The standard theme of New or Roman comedy, the source of modern domestic drama, is that of the social misfit - miser or crank or misanthrope - creating a series of problems for young lovers. Confounded by a crafty servant who, under the aegis of comedy's holiday spirit, oversteps his rank, the misfit is either reintegrated into society or expelled from it. The result is an affirmation of society's ideals and conventions. By the late eighteenth century, this formula was beginning to break down: in Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro, the clever servant finds his master's aims too much in conflict with his own. The dissolution of the social fabric is prefigured by the growing tensions within the comic framework.
The Cherry Orchard carries forward this dissolution. All the characters are misfits, from Lopakhin who dresses like a rich man but feels iike a pig in a pastry shop,' to Yasha and Dunyasha, servants who ape their betters, to the expelled student Trofimov ('Fate simply hustles me from place to place') to Yepikhodov who puts simple ideas into inappropriate language, to Varya who is a perfect manager but longs to be a pilgrim, to the most obvious example, the governess Charlotta, who has no notion who she is. Early on, we hear Lopakhin protest, 'Have to know your place!' Jean-Louis Barrault, the French actor and director, has suggested that the servants are satiric reflections of their master's ideals: old Firs is in the senescent flesh the roseate past that Gayev waxes lyrical over; Yasha, that pushing young particle, with his taste for Paris and champagne, is a parody of Lopakhin's upward mobility; Trofimov's dreams of social betterment and reading-rooms for workers are mocked by Yepkihodov reading Buckle and beefing up his vocabulary.3
If there is a norm here, it exists off-stage, in town, at the bank, in the restaurant full of soap-smelling waiters, in Mentone and Paris where Ranevskaya's lover pleads for 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.' In addition to 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 Vary a, the famous Jewish orchestra, Gayev's deceased parents and servants, the staff eating peas 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 character's 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 Andreyev. As Henri Bergson insisted,4 anything living that tries to stand still in fluid, evolving time becomes mechanical and thus comic. How do the characters take position in the temporal flow - are they retarded, do they move with it, do they try to outrun it? Those who refuse to join in (Gayev 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 (Lopakhin, Trofimov), the servants are uppish but no help to anyone (Yasha, Dunyasha), all the characters are expelled at the end, but their personal habits have undergone no reformation. Ranevskaya returns to her lover; Gayev, at his most doleful moment, pops another caramel into 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 implied, 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 oddly free- floating nature, the 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 Cherry Orchard first opened, the critic Nevedomsky remarked that the characters are simultaneously 'living persons, painted with the colours of vivid reality, and at the same schemata of that reality, as it were its foregone conclusions.'5 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 mystical'.6
Chekhov's close 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.7 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 favourite scenarios of waiting are specially 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.
But the symbolism goes hand-in-glove with carefully observed reality: they co-exist. According to the poet Andrey Bely, the instances of reality are scrutinised so closely in this play that one falls through them into a concurrent stream of 'eternity.' Hence the uneasiness caused by what seem to be humdrum characters or situations:
How terrifying are the moments when Fate soundlessly sneaks up on the weaklings. Everywhere there is the alarming leitmotiv of thunder, everywhere the impending storm-cloud of terror. And yet, it would seem there's good reason to be terrified: after all, there's talk of selling the estate. But terrible are the masks behind which the terror lurks, eyes goggling in the apertures.8
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 egoistic they are, like Arkadina and Serebryakov, the sooner they head for the safe haven of a house or, like Natasha, renovate nature to suit their taste. The last act of Three Sisters literally strands its protagonists in an uncongenial vacancy, with halloos 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 defenses. In Act Two the characters meet on a road, one of those indeterminate locations, halfway between the station and the house, but symbolically, halfway between past and future, birth and death, being and nothingness. Something here impels them to deliver characteristic monologues: Charlotta complains of her lack of identity, Yepikhodov declares his suicidal urges, Ranevskaya describes her 'sinful' past, Gayev addresses the sunset, Trofimov speechifies on what's wrong with society, Lopakhin paints his hopes for Russia. As if hypnotised by the sound of their voices reverberating in the wilderness, they deliver up quintessences of themselves.