As Maxim Gorkii (the “bitter one”) is wildly overrated; Chekhov is identically underrated. He is underrated not just in terms of style, but, more importantly, in terms of content. Often depicted as a mere promoter of revolution and westernization (a later Belenskii, though infinitely more talented), Chekhov is far more complex–a revolutionary yes, but not the way the literati in America like to believe. He was a revolutionary against bourgeois-ism; against vulgar middle class ideology; against Stolipinism. He was a friend of monarchy in spite of himself; though few monarchists know why. “The Cherry Orchard” is one particularly powerful place to start, and represents a social romanticism that has eluded most of his English commentators.
Like all things Russian, this play is woefully misunderstood; nay, mal-understood, by those among the American cognoscenti who try to navigate this difficult waters. Without knowing–in some detail–the nature of Russian society, particularly elite society, in 1904 (when this play was written), this powerful play will fall on deaf ears; just another set of stage cues for American intellectuals to place a profound-sounding label upon.
The plot line is simple; but, as always, such simplicity is a bait-and-switch; a trick the likes of Chekhov like to play on the pseudo-intellectuals in Petersburg–impressionable, eager to impress, passionate in the most evil sense of the word. He tricked Gorkii. Gorkii, primary a journalistic hack for American newspapers, was completely out of his depth in his correspondence with Chekhov. His complete misunderstanding of the play is humorous, and shows the intellectual level of those who like to promote this bitter pill to western societies as “Russian.”
The plot goes something like this: The primary character is not a person, but it is a place, a beautiful cherry orchard somewhere in Russia. The orchard is a character, a character with far more depth than anyone else in the play. The central notion is that those who can appreciate these depths become the play’s heroes. Those who cannot, its villains. The house that overlooks this orchard is another character, though connected with the beauties of the Russian nature itself.
The landowner, Madame Ranevskii, has just returned from a 7 year jaunt abroad (Paris, of course), due to a failed marriage and the accidental death of a child by drowning. The drowning occurred in a pond at the orchard, and his mother could not bear to be near these scene of this tragic accident.
The man-servant, a major character despite having few lines, is the aged Firs, the nearly 90 year old servant, who, significantly, still remembers the days of serfdom. It is clear, like most Russian nobility of the day, she is deep in debt, and, therefore, the orchard must be sold. It is in this “cash matrix” that Chekhov’s genius shows itself; shows itself to be far too powerful for most American readers. This play turns out, ironically, to be the closest to American middle class lives today, and is saturated with lessons for the indebted Americans.
Given that Madame no longer has a husband–one died, the other robbed her, and continues to manipulate her from afar–her brother, Leonid Gaiv, takes this central role. However, as he represents a dying class, he is presented as an amiable buffoon, absolutely obsessed with playing pool to the extent that he cannot get a sentence out without making some reference to his obsession. The comedy writing here is brilliant. The reader finds himself “casting” this play from among contemporary comedic talents as these characters become filled out. The sensitive can see Russia in 1904 through these characters, but, ominously, they can also see Americans in these characters.
The other major character is the representative of the bourgeois, the hard working, intelligent and wealthy Lopakhin. What is significant is that there are no evil characters; no villains in the common sense of the term. What is villainous is social interest; social forces unleashed at the waning days of Russian glory. “The Cherry Orchard” is a disturbingly brilliant portrayal of these social forces. I am tempted to go so far as to say that the forces are far more significant “characters” than the actors, who merely represent such forces in nearly comic terms. The play is ultimately pessimistic: the bourgeois are as vulgar as the dying nobility, and complete in absurdity with the left revolutionaries.
Madame has a choice: either she can consent to sell the Orchard in order for it to be destroyed and turned into fashionable houses for the neo-bourgeois of Russia, or she can permit her property to be seized. There is no question that, either way, the cherry orchard is gone, an orchard that has been in her family for generations.
