Chekhov: A Biography

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 all: “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.

The matching of time present and time past gives the play the density and intricacy of a novel; the play is the most novelized of Chekhov’s plays because the people talk it into existence and because no one listens. It is a farce because the people are a disordered chorus who have lost their gods and invent themselves. They are a collective farewell, and that is what moves us. As Professor Rayfield has written, the play is also Chekhov’s farewell to Russia and his genius.

There was the usual trouble, especially with Stanislavsky, but even with Nemirovich-Danchenko, when rehearsals began. The premiere was on January 17, 1904. Chekhov was too ill to go to it but he was taken, against his will, to see the end of the third act. The occasion was arranged as the celebration of his twenty-five years as a writer. Chekhov loathed celebrations and listening to speeches. A journalist wrote:

He stood in the middle of the stage, tall and haggard, stooping and fidgeting with his hands, in a short-tailed morning coat, rather short trousers, with dishevelled hair and gray beard. Someone in the gallery called out kindly, “Sit down,” but there was no chair on the stage.

He was with Olga and in February she described how on a sunny day, though the frost was hard, they took a trip by train into the country and came back by sleigh; he loved the white plains gleaming in the sun and the crunch of the runners on the smooth snow. The Russo-Japanese war had started and Chekhov was planning to go to the front as a doctor in June if he felt well enough.

“What is the meaning of life?” Olga asked in a letter when he was back in Yalta. He replied: “It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot and nothing more is known.”

In Yalta he lay in bed, emaciated, almost unrecognizable, and suffering great pain in his stomach, to which the disease had traveled. His doctor advised him to go to the German spa of Badenweiler in the Black Forest. It was plain that he would never return to Russia. This would be the nomad’s last trip. Olga traveled with him to Berlin; then on they went to the spa and they stayed in a guest house. The German doctors turned him upside down, he said, but the routine of treatment was “pleasant.” He was given an enormous amount of butter to eat. For a time his health improved, and by the middle of June he wrote to his sister—to whom he sent regular bulletins—that his weight was increasing, not by ounces but by pounds, and that he was able to go for walks in the sun. But Chekhov and Olga had to leave the guest house because the owners feared a death would drive away other guests. The couple moved to a cosy room at an hotel, and he would sit on the balcony watching the crowds going to the post office to collect letters. “That means everyone can read,” he wrote. “When will our peasants in Russia be like that? There is more talent in Russian villages: in Germany there is no talent but there is order and honesty.”

The doctor thought that Chekhov’s heart was bad, but that his lungs were strong enough to last for another four to six months. Chekhov was already talking of returning to Russia by way of Trieste and Lake Como, even of joining an expedition to the Arctic! But he clearly knew he would die much earlier for he sent a check to a Berlin bank and asked for the money to be made out to his wife’s name.

A few hours before he died, on July 2, 1904, Chekhov was telling Olga a story about an hotel packed with fat Englishmen and Americans who one evening discovered that the cook had left and there was no dinner. Olga was laughing at his account of how each of the guests reacted to this. A few hours later he was gasping for breath. They were going to send for oxygen but Chekhov said he would be dead before it came, so a bottle of champagne was brought. He sipped it and soon began to ramble and he evidently had one of those odd visions that he had evoked in Ward 6. “Has the sailor gone?” he asked. What sailor? Perhaps his sailor in Gusev? Then he said in Russian, “I am dying,” then in German, “Ich sterbe,” and died at once. Olga said his face suddenly looked very young, contented and “almost happy.” Very strangely, she had not expected him to die.

The journey back to Moscow and the funeral had elements of farce that would have delighted Chekhov; Gorky was infuriated. The coffin had been put into a goods wagon labeled Fresh Oysters, and in Moscow the mourners got mixed up with another funeral, that of a General Keller of Manchuria, to the sound of a military band. Part of the small crowd mourning for Chekhov followed the wrong procession, “That is how we treat our great writers,” Gorky wrote.

Chekhov was buried beside his father’s grave.