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Home , Anton Chekhov, Ivanov (play), The Cherry Orchard

A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

The Cherry Orchard The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any ) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. Insights is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2011, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print Insights, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover photo: Henson Keys as Firs in , 2000. Contents

Information on the Play Synopsis 4 TheCharacters Cherry Orchard5 About the Playwright 6

Scholarly Articles on the Play The Glory of the Past 7 The Language of 9

Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: The Cherry Orchard Early one May morning, after a long absence (during which she lived in Paris), the widow Madame Ranevsky returns to her family estate to find that it has been heavily mortgaged to pay for her extravagances and that it is to be auctioned off. With her arrives her daughter, Anya, and Anya’s German governess, Charlotte. They are greeted by Varya, Ranevsky’s adopted daughter who manages the remnants of the once-grand estate; Gayev, Ranevsky’s brother; Lopakhin, a former peasant who has become a wealthy merchant and neighbor; members of the staff; and other neighbors and friends. Amidst her recollections of her girlhood nursery, Madame Ranevsky is reminded that the estate will be sold to clear debts in August, unless the family can raise sufficient funds. Generous and distracted, she seems incapable of recognizing and acting on her desperate situation. Lopakhin offers to lend Ranevsky 50,000 rubles to cover the debts and save the estate--if she will permit the land to be divided into lots for summer tourist homes. This, however, involves cutting down the estate’s famous cherry orchard, which Ranevsky loves dearly; and the plan is rejected as sacrilege. Several other ideas to save the estate also arise: Gayev will try to secure a loan, or perhaps Anya will visit her wealthy great-aunt, a countess in distant Yaroslavl, and be richly married. Nothing is resolved. Later in the summer, courtship seems to preclude business. The new servant, Yasha, competes with the estate clerk Yepikhodov for the attentions of Dunyasha the maid; Varya tries to prevent a union between her sister, Anya, and the perpetual student Trofimov (former tutor to Ranevsky’s infant son, who drowned at age six), and everybody assumes that Varya will marry Lopakhin, though there has been no proposal. In the midst of this, Lopakhin tries vainly to get the family to be more practical, but Ranevsky confesses that she squandered her fortune on her unfaithful lover in Paris and is probably not capable of practical dealing with the immediate problem. Firs, an aged servant, longs for “the good old days” before the serfs were emancipated, but Trofimov dreams of progress. He is glad the estate will be sold, for to him every leaf in the cherry orchard tells of a serf ’s complaints and sufferings. August arrives, and the estate must be auctioned to meet the mortgage payments. Gayev attends the sale, hopeful that the great-aunt’s money will be enough to satisfy the creditors. At the mansion a farewell party is underway even though there are no funds for the orchestra. The household members and quarrel until Lopakhin returns with Gayev from the auction to announce that he has bought the estate where his father and other family members once was serfs, and he intends to carry out his plan for cutting down the orchard. Seeing Ranevsky’s sorrow, Lopakhin remorsefully wishes that “this miserable disjointed life could somehow be changed.” Anya comforts her mother, promising that together they will build a new, happy life. In the fall with the estate and orchard now gone, Ranevsky readies for her departure to Paris, where she will live on the money from the great-aunt. Anya will accompany her and attend school. Gayev has a job as a bank clerk; Trofimov, as a translator. Lopakhin has failed to propose to Varya, so she will become a house- keeper for others. However, Lopakhin does hire Yepikhodov to work for him and promises to find a new position for Charlotte. Ranevsky is worried about the old and ailing Firs, but is told that he is in the hos- pital. Once the family and their entourage depart, however, Firs finds himself alone, locked in the deserted house. Axe strokes resound outside, as the woodsmen begin at last to cut down the beloved cherry orchard.