In other words, the play is about the conflict (however friendly) between the dying nobility and the allegedly rising middle classes (and, truth be told, these rising classes are in some sense made up by failed nobles who took to the towns–there is a lively literature on this important topic in the literature today). In Russia, at the time, this class was specifically interesting. This is because class status was a legal category, having nothing to do with income: there were peasants, clergy and nobles (though this system was changing radically in 1904, and the following two years would ensure it). Outside of that class, success could be found–and was–but it was somewhat outside of the legal strictures of Russian life.
The monarchy was highly anti-bourgeois, as Alexander III and his son made certain the world understood, and yet they were trapped–outside of the industry of the middle classes, Russia would fall behind the European race for power–a race that Russia, in spite of herself, was forced to enter. Without this industrious and wealthy class (however small), Russia could not compete with the financial colossus of Great Britain. Now, while nearly all great Russian writers hated the middle classes, no one sublimated this contempt to the extent Chekhov did. And in this is the play’s greatness.
The problem is that the simple minded will view the anti-bourgeois movement as automatically leftist (in our modern, vulgar sense). But, given the action of this play, nothing was farther from the truth. Regardless of Chekhov’s attitudes in public, there is a powerful traditionalist, agrarian message in this play, a message taken almost directly from the great agrarian masterpiece, Gogol’s “Old World Landowners.” The overlap between these two works of literature is rather significant, and has yet to be dealt with in the literature.
The conclusion is that the bourgeois are vulgar. Hard working yes, but utterly unappreciative of Russia’s beauty and history. Near the end of the play, Lopakhin waxes eloquently about the money he has made in agriculture, making sore to describe the beauty of his fields in purely financial terms. With all being filtered though the cash matrix; reality dissolves into purely quantitative concerns, the perennial sickness of middle class life. Lopakhin wants Madame to make a profit–turn the orchard over the developers; turn them into trendy housing for the newly wealthy. Eliminate the beauty for standardization and in satisfying the whims of the newly rich.
Every one of us who lives in rural areas realizes this struggle: the developers, uncaring about natural beauty or tradition, seek to pave rural America into a large parking lot for the Wal-mart System. It’s no accident that the rich, who seek to use rural America as a cheap getaway, view its inhabitants as ignorant hicks. Insulting and humiliating farmers is a national pastime for the Prozac/Yoga/SUV/suburbanites, made socially acceptable only through the medium of television; this is the sociological version of Prozac, making it emotionally appropriate to destroy the livelihood of the agricultural classes, as well as their memories and families in the interests of cheap land and large golf courses. This mentality is captured, though in a pleasant and comedic sense, through Lopakhin.
However, it is also clear that the old order is suffering. Indebtedness, idleness and sentimentality are destroying this group as well, though Chekhov makes it clear that, far from being useless parasites, the nobility has just lost its way; its sense of mission; its mission to provide a emphasis on quality, as opposed to middling quantity–the curse of the bourgeois. So, Gaiv’s obsession with playing pool, to the exclusion of all else, and his addiction to sugar candies, is symbolic of the nobility’s desire to imitate western ways, of their addiction to western vices (cf. Dostoyevskii’s The Gambler). This addiction has destroyed their sense of mission, and therefore, has shown them to be useless, in spite of themselves. Throughout the play, the characters representing nobility do not plan; they do not even seem to fight the inevitable sale of their property. They either retreat into useless pastimes, or, as in the case of Madame Ranevskii, quickly flow into flights of sentimental fancy; pleasant, powerful, but ultimately ineffective in a radically changing society.
For Chekhov, the play is the battle between the middle classes, vulgar and industrious, and the nobility, dying, neglectful of its mission, but seemingly unable to redeem itself. In other words, the play is highly pessimistic; there is no happy ending. The orchard itself is Russian history–beautiful, worthy of retention, the scene of much tragedy, yet both classes can not seem to get a grip on its significance. It is as if Chekhov is seeing a bleak future if this is in the hands of either the bourgeois or the dying nobility.
