In a lively, cheerful mood she left the town, forever, as she thought.
Her rebellion is positive. There are no tears. She will, as Sasha has urged her, “educate herself.” Many critics have thought that in the portrait of the dying Sasha Chekhov is in some degree mocking himself.
The importance of the story really lies in details that connect it with the writing of The Cherry Orchard.
Chapter Nineteen
Chekhov started writing The Cherry Orchard in Yalta in February 1903. He wrote to Olga, who was in Moscow and whom he called his “little pony,” that a crowd of characters was gathering in his mind but he could only manage to write four lines a day and “even that gives me intolerable pain.” His disease was possessing his whole body, moving to his intestines and his bowels. Olga came to Yalta in July, hoping the play would be finished in time for her to take a fair copy back to Moscow in September when the theater season opened. It was not ready because he was continuously revising what he had written, but also because, in his anxiety about money, he had agreed to become the literary editor of a new magazine which had been started by his liberal admirer Lavrov, and he was reading dozens of manuscripts for him. At last the play was finished, “except for difficulties with the second act.” Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko sent him long and enthusiastic telegrams. There was only one jarring note: Stanislavsky had called the play “a truly great tragedy.” Tartly, and fearing Stanislavsky’s possessiveness, Chekhov replied that it was not even a drama— “It is a farce.”
The central subject of The Cherry Orchard seems to have been taken from Chekhov’s story A Visit to Friends, written in 1898, which deals with the bankruptcy of the Kiselev family, with whom he had stayed many times at Babkino. Chekhov did not include the story in the complete edition of his work and it has been suggested that he did not want to offend the family: but the story may very well have been rejected because it is too labored in a novelizing way. In the story, the family have turned cynically to a shrewd and successful young lawyer, hoping against hope that he will find some way of saving them from ruin: he knows so many rich people. The wife thinks the solution lies in getting him to marry their daughter. He is sentimentally attracted to her, but self-interest is stronger than sentiment: he simply sneaks away in the night. The young man is ashamed of his behavior.
In The Cherry Orchard, Lopakhin, the property speculator, evades all appeals to marry Ranevskaya’s ward. He seems to be a new version of the shrewd plain practical railway engineer who appears in Lights and more fully in the excellent My Life, a man with a businesslike eye for taking over the properties of the feckless landowning families. Chekhov admired this self-made man and he warned Stanislavsky that Lopakhin must not be played as a greedy vulgarian; he saw that Lopakhin’s weakness was that he would be too cautious and inhibited in love. Ranevskaya must not be played as an entirely frivolous and irresponsible spendthrift: she is all heart; her sensuality is natural to her and not vicious. In her reckless life in Paris she has nursed a lover who has deceived and robbed her, and she will return to him at the end of the play when he is ill again and appeals to her once more. She is shrewd when she mocks Trofimov, the high-minded and self-absorbed “eternal student” who has been the family tutor, because, at his age, he has never had a mistress. He is, she says, a prig. She may be a victim of what Chekhov called morbus fraudulentus when she gazes at her cherry orchard and sees in the white blossoms the symbol of the lost innocence of her girlhood, but the incurable lavishness of her heart is genuine. Lopakhin will not forget the moment she tenderly washed his face when his nose was bleeding when he was a little boy, and called him “little peasant.” In Lopakhin, the tongue-tied money-maker, that childhood memory is a genuine grace. What Chekhov brings out, as he makes his people tell their own story without listening to one another, is their absurd pride in their own history and their indifference to everyone else’s. Ranevskaya may long for the tongue-tied Lopakhin to propose to her ward, but the girl’s real dream is for a life of pious journeys from convent to convent.
The truly desperate character is the bizarre half-German outsider, Sharlotta, who breaks the tension of the play by her mystifying tricks with cards and her ventriloquism. Chekhov had seen such a girl at a fair on one of his trips. She is the daughter of anarchy and is truly frightening. Everyone else knows who they are. She does not know who she is. “I have no proper identity papers and I don’t know how old I am. I keep imagining I am young…. Where I come from and who I am I do not know.” All she knows is that she has traveled, when she was a child, from fair to fair and that her gypsy parents taught her to do card tricks. A German lady rescued her and turned her into a governess. She pulls a cucumber out of her pocket and eats it. “I am so lonely, always so lonely … and who I am, what I exist for, nobody knows.” Pathos? Not at all—a wild independent native homelessness. In the final scene of the play, in the general good-byes when the house is sold, she picks up a bundle, pretends it is a baby, produces the illusion of a baby crying as she sings “Hush, little baby, my heart goes out to you,” and then throws the bundle on the floor and says to them alclass="underline" “And please find me another job. I can’t go on like this.”
What about the eloquent speech of Trofimov, the eternal student, sent down twice from the university, working for the “glorious future” in Russia? He attacks the theorizing intelligentsia and proudly refuses a loan from Lopakhin at the end of the play. In Act II he cries out: “The whole of Russia is our orchard.” Is he a proud prophet of revolution and reform? Hardly: he is a rootless enthusiastic bookworm.
Objection has been made to the final scene, in which Firs, the sick and rambling old servant, lover of the old days, is left behind when the family leave, locked in by mistake. The family had assumed he was in the hospital and no one had troubled to find out. Is this eerie or simply anticlimax? It “works,” for he is the very conscious historian of the family in a play which is notable for its pairs of matching scenes. For we remember that in the wild ballroom scene in the third act, Chekhov has brought in the local stationmaster, who insists on reciting a notorious poem called “The Sinful Woman.” It is clearly directed at Ranevskaya’s adultery. He is seemingly unembarrassed by his tactlessness and may even be thinking that he is celebrating her fame in local gossip. No one listens. But it is Firs who enlarges the history of the family. He says:
We used to have generals, barons and admirals at our dances in the old days, but now we send for the post-office clerk and the stationmaster and even they are not all that keen to come.
He rambles on about the good old days of serfdom:
I feel frail. The old master, Mr. Leonid’s grandfather, used to dose us all with powdered sealing wax no matter what was wrong with us. I’ve been taking powdered sealing wax for twenty years or more and maybe that is what’s kept me alive.