4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: The Cherry Orchard LYUBA RANEVSKY: A wealthy landowner, Ranevskaya is returning to her beloved estate and cher- ry orchard after an extended stay abroad. (Pronounced LYOO-bah Rah-NYEFF-sky.) ANYA: Ranevskaya’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Anya is returning with her mother to her home. (Pronounced AH-nyah.) VARYA: Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter, Varya is twenty-four years old and has remained taking care of the estate. (Pronounced VAH-ryah.) LEONID GAYEV: Ranevskaya’s brother. (Pronounced Lay-oh-NEED GAH-yeff.) YERMOLAY LOPAKIN: A recently wealthy merchant, whose father was once a serf on the Ranevskaya estate. (Pronounced Yehr-moh-LIE Loh-PAH-kheen.) PETER TROFIMOV: A student, Trofimov is in love with Anya and was once the tutor of Ranevskaya’s son who died when he was young. (Pronounced Troh-FEE-moff.) BORIS SIMEONOV-PISHCHIK: A landowner. (Pronounced Sim-YAW-noff Pee-shchik.) CHARLOTTE: A governess. (Pronounced Ee-VAH-noff-nah.) SIMON YEPIKHODOV: A clerk, Yepikhodov is in love with Dunyasha. (Pronounced Yeh-pee- KHAW-doff.) DUNYASHA: A maid. (Pronounced Doon-YAH-shah.) FIRS: An old servant, aged 87. (Pronounced FEERS.) YASHA: A young servant, also in love with Dunyasha. (Pronounced YAH-shah.) A PASSER-BY A STATIONMASTER A POST OFFICE CLERK

Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: By Heidi N. Madsen From Insights, 2000 Anton Chekhov was neither a liberal nor a conservative, feminist nor monk--nor was he entirely indifferent. He dealt with cold , in the irony of unfulfillment, and, like Hemingway, he disapproved of adjectives. He detested arbitrariness, though he believed without bias that it equitably and universally existed. In the merchant’s house, at the police station, in lit- erature, in science and among the young it existed. Chekhov did not look the part of an author or a playwright; his physical appearance most stereotypically resembled his alternate profession as a doctor. Medicine was his “lawful wife,” and writing was his “mistress,” and for this reason, to read Chekhov’s writing we must don the white clinician’s jacket and the gloves and look at the human plight more scientifically. We must not allow ourselves to view the autopsic style of Anton Chekhov with too much morbidity. His heroes, perhaps as did his patients, speak, love, marry, give birth, and die. Physicians, as Chekhov was, must seek to be non-judgmental, even detached, and observe only with clinical precision. The surgeon’s table is sterile, his tools cold and hopefully lacking in pretentiousness; and, omit- ting political, religious, and philosophical views, Chekhov wrote with the same medical ministra- tions. His wife, actress , wrote to him in 1901: “My heart aches when I think of the quiet sadness that seems to be so deeply entrenched in your heart.” To which Chekhov replied: “But darling, that is utter nonsense!” (Rene and Nonna D. Wellek, editors, Chekhov: New Perspectives. [New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1984], 33). Anton Chekhov was born in the Azov seaport of . In 1884 he published twenty, of an eventual two hundred, pieces in his first book, Tales of Melpomene; published his only novel, A Shooting Party, and graduated medical school. The Kreutzer Sonata by was Chekhov’s favorite book, but he was only partly influenced by his Russian contemporaries and did not mimic their styles. Some disapproved, including Tolstoy, but Chekhov was a transitional --the bridge between classical and contemporary literature. He also must be given credit for his particular revolution of theatre itself. Instead of the actor being given full reign on stage, his plays were designed to subjugate the actor directly to the text. Words, the words on the script, were responsible for mood and for staging, and it was not how or what the characters said that was most important, but more why they said it. No longer was the dramatist entirely at liberty to interpret. Donna Rayfield suggested that one of his motives in doing this was to antagonize actors as well as audience members (The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1994], 7). However, as stated earlier, Chekhov was not a radical; he did not try to force opinions upon others. In fact, his resolve to leave his stories and plays in a way unresolved, reveals him as unas- suming, noncommittal, and almost undecided in most kinds of politics. A good example of this was pointed out by Professor Nilsson, that stage directions may sometimes consist of opposing parts: “cheerfully, through tears” (Welleck, 95). We do know that Chekhov did not believe life to be a series of resolutions; happy endings in his opinion were almost nonexistent. His most successful plays were , , , and The Cherry Orchard. These owe their initial success to director Konstantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Art Theatre and the father of “,” a technique which influenced actors like and James Dean. In fact, prior to Stanislavsky’s directions, the plays were disastrously received.