The manservant Firs is taken precisely from Gogol. He remembers the old recipes for cherry dishes (identical to the old couple in “Old World Landowners”, who are preoccupied with such things) and is told to “shut up” by, of all people, Gaiv, one who should appreciate these memories. He misses the days of serfdom, and, as a former serf, claims that these were better times. Firs remarks, in Act II, “I wouldn’t have any Liberation then, I stayed with the master. I remember how happy everyone was, but why they were happy they didn’t know themselves.” It is also significant that the representative of the bourgeois, Lopakhin, was descended from serfs, people who were “unwelcome even in this kitchen,” he says with an angry snarl. Firs regrets, when questioned about the old ways of doing things, that “no one remembers.” Lopakhin says, “Until a little while ago there was nothing by gentry and peasants around here, now, fashionable houses are going up everywhere. . .” He predicts universal happiness from this phenomenon, and without articulating an argument, Gaiv responds, “that’s silly;” possibly incapable of articulating any serious argument against this process. Showing his senselessness, Maxim Gorky, in a letter to Chekhov, writes this on the play, completely missing the point of everything:
And here is the lachrymose Ranevskii and the other owners of the Orchard, egotistical like children, with the flabiness of senility. They missed the right moment for dying; they whine, seeing nothing of what is going on around them, understanding nothing, parasites without the power of again taking root in life
Gaiv himself, a representative of the dying nobility, tries to prove just how “liberal” he is by crying like an idiot over a 100 year old cabinet, calling it a “witness of a better future. . .” to a chorus of rolling eyes. He then quickly makes a comment about playing pool. Chekhov writes this brilliantly, providing the otherwise useless Gaiv with a liberal consciousness, but largely reducible to emotional states and pompous speeches about nothing. It is unnatural to him to try to imitate the latest fads in life, he should be a rock for tradition and quality. Thus, he sounds absurd, and the rest of the family mock him regularly for it.
One of the pivotal moments of the play comes with a speech, or rather, a series of short speeches by the student, Trophymov, who is representative of the sons of the gentry, that is, the alienated student body of elite Russia. First, he accused the representative of the bourgeois of being “. . .a beast of prey which devours everything that comes its way. . .” His second comments concerns human pride: “. . . what room is there for pride? Is there any sense in it, when man is so poorly constructed from a physiological point of view; when the vast majority of us are so gross and stupid. . .” And the third, concerning the Russian intelligentsia: “The vast majority of educated people that I know seek after nothing, do nothing, and as yet are incapable of work. They call themselves “thou” and “thee” to the servants, they treat their peasants like animals, learn nothing, read nothing serious, do absolutely nothing, only talk about science, and understand little or nothing about art.”
The first of these three comments are quite common for this alienated class. The last two are not. It was common for all Russian classes to despise the bourgeois, ultimately a foreign, cancerous growth on a Russia that abhorred ladder climbing. The comment on human pride is quite another thing, for it assaulted the basis of a kind of individualism prominent among the Belinskiites; there is nothing for man to be proud of, and therefore, building a system on his whims is a house on sand. And the third, the attack on the radical movement in general, as it was promised by the “thinking class.” This is not the stereotypical rantings of a “scientific anarchist” as was portrayed by Turnegev, for example.
However, the false cover of Trophymov falls, and the Turnegevian student is revealed. In the confusion of often contradictory ideological posturings, he attacks Madame over his love for her youngest daughter, Anya, an easily impressed, young and naive girl: “Day after day she never leaves us alone. With her narrow mind she cannot understand that we are above love. . . Forward! We march on irresistibly towards that bright star which burns far, far before us. Forward! Don’t tarry, Comrades!” Of course, this is boilerplate radical sloganeering, complete with the Masonic reference to the bright star, Sirius, the seat of Satan in occult lore. Of course, in normal conversation, Trophymov seems rather agreeable, but as soon as his libido is involved, he retreats into the absurd citadel of radical university life.
