characters loiter only momentarily on their way to somewhere else. The old Russian tradition of sitting for a moment before taking leave becomes especially meaningful when there are no chairs, only trunks and bundles to perch on. The ghosts that Gaev and Ranevskaya had seen in the orchard in the first act have now moved indoors, in the person of Firs, who is doomed to haunt the scene of the past, since he has no future.
The consummate mastery of The Cherry Orchard is revealed in an authorial shorthand that is both impressionistic and theatrical. The pull on Ranev-skaya 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 about her mother’s flat in Paris. “Mama is living on the sixth floor, I walk all the way up, there are some French people there, ladies, an old Catholic priest with a pamphlet, and it’s full of cigarette smoke, not nice at all.” In a few strokes, a past is encapsulated: a high walk-up, signifying Ranevskaya’s reduced circumstances, her toying with religious conversion, a louche atmosphere.
Each character is distinguished by an appropriate speech pattern. Ranev-skaya constantly employs diminutives and terms of endearment; for her everyone is golubchik, “dovey.” She is also vague, using adjectives like “some kind of” (kakoy-to). Gaev is a parody of the after-dinner speaker: emotion can be voiced only in fulsome oration, thick with platitudes. When his flow is stanched, he falls back on billiard terms or stops his mouth with candy and anchovies. Pishchik 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 interlocutor: blunt and colloquial with servants, more respectful with his former betters. As suits a businessman, he speaks concisely and in well-structured sentences, citing exact numbers and a commercial vocabulary, with frequent glances at his watch. Only in dealing with Varya does he resort to ponderous facetiousness and even bleating.
Memorably, Firs’s “half-baked bungler” is the last line in the play. Its periodic repetition suggests that Chekhov meant it to sum up all the characters. They are all inchoate, some, like Anya and Trofimov, in the process of taking shape, others, like Gaev 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.