6 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Anton Chekhov was a writer who refused to pretend. In his stories “men are always being caught buttoning their trousers and women pulling up their stockings” (Frank O’Conner. New York Times Book Review, “A Writer Who Refused to Pretend,” 17 Jan. 1960). Perhaps it was just part of his numer- ous, intended. and ultimately successful ironical effects.

The Glory of the Past By S. S. Moorty From Insights, 2000 “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” — “Idylls of the King: the Passing of Arthur,” Lord Alfred Tennyson Composing his last play while ill, Anton Chekhov insisted that The Cherry Orchard was a com- edy; Stanislavsky, who directed the first production and played the part of Leonid Gaev, brother of Lyubov Ranevsky, told the celebrated playwright that “it is definitely not a comedy . . . but a .” At any rate, the play is not a comedy like The Sunshine , nor is it a tragedy like ’s Death of a Salesman or Shakespeare’s King Lear. Had Chekhov magically had a sophisticated critical literary terminology at his fingertips, perhaps he would have cheerfully employed the expression “problem play” or “dark comedy” terms used to describe Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. To a cer- tain extent Chekhov would have relented to labeling The Cherry Orchard a “tragicomedy.” However, viewers and readers of the play would still tend to endorse Chekhov’s original view about his play. The loss of a family’s homestead and the resulting eviction of an aristocratic family may be con- sidered the theme of the play. The central female character in the play is a woman, Madame Ranevsky, who lost her husband and her seven-year old son, , six years prior to the action of the play and who lives entirely in the past by sentimentally and nostalgically clinging to the cherry orchard. Her brother, Gayev, too, is passionately attached to the orchard because it has the aura of prestige and is immortalized by having been mentioned in the encyclopedia. And the eighty-seven-year-old senile servant, Firs, who tenaciously served the aristocratic family, cannot reconcile to the new beginning, a new society that is already on the horizon. Actually the play concludes with an empty stage and Firs muttering: “They’ve fogotten about me. . . . Life’s gone by, it’s as if I’ve never lived” (Translated by Stephen Mulrine [: ], 88 89). He is the one who “makes the cherry orchard an inviolable aesthetic symbol of the traditional order” (Irina Kirk, Anton Chekhov [Boston: Twayne Publishers], 151). [Editor’s Note: However, in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s production (among others) of The Cherry Orchard, even Firs is interpreted as hopeful and able to move on.] In the simple image of the cherry orchard, Chekhov meaningfully recognized a symbol of a com- plex and complicated problem—the multi-faceted change that Russia was on the verge of undergoing, one that was quivering on the horizon. It was the decay of one epoch and the gradual rise of a new one, represented by the disappearance of Firs, forgotten by the family he has served for decades; the depar- ture of Madame Ranevsky from her homestead; and the purchase of the estate (to convert it into com- mercial property) by the bourgeois Yermolay Lopakhin, a merchant whose father had once been a serf on Madame Ranevsky’s estate. “I’ve bought the land on which my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed into the kitchen,” declared Lopakhin with newly-acquired courage, self-confidence, and authority. “Everything’s to be as I want it. Come on, here comes the new landlord, the owner of the cherry orchard!” (69-70). The multi-dimensional change is manifested in the economic, social, and cultural facets. The old