Madame, a little later, makes an unprincipled, but powerful defense of herself: “You settle every important question so boldly; but tell me, Peter, isn’t that because you’re young, because you haven’t solved any question of your own as yet?” Then, she gets to the crux of the story, the true thesis: “Don’t you see? I was born here, my father and mother lived here; and my grandfather; I love this house; without the cherry orchard my life has no meaning, and if it must be sold, then see it along with me!” She continues in the next act, speaking to no one in particular: “Oh! Why didn’t you listen to me: You can’t push the clock back now, poor dear.” She sees either the final vulgarization of her class, or its disappearance; its replacement by a class who knows nor cares anything about Russia and her traditions: a party represented today by the western-supported liberal opposition to Putin.
Trophymov, who, incidentally, has been in school forever, the “eternal student” who actually knows nothing, is floored by this response, and claims that he is truly on her side. He misses the significance, as do most readers: this play is about the two sides of “revolution.” The side of the British and French revolutions, and the side of the Russian one that is developing. Firstly, the bourgeois revolution, represented by the merchant Lopatkhin: he sees nothing but money in everything. He does not understand the romantic sense of attachment the older generation has to things. They have invested Russia with a tremendous amount of emotional baggage: baggage indeed, but not arbitrary baggage. Their love for Russia derives from experience. This is why Firs is depicted as an elderly man: he lived the times the likes of Trophymov only reads about, and that sporadically. Second, the “anti-bourgeois” revolution represented by Trophymov: young, naive, full of theories with no practical value or no meaning: to be “above” love is just such a ridiculous saying. Chekhov makes certain that the defense of this romanticism of Madame is not based on ideology, but rather on experience; experience crystallized into emotion and attachment. In the middle, stands a sick noble class, incapable of anything but playing pool, eating sugar candy and mouthing slogans so as to be perceived as “keeping in touch with the times.” Of course, they have no place; what they do is either redundant of useless.
Trophymov challenges Lophatkin (who has been ribbing the student throughout the play) in Act II, sarcastically: “Building villas! Prophesying that villa residents will turn into small freeholders!” A clear slap at Stolypin, whose reform of the Russian countryside would make peasants into small freeholders outside of communal restrictions. The place of the nobility here would be to correct both on the nature of the peasantry and their views on property, but, of course, none is forthcoming. As it turns out, Gaiv takes a job as a “bank clerk” and believes to be in “finance” as a result. Not only does he become part of the middle classes, he does not even get a chance to share their wealth. He views his position as a “clerk” as just another promotion to a different chin, having no conception of the disappearance of his class.
As Madame is leaving her house for Paris (her exile), she speaks to it, as a living thing: “Good bye, dear house; good bye, old life! Good bye, grandpa! Oh, think of what these walls have seen!” A passage that could have been taken straight from the early Gogol. The house, as the orchard, is a character and can be spoken too as a person; a very old and wise person.
The final analysis is both Herderian and Gogolian: mankind finds itself a home by humanizing its surroundings. Experience in a certain place and time promote this romantic and intelligent attachment to objects commonly referred to as inanimate. They are not: humanization creates a home. The orchard or the house are not mere objects to be exploited; but the scene of many years of experience; joys and sorrows. It has become an extension of the family, an extension of the personalities of madame and Gaiv (regardless of the latter’s inability to understand it). For the middle classes, objects are dissolved into financial value, while sentiment, even properly directed, is dismissed. But sentiment is what hold families, communities and nations together. Nations are actual moral people in that they too, have been the scene of and witness to many joys, sorrows, pains and pleasures: in short, the experience that translates mere objects into beloved treasurers. In modern times, this has been completely wiped out, surviving in occasional flights of fancy, and quickly snuffed out by vulgar practicality and utility. In “The Cherry Orchard” the house is a character, it has “seen” things. In Gogol’s “Old World Landowners” the old house speaks to its inhabitants through the squeaks of the hinges, or the creaks of the floor boards. It is in precisely these attachments that the eternal enemy of alienation is fought, and a home is created out of objects.