February 18, 1999
Notes on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
An audience, of course, will find [in The Cherry Orchard] what it will, depending upon how it approaches the theatre experience. If, like recent Soviet audiences, it wants rousing polemics from Trofimov, it can hear them. If, like many Western audiences, it wishes to weep for Mme Ranevsky and her fate, it can be partly accommodated. It is possible to see Lyubov and Gaev as shallow people who deserve to lose their orchard, or as victims of social and economic forces beyond their control. It is possible to find Anya and Trofimov far-sighted enough to want to leave the dying orchard, or ignorant of what they are forsaking. But if production allows either the heroics of prophecy or the melodrama of dispossession, then all of Chekhov’s care for balance is set at nought and the fabric of his play torn apart. Chekhov himself must have known that he was taking this risk, and that it is for us to ask why. (Styan 246)
Chekhov’s dramatic characters are quite ordinary people, leading unremarkable lives, and that from a psychological point of view, they are neither particularly complex nor unusual. . . . Chekhov reveals enough about his characters to enable us to understand their situation, and to fell with them in the crises which they pass through; but the characters do not analyze themselves, nor do we learn very much about the influences that have shaped their lives. (Pitcher 73)
The essential difference in characterization [from Chekhov’s earlier plays], I believe, is this: that in the later play[s] Chekhov is not so concerned with what kind of people his characters are, but is focusing his attention directly on their emotional preoccupations. . . . What the characters are feeling has become the focus of attention. . . . Chekhov presents his characters in terms of what they feel about themselves and other people, about their situation in life and about life in general. . . . What Chekhov’s characters do is important only in so far as their actions . . . illustrate these emotional preoccupations, and in particular, as the expression of some inner emotional crisis. (Pitcher 77-78)
[Chekhov recognized and portrayed on stage that] there is nothing of which we are more urgently, though less expressly conscious than the presence of other life humming about us, than the fact of our experiences and our impulses are very little private to ourselves, almost always shared with a group of people. (Calderon 8-9)
An audience is prompted by the Chekhov play to explore what it feels in general about life and the world we live in; and to explore in many and varying directions, for the emotional implications of the Chekhov play are very open-ended. (Pitcher 81)
The cherry orchard is a particular place and yet it is more. It represents and inextricable tangle of sentiments, which together comprise a way of life and an attitude to life. By the persistent feelings shown towards it, at one extreme by old Firs, the house-serf for whom the family is his whole existence, and at the other by Trofimov, the intellectual for whom it is the image of repression and slavery; by Lopahin, the businessman and spokesman for hard economic facts, the one who thinks of it primarily as a means to wiser investment, and by Mme Ranevsky, who sees in it her childhood happiness and her former innocence, who sees it as the embodiment of her best values — by these and many other contradictions, an audience finds that the orchard grows from a painted backcloth to an ambiguous, living, poetic symbol of human life, any human life, in a state of change. (Styan 241)
[In The Cherry Orchard,] the artificiality of conventional dramaturgical design, whose effect is to seal-off stage life as hermetic, in a mode of the exemplary or inimitable, has been replaced by an openwork structure which resists climax, definition, or resolution, rejecting the dragooned shapeliness of a narrative frame for the display of heightened emotions, important truths. The truth distilled in [The Cherry Orchard], modest, lowly, oblique, is rooted in recognizable rhythms of our lives, with nothing set off by obvious “construction,” nothing inflated beyond its familiar size, yet with everything transfigured by an imagination whose chief instrumentality is its penetration into the strangeness of the familiar. (Gilman 198)
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