The Cherry Orchard by
Anton Chekov
Learning aims
After completing this section (in this guide and in the learner book), you should:
● Be able to analyse The Cherry Orchard according to the dramatic principles.
● Understand the context and background in terms of sociopolitical, religious, economic, artistic and historical events relevant to the play.
● Know more about the design elements of staging this play, about the placement of the text on stage (direction and design) and understand the audience reception (past and present).
What to study?
Read the text of The Cherry Orchard, study the notes in this guide and ‘Journey 5: Realism in the Theatre‘ in the learner look.
You may also benefit from watching the play on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3mbaYEc
Introduction
In this section we analyse the text The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov.
SampleImportant terminology
Term
aristocrats
bourgeoisie
farce
Definition
A member of the aristocracy (the highest class in certain societies, typically people of noble birth with hereditary titles and offices)
The middle class
A comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay, and typically including crude characterisations and ludicrously improbable situations
(1860 – 1904)
Term Definition
gentry
People of good social position, specifically the class of people next below the nobility in position and birth laconic Involving the use of a minimum of words: concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious serf An agricultural labourer bound by the feudal system who was tied to working on his lord’s estate
The playwright – Anton Chekov (1860 – 1904)
Anton Pavlovich Chekov was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics alike. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters.
Chekov’s best plays and short stories lack complex plots and neat solutions. He concentrated on apparent trivialities creating a special kind of atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical. Chekov described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices. He is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th century Russian realist school.
Chekov’s father was a struggling grocer who had been born a serf. Chekov’s mother was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with the tales of her travels with her cloth merchant father all over Russia. Chekov famously said, ‘Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother.’ On 1876, Chekov’s father was declared bankrupt and fled to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison. The family lived in poverty in Moscow – which physically and mentally broke his mother – and Chekov stayed behind to sell the family’s possessions and finish his education.
SampleHe also assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life – many of these under pseudonyms. He gradually earned a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life and by 1882 he was writing for the Oskolki publication. In 1884 he qualified as a physician which he considered his principal profession, though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. He considered writing to be his passion and life’s work, and he moved between writing short stories and plays. The Cherry Orchard was the last play he wrote before succumbing to tuberculosis.
Introduction
The Cherry Orchard was written in 1903 and was first published in the same year. It opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavski.
The play revolves around an aristocratic Russian landowner who returns to her family estate (which includes a large and well-known cherry orchard) just before it is auctioned off to pay the mortgage. Unresponsive to offers to save the estate, she allows its sale to the son of a former serf. The family leaves to the sound of the cherry orchard being cut down.
The story presents themes of cultural futility – both the futile attempts of the aristocracy to maintain its status and the bourgeoisie to find meaning in its newfound materialism. It dramatizes the socio-economic forces in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, including the rise of the middle class after the abolition of serfdom in the mid-19th century and the decline of the power of the aristocracy.
Widely regarded as a classic of 20th century theatre, the play has been translated and adapted into many languages, and also produced around the world. Major theatre directors, including Charles Laughton, Tyrone Guthrie, etc. have staged it.
Background and setting
The Cherry Orchard portrays the social climate of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, when the aristocrats and land-owning gentry were losing their wealth and revealed themselves to be incapable of coping with their change in status. The play takes place on the provincial/country estate of Lyuba Ranevsky in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. In February of 1861, Alexander II emancipated serfs in Russia. Serfs were very much like slaves, but different in that they were attached to the land on which they worked. The play takes place between May and October of a year around the beginning of the 20th century.
Genre
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Chekov described the play as a comedy, with some elements of farce, though Stanislavski treated it as a tragedy in its first stage production. Since this production, producers and directors have contended with its dual nature. Traditionally, humour and tragedy have been kept separate in dramatic works. Although Chekov is certainly not the first playwright to mix comic and tragic elements onstage, he develops this tendency by creating a play that defies classification as either of these dramatic genres. Works like this, which cannot be subjected to the traditional standards of classification, have helped build new modern literary traditions through their innovation in nature.
Plot summary
Madame Ranevsky, who has spent five years in Paris to escape the grief of losing her youngest son, returns to her home in Russia ridden with debt. She must decide how to dispose of her family’s estate, with its beautiful and famous cherry orchard.