Utah Shakespeare Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 tradition of the feudal landowning class symbolically represented by Madame Ranevsky is now replaced by the active, aggressive, self-made merchant Lopakhin, who will transform the glorious cherry orchard into commercial property covered with summer cottages to be rented out. Despite her sentimental and romantic fascination with her childhood home and nursery and her parting lyrical valedictories--“Good- bye, dear house, goodbye, old grandfather. The winter will pass, and then it will be spring, but you won’t be here, they’ll have pulled you down” (78-79)--Ranevsky tenderly detects in her seventeen-year-old daughter, Anya, when the teenager responds: “We’re beginning a new life, Mama” (79). The billiards-play- ing and candy-munching brother, Gayev, also finally recognizes that “everything’s fine now. We were all so anxious and upset before the sale of the orchard, but afterwards, when the business was settled once and for all, we were able to relax, we even cheered up a bit” (79). Ranevsky, who was initially adamant and couldn’t imagine her life without the cherry orchard, is now reconciled and endorses her brother’s assessment of the inevitable sale of the estate: “Yes. My nerves are better, that’s true. I’m sleeping well now. . . . It’s time we were going” (79). Surely there can’t be tragic element in a situation that seems to herald good life. Only the old servant, Firs, who grew up with “generals, and barons and admirals at our dances” (62) will be left to his normal natural life to come to an end in isolation. Undoubtedly natural extinction does not necessarily lead to tragic experience. The innumerable references to time in the play further reinforce the theme of passage from one epoch that is dying to one that is rising. Another expression that is used like a refrain is “understand.” Those who understand the inevitability of change will not fight it; they recognize it. It is only after the cherry orchard is sold that Madame Ranevsky understands! Time will not stand still. The young daughter, Anya, bids “goodbye, house! Goodbye, old life” (87). The perennial student, Peter Trofimov, responds with: “And hello, new life!” (87). And toward the end, Madame Ranevsky pathetically parts with these wistful expressions: “Oh, my dearest darling, wonderful cherry orchard! , my youth, my happiness, goodbye! Goodbye!” (88). Neither the readers nor the audience would detect any tragic intensity in this farewell. The Cherry Orchard, a “play of nostalgic regret” (Beverly Hahn, Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977], 14), delineates impressionistically and wistfully a social/ cultural order that was once and projects a new economic and social order that is beginning to take full shape. Francis Fergusson asserts that the play “may be briefly described as a realistic ensemble pathos: the characters all suffer the passing of the estate in different ways, thus adumbrating this change at a deeper and more generally significant level than that of any individual’s experience” (“The Cherry Orchard: A Theatre-Poem of the Suffering of Change,” in Norton Critical edition of Anton Chekhov’s Plays, trans. and ed. by Eugene K. Bristow [New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977], 383). Vladimir Navokov confessed that it is Chekhov’s works which he would take on a trip to another planet!

