“Listen, Lopakhin doesn’t shout. He is rich, and rich men never shout.” . . .
When I inquired of Chekhov how to play Lopakhin, he replied: “In yellow high-button shoes.”
(“Past and Present,” Moscow Art Theatre Yearbook for 1944, vol. 1 [1946])
9 A parody of the self-made man represented by Lopakhin. Chekhov first envisaged the character as plump and elderly, but revised this to fit one of his favorite actors, Ivan Moskvin, who was young and trim. The character had several originals. Yepikhodov’s autodidacticism, reading abstruse books to better his mind, originated when Chekhov suggested to one of his attendants in Yalta that he go in for self-improvement. So the man went out, bought a red tie, and announced his intention of learning French. Yepikhodov’s clumsiness derives from a conjuring clown Chekhov saw perform at the Hermitage gardens. The act consisted of disasters: juggled eggs smashing on the clown’s forehead, dishes crashing to the ground, while the woebegone wizard stood with an expression of bewilderment and embarrassment. Chekhov kept shouting, “Wonderful! It’s wonderful!” (Stanislavsky, Teatralnaya gazeta, November 27, 1914).
10 See The Bear, note 6.
11 “Dunya and Yepikhodov stand in Lopakhin’s presence, they do not sit. Lopakhin, after all, deports himself freely, like a lord, uses the familiar form in speaking to the housemaid, whereas she uses the formal form to him” (Chekhov to Stanislavsky, November 10, 1903).
12 Literally, Dvadtsat-dva neschastye, Twenty-two Misfortunes, “twenty-two” being a number indicating “lots.” Neschastye is a recurrent word throughout the play.
13 “No, I never wanted to suggest that Ranevskaya is chastened. The only thing that can chasten a woman like that is death . . . It isn’t hard to play Ranevskaya; you only need from the beginning to take the right tone; you need to come up with a smile and a way of laughing, you have to know how to dress” (Chekhov to Olga Knipper, October 25, 1903).
14 “Anya [is] a bobtailed, uninteresting role. Varya [ . . .] is a little nun, a little silly” (Chekhov to Nemirovich-Danchenko, October 30, 1903). “Anya can be played by anybody you like, even by an altogether unknown actress, only she must be young and look like a little girl, and talk in a young, ringing voice. This is not one of the major roles. Varya is a more important role . . . Varya does not resemble Sonya and Natasha; she is a figure in a black dress, a little nun, a little silly, a crybaby, etc., etc.” (Chekhov to Nemirovich-Danchenko, November 2 , 1903).
15 “Charlotta is a major role . . . Charlotta speaks correct, not broken, Russian, but occasionally she pronounces the soft ending of a word hard, and she confuses the masculine and feminine gender of adjectives” (Chekhov to Nemirovich-Danchenko, November 2, 1903).
“Muratova, who played Charlotta, asks Anton Pavlovich, might she wear a green necktie.
“‘ You may but it’s not necessary,’ the author answers” (L. M. Leonidov, “Past and Present,” Moscow Art Theatre Yearbook for 1944, vol. 1 [1946]).
The character was based on an eccentric English governess, whom Chekhov had met while staying on Stanislavsky’s estate. This acrobatic Miss Prism would leap up on Chekhov’s shoulders and salute passersby by taking off his hat and forcing him to bow (My Life in Art, Russian ed.).
16 “Pishchik is a real Russian, an old man, debilitated by gout, old age, and over-indulgence, stout, dressed in a tight, long-waisted frockcoat . . . , boots without heels” (Chekhov to Nemirovich- Danchenko, November 2, 1903).
17 Or Menton, a resort area on the Mediterranean coast of France. Nearby lies Monte Carlo, another suggestion of Ranevskaya’s extravagance.
18 Becoming a bogomolets, or pilgrim, was a common avocation in pre-Revolutionary Russia, especially for the rootless and outcast. One would trek from shrine to shrine, putting up at monasteries and living off alms. Varya’s picture of such a life is highly idealized. Its picaresque side can be glimpsed in Nikolay Leskov’s stories, such as “The Enchanted Pilgrim,” in the ambiguous figure Luka in Gorky’s 1902 play The Lower Depths, and in Chekhov’s Along the Highway.
19 Nedotyopa was not a Russian word when Chekhov used it; it was Ukrainian for an incompetent, a mental defective. Chekhov may have remembered hearing it in his childhood; it does not appear in Russian dictionaries until 1938, and then Chekhov is cited as the source. George Calderon perceived the etymology to derive from ne, not, and dotyapat, to finish chopping, which makes great sense in the context of the play. Translators grow gray over the word: earlier English versions have “good-for-nothing,” “rogue,” “duffer,” “job-lot,” “lummox,” “silly young cuckoo,” “silly old nothing,” “nincompoop,” “muddler,” “silly galoot,” “numbskull,” “young flibbertigibbet.” The critic Batyushkov considered the whole play to be a variation on the theme of “nedotyopery,” each of the characters representing a different aspect of life unfulfilled.
20 Pishchik’s costume makes him look more traditionally Russian than the others: the long coat and baggy pants tucked into boots are modern adaptations of medieval boyar dress.
21 In pre-Revolutionary Russia, billiards was played with five balls, one of them yellow. A doublette occurs when a player’s ball hits the cushion, rebounds, and sinks the other player’s ball. George Calderon ventured that Gaev “always plays a declaration game at billiards, no flukes allowed.” Chekhov asked the actor he wanted to play Gaev to brush up on the terminology and add the proper phrases in rehearsal. “Ask Vishnevsky to listen in on people playing billiards and jot down as many billiard terms as he can. I don’t play billiards, or did once, but now I’ve forgotten it all, and stick them in my play any old way. Later on Vishnevsky and I will talk it over, and I’ll write in what’s needed” (Chekhov to Olga Knipper, October 14, 1903).
22 The colloquial “Kogo” (literally, “Whom?”) instead of “chego” (“What’s that?”), the quirky locution of an aristocrat.
23 Patchouli, an oil made from an Asian plant, which has a very powerful aroma, prized in the Orient, but insufferable to many Westerners.
24 Nenaglyadnaya ditsyusya moya, literally, “blindingly beauteous bairn of mine,” a formula found in fairy tales.
25 The rest of the folksong verse goes “lost my heart head over heels.” It means “Going the whole hog.”
26 Kulak, literally a fist, but figuratively a tight-fisted peasant or small dealer.
27 Chekhov’s close friend, the writer Ivan Bunin, objected to this feature of the play. “I grew up in just such an impoverished ‘nest of gentry,’” he wrote. “It was a desolate estate on the steppes, but with a large orchard, not cherry, of course, for, Chekhov to the contrary, nowhere in Russia were there orchards comprised exclusively of cherries; only sections of the orchards on these estates (though sometimes very vast sections) grew cherries, and nowhere, Chekhov to the contrary again, could these sections be directly beside the main house, nor was there anything wonderful about the cherry trees, which are quite unattractive, as everyone knows, gnarled with puny leaves, puny blossoms when in bloom (quite unlike those which blossom so enormously and lushly right under the very windows of the main house at the Art Theatre) . . .” (O Chekhove [New York, 1955], pp. 215–216).
28 Chekhov is making fun of the Russian mania for celebrating anniversaries. Stanislavsky reports that on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chekhov’s literary career, held during the third performance of The Cherry Orchard, “One of the men of letters began his speech of tribute with the same words that Gaev addresses to the old cupboard in Act One of The Cherry Orchard, ‘Dear, venerated.’ Only instead of cupboard, the orator said ‘Anton Pavlovich.’ Chekhov winked at me and smiled a wicked smile” (Letters).