The coarse but wealthy Ermolai Lopakhin suggests that she develop the land in which the orchard sits. Eventually Lopakhin purchases the estate and proceeds with his plans for a housing development. As the unhappy Raneskayas leave the estate, the sound of saws can be heard in the orchard.
Structure
The play consists of four acts. The structure of the plot is tightly unified. The play moves around Lyubov and the sale of the cherry orchard. The play maintains the unities of time, place and character. The entire setting of the play takes place on her estate, mostly in the home where she has spent her childhood. The first act of the play is largely introductory, with the main characters being presented and initially developed. The conflict and the setting of the play are also clearly established.
By the second act, the rising action of the plot has begun. The action continues to build in the third act, rising to a climax when the estate is sold. When Lyubov learns that Lopakhin has purchased the cherry orchard, she weeps. Her tears are for the loss of her childhood home and for the passing of the old aristocratic society of Russia. The falling action revolves around Lyubov’s departure for Paris and tying up the loose ends. Gayev takes a job for the first time in his life, and Varya also finds a position for herself.
SampleTrofimov makes plans to continue his perpetual studies and Anya makes the decision to stay behind in Russia to attend school. Lopakhin reveals his excitement about the purchase of the orchard and his plans to develop it in the conclusion of the play. At the end of the fourth and final act, he is already clearing the land to make room to build the summer villas. The only remnant of the old order left behind at the estate is the faithful old valet, Firs, who is feeling very lost and alone.
The outcome of the plot is clearly tragic. Lyubov, the protagonist of the play, has fought to save the orchard, but she fails miserably due to her inability to change. Clinging to the past defeats her in the end. Lopakhin, a symbol of the newly emerging capitalistic middle, class buys the estate at a foreclosure auction and immediately begins to change it, destroying the old, aristocratic way of life the orchard symbolises.
Indirect action
Indirect action is a technique Chekov was most famous for. It involves action important to the play’s plot occurring off-stage, not on. Instead of seeing such action happen, the audience learns about it by watching characters react to it onstage. Lopakhin’s speech at the end of Act Three, recounting the sale of the cherry orchard, is the most important example of indirect action in the play: although the audience does not see the sale, the entire play revolves around this unseen action.
Climax
The climax comes in Act Three, when Lopakhin reveals he has bought the orchard.
Characters
Lyuba Ranevsky
Lyuba is the middle-aged owner of the estate, and the main character and protagonist in the play. She has faced tragedy many times in her life. Her name means love in Russian and she seems to exemplify love with her generosity, kindness and physical beauty. Her character is defined by flight, both physically and emotionally. Physically, she is continuously fleeing from location; the play opens with her flight from Paris home to Russia after a suicide attempt provoked by her lover.
We later learn that a similar flight occurred five years before, after losing her both her son and husband within a month. The play ends with her fleeing again form the estate she has lost, back to Paris and the arms of the same lover. Her flight from Paris to Russia is paralleled by an emotional flight from the present to the past; she is a woman besieged by memories of her tragic adult life and seeking refuge in her memories of her idyllic childhood. Her first words on returning home (‘nursery!’) indicates this.
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Her vision of her own mother walking through the cherry orchard reinforces the picture of a woman suffering from illusions – the illusion that she can recapture the idyll of her childhood and block out the tragic events of the past six years from her mind. Her rejections of Lopakhin’s business proposals as being vulgar also seems a wilful ignorance on her part, a stubborn refusal to accept the unpleasant reality of her situation and a flight from the reality of her current life, which is that she is impoverished and in debt.
Dame Judi Dench as Madame Lyuba Ranevsky in the 1981 BBC movie
Source: https://bit.ly/2ZmxYYq
Ranevsky is kind and generous and we get the feeling that for her, ideals such as love are not empty words, she has suffered for them. She is well loved by her family as well as by Lopakhin, who says she has done many kind things for him and also comments on her irresistible eyes. She is also a sympathetic character, and this trait gives her loss of the orchard a poignancy that leads to some classifying the play as a tragedy. Ranevsky identifies with the orchard and says that if it is sold, she might as well be sold with it.
The orchard also symbolises her memories, and we see this in the fact that it places the same emotional burden on her as her memories do – it draws her towards her past and prevents her from moving forward in her life. The symbolism of the play is tightly interwoven with its physical details here, for destruction of the orchard –the physical symbol of her memories – gives her a chance to move beyond those memories, a chance she will hopefully take.