8 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 The Language of Russia By Heidi Madsen From Midsummer Magazine, 2000 The Cherry Orchard was written at a time of great industrial and rural unrest—unrest which led Russia to revolution—causing the collapse of an empire and the formation of the first Soviet government. Written with tremendous authorial reticence, the play approximated the social and domestic speech and situa- tion of the people in pre-revolutionary Russia. Indeed, Chekhov’s plays, not unlike those of Aristophanes’, were based on elements of “home.” Chekhov did not believe that his plays should be performed, or that they would even be understood, outside the borders of Russia. In addition, painstaking personifications and reenactments of often ridiculous human conditions are performed on stage, but the characters in The Cherry Orchard do not speak in aphoristic or sententious phrases. Leo Tolstoy once explained why the in ’s (a contemporary of Chekhov’s) The Bull do not speak true to life: “They all speak in aphorisms. Aphorisms are not natural to the ” (cited in Carl Van Doren, An Anthology of World Prose [New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935], 1019). With that in mind it is unfor- tunate that through numerous translations the language that is used in The Cherry Orchard has probably lost some of its grammatical and rhetorical accent. In his book, The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, Donald Rayfield tells us that some twenty translations have been published in the last eighty years [New York: Twain Publishers, 1994], 38). Parallel to what Gayev says in Act 1: “If a great many reme- dies are suggested for some disease, it means that the disease is incurable. . . . If a text has many translations, then it must be untranslatable” (Van Doren 1034). At the opening of the play the owner of the estate Madame Lyuba Ranevsky and her daughter Anya return home after a long sojourn in Paris, only to learn that the beloved orchard is to be sold for the pay- ment of debts (either that, or cut up to make way for summer villas). However, the orchard, albeit non- human, is the play’s only central protagonist; and, as we know, a protagonist is not casually disposed of. It is an orchard of immense and exaggerated proportion. Chekhov was an orchard owner himself at one time and must have known that the size was realistically impossible. He wanted it to represent some- thing grand, something excessive—even wastefully so, with its row upon row of producing trees, either white with blossom or red with fruit, wherein from “every cherry, from every leaf, from every trunk human creatures” peer out (Van Doren 1042), where, from the window, Ranevsky sees her dead mother walking down a flowering avenue (Van Doren 1033). There are owls and other strange birds perched on branches, and trees of good and evil omen, and like the disastrously dominant female character, the orchard is at the threshold of drastic alteration. The family orchard, once walked by governors, barons, and admirals, now is frequented with post-office clerks, station managers, and even the son of former household slaves, who visit the estate and linger destructively. It should be natural for them to visit, however, if what Trofimov, a perpetual student and potential love interest of Anya, declares at the close of Act 2 as the truth: “all Russia [should be] our garden” (Van Doren 1042). The Cherry Orchard is a play of seemingly combined incompatibles. Chekhov did not approve of his own wife’s tearful interpretation of Madame Ranevsky, nor of his director Stanislavky’s, whose percep- tion was that the play’s elements were wholly catastrophic. Like the stage directions in one of ’s melodramas, “with intensely recalcitrant resignation,” and “bursting into dry, angry tears” things of this nature that go on in The Cherry Orchard should not make the spectator too sad (cited in Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces Volume III: The Devil’s Disciple [New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963], 374 375). The costume and scenery, rather than belonging to any precise period, reveal the basic traits of individual characters not unlike the black silhouette of the villain, the non-picturesque rags of the thief, etc., of operatic theatre, of melodrama and vaudeville, of circus comedies based on detec- tive stories and penny dreadfuls— like the contrasting color found in the dress of the two sis- ters: Anya in innocent white, and Varya in despairing black.

Utah Shakespeare Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 In 1901 Chekhov voiced his intentions of writing a four-act vaudeville, saying he would if nothing stopped him from doing so; , 1904, was the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, so it could be assumed that this was the closest he ever came to fulfilling this intention. Shaw, an author of Melodrama, stated that “a good melodrama is a more difficult thing to write than all this clever-clever comedy; one must go straight to the core of humanity to get it, and if it is only good enough, why, there you have Lear or Macbeth” (cited in Daniel Gerould, Melodrama [New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980], frontis- piece). Not assuming that it is in fact a vaudeville, The Cherry Orchard is subtitled “a comedy in four acts,” the type of “comedy” that must be played seriously—casting off all skepticism and doubt—and approached as high art. This may have been precisely what Chekhov had in mind for The Cherry Orchard, a theatre of strong effects, “a theatre relying at one extreme on titanic emotions, and at the other, on reckless buffoon- ery (Gerould, iv). Methods exercised by Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard have not only influenced countless authors, but have led straight to certain cinematic and tele-visual dramatic techniques. Numerous films, adapted from novels, can be seen effectively employing the comic and the tragic simultaneously” ’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (adapted from a novel by Truman Capote), Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, and accurate cinematic depictions of Charles Dickens. Completing the full circle, a film version of The Cherry Orchard is currently in pre-production staring Claire Danes and John Malkovich.

10 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880