29 Instead of Do svidaniya, “Be seeing you,” Lopakhin facetiously says Do svidantsiya.
30 By 1903, almost one-half of all private land in Russia (excluding peasant land) was mortgaged, forcing the landed gentry to sell their estates and join the professional or commercial classes, as Gaev does at the end of this play.
31 “I’m worried about the second act’s lack of action and a certain sketchy quality in Trofimov, the student. After all, time and again Trofimov is being sent into exile, time and again he is being expelled from the university, but how can you express stuff like that?” (Chekhov to Olga Knipper, October 19, 1903).
32 Radical student dropouts were far from uncommon. The saying went, “It takes ten years to graduate— five in study, four in exile, and one wasted while the University is shut down.”
33 Under Alexander III, political reaction to reforms set in, the police and censorship became extremely repressive, and anti-Semitic pogroms broke out. Large-scale political reform became impossible, so that liberal intellectuals devoted themselves to local civilizing improvements in the villages, Tolstoyan passive resistance, and dabbling in “art for art’s sake.” This feeling of social and political impotence led to the torpid aimlessness common to Chekhov’s characters.
34 In the sense of an “internal passport,” an identity document carried when traveling through the Russian empire.
35 In the original, Italian, salto mortale.
36 Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), pronounced Buckly, whose History of Civilization in England (translated into Russian in 1861) posited that skepticism was the handmaiden of progress and that religion retards the advance of civilization. His materialist approach was much appreciated by progressive Russians in the 1870s, and Chekhov had read him as a student. By the end of the century Buckle’s ideas seemed outmoded, so the reference suggests that Yepikhodov’s efforts at self-education are behind the times.
37 Literally, talmochka, or little talma, a smaller version of the garment Nina wears in the last act of The Seagull.
38 There was a railway boom in Russia in the 1890s, although, owing to bribery and corruption, the stations were often some distance from the towns, and the service was far from efficient.
39 A period when the intelligentsia formed the Narodniki, or Populists, who preached a socialist doctrine and tried to educate the peasants. They were severely repressed in 1877–1878. Decadents here refers to writers of symbolist literature. See The Seagull, note 34.
40 Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861.
41 A reference to Maksim Gorky’s “Proud man” in the play The Lower Depths (1902). “Hu-man Be-ing! That’s magnificent! That sounds . . . proud!” “Man is truth . . . He is the be-all and the endall. Nothing exists but man, all the rest is the work of his hands and his brain. Man is something great, proud, man is.”
42 Literally, “they address the servant girl with the familiar form of ‘you,’ ” as Lopakhin does Dunyasha. It is typical of Trofimov’s intellectual astigmatism that he demands token respect for the servant class but cannot foresee doing away with it entirely.
43 The line beginning “Anyone can see” and ending “moral pollution” was deleted by Chekhov to accommodate the censor, and restored only in 1917. It was replaced by a line reading, “the vast majority of us, ninety-nine percent, live like savages, at the least provocation swearing and punching one another in the mouth, eating nauseating food, sleeping in mud and foul air.”
44 Aziatchina, a pre-Revolutionary term of abuse, referring to negative qualities in the Russian character such as laziness and inefficiency.
45 According to the literary critic Batyushkov, Chekhov put great stock in this sound. The author told him that Stanislavsky, not yet having read the play, asked him about the sound effects it ought to have. “‘In one of the acts I have an offstage sound, a complicated kind of sound which cannot be described in a few words, but it is very important that this sound be exactly the way I want it.’ . . . ‘Is the sound really that important?’ I asked. Anton Pavlovich looked at me sternly and said, ‘It is.’ ”
46 This was a sound Chekhov remembered hearing as a boy. In his story “Happiness,” he uses it ironically as a spectral laugh, presaging disappointment.
47 Under the terms of the Emancipation Act, field peasants were allotted land but had to pay back the government in annual installments the sum used to indemnify former landowners. House serfs, on the other hand, were allotted no land. Both these conditions caused tremendous hardship and were responsible for great unrest among the newly manumitted.
48 The Vagrant quotes from a popular and populist poem of 1881 by Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887) and from Nekrasov’s “Reflections at the Main Gate” (1858). The laments are supposed to come from barge haulers along the Volga. Quoting Nekrasov is always a sign of insincerity in Chekhov.
49 In Russian, Lopakin’s remark is very awkwardly phrased.
50 Okhmeliya, from okhmelyat, to get drunk, instead of Ophelia.
51 Lopakhin is misquoting Hamlet, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remember’d” (Act III, scene 1).
52 The line beginning “They owned living souls” and ending “your front hall” was deleted by Chekhov to accommodate the censor and restored only in 1917. It was replaced with this line: “Oh, it’s dreadful, your orchard is terrifying. At evening or at night when you walk through the orchard, the old bark on the trees begins to glow and it seems as if the cherry trees are dreaming of what went on one or two hundred years ago, and painful nightmares make them droop. Why talk about it?”
53 Figures in a quadrille: Promenade à une paire!: Promenade with your partner! Grand-rond, balançez!: reel around, swing your arms! Les cavaliers à genoux et remerciez vos dames!: Gentlemen, on your knees and salute your ladies!
54 “To one of his chariot-steeds named Incitatus . . . besides a stable all-built of marble stone for him, and a manger made of ivory, over and above his caparison also and harness of purple . . . he allowed a house and family of servants, yea, and household stuff to furnish the same. . . . It is reported, moreover, that he meant to prefer him into a consulship” (Suetonius, History of Twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland [1606]).
55 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose philosophy encourages a new “master” morality for supermen and instigates revolt against the conventional constraints of Western civilization in his Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (Dawns. Reflections on moral prejudices, 1881). This recalls Chekhov’s statement in a letter (February 25, 1895): “I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere on a train or a steamer, and spend the whole night talking to him. I don’t think his philosophy will last very long, though. It’s more sensational than persuasive.”
56 A lively Caucasian dance in two-four time, popularized by Glinka and by Rubinstein in his opera The Demon.