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Yermolay Lopakhin
He is a businessman and the son of peasants. He is also middle-aged but slightly younger than Ranevsky. He is extremely self-conscious and complains about his lack of education and refinement. He is the main protagonist of the play and the character who drives the play forward as the source of energy and action. He is a character full of details, plans and action: he outlines a plan for Ranevsky to save the estate, offers her a loan and ends up buying the estate in the end. Just like Ranevsky, he is also emotionally fleeing from his memories of his brutal, peasant upbringing.
What seems to hold back his flight, is his attachment to her. In his first moments on stage he tells of a time when his father beat him, but he also relates to Ranevsky’s subsequent kindness to him, even though she belongs to the same landowning class that oppressed his forefathers. Lopakhin’s attitude towards Ranevsky is thus ambivalent form the start – he is grateful for her kindness, but she is also a key figure in memories that he wants to put behind him. He tries to elevate his ‘class’ by dressing smartly and constantly working.
This tension resolves itself finally in Act Three of the play when he buys the orchard. His insensitivity to Ranevsky is not merely the result of his peasant upbringing, and the fact that he does not end up proposing to Varya, which would make him part of her family, is not accidental. They both symbolize the fact that he considers himself to have broken free from or forgotten his past, and this means breaking fee from and forgetting his gratitude to Ravensky.
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Source: https://bit.ly/3lWuEKw
Peter Trofimov
Lopakhin calls Peter the ‘eternal student’ and he provides most of the explicit ideological discussion in the play. He was tutoring Ravensky’s son who had passed away. Trofimov makes the play’s social allegory explicit. He idealizes work, as well as the search for truth, decrying the poor living conditions in which most Russian peasants live, as well as the ‘Russian intellectuals’ whose inactivity he deems responsible for these conditions.
Lopakhin in a production of The Cherry Orchard
His idealism and intellectualism make him a foil for the practical, materialistic Lopakhin, but he also serves as a foil for Ranevsky. His emphasis on truth over love and beauty, and his orientation towards the future contrast with her devotion to love and beauty, and her obsession with the past.
These elements of both their personalities become united in the cherry orchard. Ranevsky sees the orchard as beautiful and interesting, but Trofimov sees it as a symbol of Russia’s oppressive past and the dehumanisation caused by families such as Ranevsky’s through the institution of serfdom.
Source: https://bit.ly/3pDZL10
Other characters:
Varya
SampleShe is Madame Ranevsky’s 24-year-old adopted daughter. She is serious, hardworking, has a need to keep busy and struggles with the frivolity and sometimes idleness of aristocracy. She is in love with Lopakhin but doubts that he will ever propose to her. Her sense of powerlessness is reflected in her penchant for bursting into tears. She manages the estate and will lose her income if it is sold – she has no control over her fate.
Anthony Flanagan as Peter Trofimov with Josie Lawrence as Madame Ranevsky in one of the productions of The Cherry Orchard
Anya
She is Madame Ranevsky’s younger, biological daughter. She is seventeen years old and a dreamer who has lived a sheltered life. She has feelings for Trofimov and they grow close throughout the play.
Leonid Gayev
He is Ranevsky’s brother and has several intriguing verbal habits; he frequently describes tricky billiards shots at odd and inappropriate times. He also will launch into overly sentimental and rhetorical speeches before his niece Anya stops him, after which he always mutters, ‘I am silent.‘ at least once.
Gayev is a kind and concerned uncle and brother, but he behaves very differently around people who aren’t in his social class. He is fifty-one years old, but as he notes, this is ‘difficult to believe‘, because he is in many ways an infant. He constantly pops sweets into his mouth, insults people with whom he disagrees and must be reminded to put on his jacket.
Boris Simeonov-Pischik
A nobleman and fellow landowner who is also in financial trouble.
Charlotte
Anya’s governess who is something of a clown, performing tricks for the amusement of the elite around her while at the same time mocking their pre-occupations.
Firs (Fairs)
Ravensky’s eighty-seven-year-old manservant who is always talking about how things were in the past on the estate. He is the only surviving link to the estate’s glorious past and comes to symbolize this.
