Grisha, the dead nanny and the dim Anastasy recollected by Gayev. 'I'm so glad you're still alive,' Ranevskaya says to Firs. But these obituaries are tossed off, not taken to heart; even Ranevskaya's aggrieved recollection of her dead past is cut off by the merry music of the Jewish orchestra. Finally, Charlotta mocks the pervasive sterility by nursing a baby made out of an empty parcel. The most touching eulogy is pronounced by the clownish Pishchik over himself.
The consummate mastery of The Cherry Orchard is revealed in an authorial shorthand that is both impressionistic and theatrical. The pull on Ranevskaya 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 relating how she found her mother in Paris: 'Mama was living on a fifth floor, I go upstairs, with her there are some French people, ladies, some old Catholic priest with a little book, and it's smoky, tawdry'. In a few strokes, a past is encapsulised: a high storey, bespeaking Ranevskaya's reduced circumstances, her toying with religious conversion, the louche atmosphere full of cigarette smoke.
Each character is distinguished by an appropriate speech pattern. Lyubov Ranevskaya (whose first name means 'love') constantly employs diminutives and terms of endearment; for her everyone is golubchik, 'dovie'. She is also vague, using adjectives like 'some kind of (ikakoy-to), suggestive of her passive nature. Gayev is a parody of the after-dinner speaker: emotion can be voiced only in a fulsome oration, thick with platitude. When his flow is staunched, he falls back on billiard terms or, like a Freudian baby arrested at the oral stage, stops his mouth with caramels, anchovies and Kerch herrings. An untoward situation prompts him to say not 'What?' (Chto?) but the more effete 'How's that?' (Chego?)
Pishchik, always waiting, like Micawber, for something to turn up, 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 addressee; blunt and colloquial with servants, more respectful with his former betters. As a businessman, his language is concise and well-structured, except when dealing with Vorya, when he lapses into a bleat: 'Me-e-eh.' He cites exact numbers and uses a commercial vocabulary, and frequently consults his watch.
Trofimov, like Gayev, is fond of rhetoric, but his is a melange of literary and political war-cries. The stirring phrase about a 'shining star, glowing there in the distance! Forward! No dropping behind, friends' is patched together from Pushkin, Pleshcheyev and the Decembrists. He waxes most poetical with Anya, whom Chekhov has speak in iambs. Yepikhodov invents a style all his own, dropping formal locutions into colloquial discourse.
Firs' speech is pithy and demotic: his laconic remarks always bring a situation back to earth. His particular tag, Ekhy ty nedotyopa long bemused commentators. Some thought nedotyopa to be an obscure peasant word collected by Chekhov in the country; others believed he made it up. Translators have rendered it as everything from 'lummox' 'duffer' 'joblot' and 'good-for-nothing' to 'silly young cuckoo'. Literally, it means something in the process of being chopped by an axe, but left unfinished: perhaps 'half-baked' comes closest in English.
Memorably, 'Ah, you're half-baked' is the last line in the play. Its regular repetition suggests that Chekhov meant it to sum up all the characters. Like the chopping left undone, they are inchoate, some, like Anya and Trofimov, in the process of taking shape, others, like Gayev 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.
9
The Theatrical Filter
All one needs is your name on the poster - and there's a full house, and the actors pull themselves together: they treat each of your phrases, every word, with real reverence and don't allow themselves a single omission. The provincial director I. A. Rostov tsev to Chekhov, 1900
Chekhov's art is allusive, syncretic, rich in ambivalence: his standard practice when rewriting was to excise lines that seemed tautological or overly explicit. Stanislavsky's view of art was more Victorian: he meant it to illustrate, inform, and explain. In addition, Nemirovich-Danchenko emphasised the social purpose of drama. Consequently, a Moscow Art Theatre production treated a play not so much as the imaginative fruits of an individual author's sensibility as a segment of real experience, to be probed in depth. Because Chekhov's plays are grounded in reality and his characters are accretions of closely-observed psychological detail, the Moscow Art Theatre approach yielded successful results, but the success was only partial. Contemporary audiences of intelligentsia were enthralled to see themselves and their malaise reflected with such authenticity, yet Chekhov felt, with some justice, that his reticence, ambiguities, and comic pacing were lost in the process. The Moscow Art Theatre rendered photographically what had been meant as pointillism.
In his director's book for The Seagull, Stanislavsky noted that a laugh offstage coming in the last act after Nina's quotation from Turgenev would be 'a vulgar effect.' But he could not resist it, because it was effective, and so it remained. Stanislavsky's whole approach to directing was to erect signposts to explicit meaning, and translate ambiguity into easily apprehended stage messages. Ultimately the Art Theatre's greatest gift to Chekhov was its insistence on ensemble playing, or in Stanislavsky's words, 'today Hamlet, tomorrow a walk-on'. Since Chekhov's casts are integral units, unstratified into leading characters and comprimario roles, he could be most faithfully performed by a company that devoted as much time to creating an inner life for Ferapont as it would for Vershinin.
This became clear when Chekhov's plays entered the repertory of other theatres. At the State-subsidised Alexandra in St. Petersburg, when the characters began to dance at the Shrovetide party in Three Sisters, Davydov, who played Chebutykin, came downstage centre and performed a Cossack dance as a music-hall turn, to audience applause.1 Such was the custom, even in realistic drama. Under these circumstances, even if the Art Theatre somewhat distorted Chekhov, he was fortunate that it existed to launch his plays in a far less compromised form that they might otherwise have assumed. The Moscow Art Theatre style was copied by provincial theatres, and became the model for producing Chekhov, even in China and Japan.
Chekhov left no school. The poet Aleksandr Blok specifically stated that 'he had no precursors, and his successors do not know how to do anything a la Chekhov'. 'Lyricism is especially prevalent in Chekhov's plays,' he continued, 'but his mysterious gift was not passed on to anyone else, and his innumerable imitators have given us nothing of value.'2 One of those who tried to perpetuate Chekhov's so-called lyricism was Boris Zaytsev, whose The Lanin Estate was put on by a group of students under the leadership of Stanislavsky's favourite disciple Yevgeny Vakhtangov in 1914. Audiences of the eve of Revolution found it an irrelevant threnody.
After the Revolution, Chekhov went out of fashion in Russia, for his plays too were dismissed as irrelevant to Soviet society. Along with the Moscow Art Theatre, they were condemned as relics of an obsolete bourgeois way of life, appealing only to the same ineffectual types that peopled his drama. The leftist poet Mayakovsky, in a prologue to his agit-prop play Mystery-Bouffe, sneered, You go to the theatre and 'You look and see/- Auntie Manyas and Uncle Vanyas flopping on divans./Neither uncles nor aunts interest us, / We can get uncles and aunts at home'.3 Another complaint was that Chekhov was too pessimistic at a time when 'active progressivism' was the byword. By the 1930s, only the vaudevilles and The Cherry Orchard were revived, with Trofimov and Lopakhin exalted as heralds of the Revolution.