Simon Yephikodov
He is a clerk at the estate and is a source of amusement for all the workers who refers to him as simple Simon. He provides comic relief and is in love with Dunyasha.
Yasha
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He is the young manservant who has been travelling with Ranevsky ever since she left for France. He is always complaining about how uncivilized Russia is compared to France, exploits Dunyasha’s love for him for physical pleasure and is extremely repulsive and obnoxious.
Dunyasha
She is a maid on the estate and functions mainly to foil Yasha – her innocent naivete and love for him serves to emphasize his cynicism and selfishness.
Themes
Modernity versus the Old Russia
A recurrent theme throughout Russian literature of the nineteenth century is the clash between the values of modernity and values of old Russia. Here, modernity is meant to signify Western modernity, its rationalism, secularism and materialism. Russia, especially its nobility, had been adopting these values since the early 18th century, in the time of Peter the Great.
In the greater part of the late 19th century however, Russian literature was written in reaction to this change, and in praise of an idealized vision of Russia’s history and folklore. Western values were often presented as false, pretentious, and spiritually and morally bankrupt with Russian culture being portrayed as honest and morally pure in contrast.
The conflict between Ranevsky and Gayev on the one hand, and Trofimov and Lopakhin on the other, can be seen as emblematic of the disputes between the old feudal order and Westernisation. The conflict is made clear in Trofimov’s speeches, who views Russia’s historical legacy as an oppressive one, something to be abandoned instead of celebrated and proposes an ideology that is distinctly influenced by the Western ideas such as Marxism and Darwinism.
The struggle over memory
In The Cherry Orchard, memory is seen both as a source of personal identity and as a burden preventing the attainment of happiness. Each character is involved in a struggle to remember, but more importantly, in a struggle to forget certain aspects of their past.
Madame Ranevsky wants to seek refuge in the past from the despair of her present life; she wants to remember the past and forget the present. But the estate itself contains awful memories of her son’s death, memories she is reminded of a soon as she is back at the estate and sees Trofimov, her son’s tutor.
SampleFor Lopakhin, memories are oppressive, for they are memories of a brutal, uncultured peasant upbringing. They conflict with his identity as a well-heeled businessman that he tries to cultivate with his fancy clothing and his allusions to Shakespeare. The memories he wishes to forget are a source of confusion and self-doubt.
Trofimov is concerned more with Russia’s historical memory of its past, a past which he views as oppressive and needing an explicit renunciation if Russia is to move forward. He informs us of this view in his speeches at the end of Act Two. What Trofimov wishes Russia to forget are the beautiful and redeeming aspects of that past.
Firs, finally, lives solely in memory – most of his speeches in the play relate to what life was like before the serfs were freed, telling those around him of the recipe for making
cherry jam, which now even he can’t remember. At the end of the play, he is literally forgotten by the other characters, symbolizing the ‘forgotten’ era with which he is so strongly associated.
Independence, liberation and freedom
This play deals with the theme of independence in many different ways. Fundamentally, it demands that we ask what it means to be free. What with the Liberation, The Cherry Orchard deals with independence in a very concrete way: shortly before the beginning of the play, much of Russia’s population was not free. The play’s characters demonstrate the different degrees of freedom that resulted from the Liberation.
On opposing ends of this question are Lopakhin and Firs. One man has been able to take advantage of his liberation to make himself independent, the other, although he is technically free, has not changed his position at all and is subject to the whims of the family he serves, as he has always been. The difference in their situation demonstrates the observations of many Russians of the time: officially liberating a group of people is not the same as making them free if you do not also equip them with the tools they need to become independent, i.e. resources such as education and land.
Trofimof, the play’s idealist, offers one definition of freedom for the audience to consider when he declines Lopakhin’s offer of money. According to Trofimof, he is a free man because he is beholden to no one and nothing more than his own concept of morality. His observations seem accurate in the light of other forms of non-freedom in the play.
Madame Ranevsky, for example, is not free in a very different way from Firs. She has enough assets to be able to control her own destiny, but she is a slave to her passions, spending extravagantly and making poor decisions in romance, and therefore cannot follow a higher moral code as Trofimof does. What with the combination of economic circumstances and the bizarre weaknesses of the characters, the play therefore suggests that there are two sources which control freedom and the lack thereof: economics, which comes from without, and control over oneself, which comes from within.
Source: https://bit.ly/3mdRvmw
Symbolism
The cherry orchard
The orchard is the massive, hulking presence at the play’s center of gravity; everything else revolves around and is drawn towards it. Lopakhin implies in Act One that the estate is spread over 2 500 acres and the orchard covers most of it, which means
that it is massive. There were never any cherry orchards of this size in Russia, and the thought that the crop one would yield from an orchard that size could not financially sustain the family, is absurd.
This absurdity is there for a reason. After all, the orchard used to produce a crop every year, which was made into cherry jam. But, as Firs informs us, the recipe has been lost. It is thus a relic of the past, an artifact, of no present use to anyone except as a memorial or a symbol of the time when it was useful. Its unrealistic size also further strengthens its symbol of that past. In a very real sense, the orchard doesn’t exist in the present. It is something that is perceived by the various characters and reacted to in ways that indicate how these characters feel about what the orchard represents, which is some aspect of memory.
What ‘memory’ means for each character and what it represents, varies. Each character sees (sometimes literally) a different aspect of the past – either personal or historical – in the orchard. Ranevsky, for example, perceives her dead mother walking through the orchard in Act One: for her, the orchard is a personal relic of her idyllic childhood. Trofimov on the other hand, near the end of Act Two, sees in the orchard the faces of the serfs who lived and died in slavery on the estate. For Lopakhin, the orchard is intimately tied to his personal memories of a brutal childhood, as well as presenting an obstacle to the prosperity of both himself and Ranevsky.
Though each character has their own perceptive, there is a rough division between the old and the young, with the age cut-off being between Lopakhin and Ranevsky. The younger characters tend to see the orchard in a negative light and the older characters view it more positively.
Breaking string
We first hear the sound in Act Two (no one knows what the sound is at first) and then when the audience last hears it, the only character left on stage is unable to comment on the sound. It is the sound of breaking string, an auditory symbol of forgetting. It is first heard in the play after Gayev gives a soliloquy on the eternity of nature:
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Firs tells us it was heard before, around the time the serfs were freed (a seminal event in Russian history). It is last heard just as Firs passes away and is juxtaposed against the sound of an axe striking a cherry tree. With its simple image of breaking line, the sound serves to unify the play’s social allegory with its examination of memory, providing a more graphic counterpart to the cherry orchard’s hovering, off-stage presence.
Source: https://bit.ly/3jC36d4
Staging of The Cherry Orchard
The play opened on 17 January 1904 at the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of the actor-director Konstantin Stanivslavski. During rehearsals, the structure of Act Two was re-written. Famously and contrary to Chekov’s wishes, Stanisvlaski’s version was, by and large, a tragedy. Chekov disliked this production intensely, concluding that Stanislavski had ‘ruined‘ his play. The playwright’s wife Olga Knipper played Madame Ranevsky in the original production as well as in the 300th production of the play by the theatre in 1943.
This photograph depicts a scene from Act Three of the original Moscow Art Theatre Group production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Stanislavski in 1904.
Source: https://bit.ly/3CckV9W
Although critics at the time were divided in their response to the play, the debut of The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theatre was a resounding success. The play was almost immediately presented in many of the important provincial cities. This success was not only confined to Russia, as the play was soon seen abroad with great acclaim as well. The modest and newly urbanised audiences attending pre-revolutionary performances at S. V. Panin’s People’s House in Saint Petersburg reportedly cheered as the cherry orchard was felled onstage.
Shortly after the play’s debut, Chekov departed for Germany due to his worsening health and by July 1904 he had passed away.
Many productions of The Cherry Orchard have since been done onstage and screen starring various famous actors.
Design elements
Set design
Each set design for the various productions of this play is vastly different and really depends on the set designer’s interpretation. Some designers design a set that looks like the nursery, the manor on the estate and the cherry orchard and some of the more modern productions design a sparser set using symbolic elements. There are some basic guides set by the setting of each of the four acts.
● Act One takes place in the nursery and the sun rises during the act.
● Act Two take place outside on the estate, near the orchard.
● Act Three takes place in the drawing room with an arch leading into the ballroom
● Act Four again takes place in the nursery
Watch this video of Bunny Christie, the set designer for the National Theatre’s production of the play, talking about her design.
