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Carlos Bardalez
Professor Lipscomb
LIT 4930
4 May 2010
Tragicomically Signifying in The Cherry Orchard
A worldview or weltanschauung is the framework through which an individual or group
interprets and approaches reality; it carries an overarching philosophy about life and the
universe. For Russia, that weltanschauung has always been its literature, which is the prism
through which its reflective society gazes upon itself. From Pushkin to Tolstoy, the Russian
people contemplates its humanity through an austere yet cynical historicity that aspires as it fails,
only to keep aspiring anew. Chekhov contributes to that Russian story through his very
recognizable cherry orchard, a sad symbol of loss and sacrifice. In it he reveals the universals of
his people, presenting a new conception of drama and literature for the world to recognize and
embrace.
The Cherry Orchard, since its first performance on stage in 1904 directed by
Stanislavsky, has been subjected to multiple theatrical interpretations. Unlike Chekhov, who
asserted that his play was a comedy, Stanislavsky appreciated it as a tragedy and presented it
thus to its first audience. This directorial vision by Stanislavsky should not be surprising given
that he descended from a wealthy prominent Russian family, which could afford his privileged and often experimental - education and dramatic innovations, some of which are now household
methods to the stage (Anton Chekhov 129). After Stanislavsky, going into the Soviet Era and the
creation of the USSR, the play was often presented as a comedy, where Lopakhin’s ascendancy
above the landed aristocracy came to be seen as a socialist triumph that was much in keeping
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with the revolutionary zeitgeist of the times. The switch back and forth throughout the 20th
century between comedic and tragic renditions of the play was caused by the constantly changing
ideologies; and the disjointedness of the play‘s characters, together with the ambiguity of the
symbolic themes presented against the back-wall of modern history, proved to be malleable,
thereby lending themselves to such reinterpretations.
Nevertheless, it was Chekhov’s genial vision what placed such pliability in the
characters, if not fragmentation, making the comedic bleed out of the tragic. What occurs in The
Cherry Orchard is nothing other than an artistic synthesis that marks an evolution in theater. An
evolution beyond the classic tragedy and comedy toward a tragicomic manifestation of being that
is all the more faithful to the human condition for being so transcendental in its view of its self.
Through his play, Chekhov articulates a worldview out of the Russian cultural conflict of his
time that speaks to the universal; this worldview mourns a loss as it expects a rebirth, blending
tragic signifiers with a comedic drive for continuity he shaped the mindset of the theater to come,
presenting possibility in detachment within a new tragicomic perspective.
The first act, which carries the greater bulk of exposition, presents the tensions and
difficulties of the characters. Those tensions and difficulties seem to be reiterated and
embellished upon in the following acts by the added complexity of the characters presenting their
stories. In this way each character seems to spread its enclosed petals as the play progresses. It
is more fruitful to show each character in isolation from the others, because they themselves
seem detached from one another. So, instead of looking at each act or at each interactive
development between characters one after the other, it seems more advantageous, given this
particular play, to see each character as he or she makes the audience witness an exercise in
alienating characterization.
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Lopakhin, in the first act, exposes his peasant origins and his susceptibility to them. His
nostalgia is connected to Andreyevna through a fond memory of kindness. His difficult
beginning makes him feel natural in the present, where he is an accomplished and fortunate man.
Moreover, he is in such a constant hurry that he seems to want to already leap into the future,
like when he nonchalantly mentions to Andreyevna: “As you know, the cherry orchard is to be
sold to pay your debts… you must tear down all the outbuildings… and this house, which is
worthless, cut down the old cherry orchard-” (803). He mentions this with an impatient tone, not
considering the emotional bonds the owners have for the place. He would give them a deadline
with this possible source of income, so that the tension is presented for those whose interests are
at stake, but there is simply no determination from the part of Andreyevna or her brother. Hence
Lopakhin must continue, like the others, in his individual presentation and build up of personal
history, emotion, and intention, apart and misunderstood.
When Lopakhin next appears he simply continues to push for the same resolution, the
practical sense of profit from land development, but his solutions seem “so vulgar” (809) for
Andreyevna and her ilk. This is because he is not conversing with their history, only with his
own. His history is about overcoming the past, theirs is about maintaining it. Their experiences
of the past divided them by class conflict and delineation. This reflects the duality of Russian
society before them, which had bunched the gentry and peasantry together but kept a divide. In
the present time of the play, as in the present social revolution of Russia, where there no longer
were to exists such a divide, there could only be the “individual” struggling to become what
seems to be a decaying superior, and that is what Lopakhin inauspiciously attempts to become.
He is a simple man, who confuses Shakespeare characters and does not show much appreciation
for taste or learning. His aim seems only the accumulation of wealth and the stability that brings.
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He does not know the privileged fruits of aristocracy, the learning and better things in life though he would have the means to gain them, he would not have the ideals to want to attain
them. His tragic sense lies in his failure to ideate happiness or passion out of that wealth; he
represents mere industriousness without purpose for the enjoyment of life, but from there stems
his comedic sense as well, from his vast success in acquisition and constant upward social
mobility.
After Lopakhin buys the place he becomes most conversant with the histories of both
social classes: with his, that is with “the fruit of your imagination, hidden in the darkness of
uncertainty” (816); and with Andreyevna’s, when telling her: “there is no turning back now.
(With tears.) Oh, if only all this could be over quickly, if somehow our discordant, unhappy life
could be changed!” (816). Nonetheless, when Lopakhin returns from that digression to the
present, he continues to be in a similar detached state, like the others. This is why he cannot
propose to Varya, because she is part of the aristocratic ideal, a romantic figure, that he could
never recognize as part of his realist world. Therefore , he must keep traveling, working,
moving, in his present tense. Only through Andreyevna could he have reached Varya, but it is
too late and history has severed them in more ways than one. The tragicomic sense of a “happy
ending” is achieved ironically in this character, because one does take a perfect conception of
social reform from Chekhov through this character, but there is, rather, a hint of distrust left for
the hyper-progressive and eager economic revolutionary who does not see what is being
overturned, cut down or sent to its grave, irreverently.
Meanwhile, at the opposite side from Lopakhin stands Andreyevna, whose character
development, though in a tragic path, is endowed with a different form of continuity by the end.
As the main object of nostalgia in the play and the central ego from whom everyone seems to
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take their cues, Andreyevna exists as a crystallization of the past inside the present. Her
paralysis in her glorious past is presented from the start by Chekhov: “I used to sleep here when I
was little… (Weeps.) And now, like a child, I…” (801). Indeed, like a child she would fain
become capricious and refuse responsibility and the passage of time, leading everyone along that
path. Her constant weeping, instead of arising pity, eventually becomes a farcical light motif for
being so recurrent. But, most importantly, of course, is her individualistic detachment from
reality and the other characters in order to enter that nostalgic past existence that brings so much
embellishment to her development. When Lopakhin tell her of the cottages, she claims not to
understand what he says and retorts by saying: “If there is one thing in the whole province that is
interesting, not to say remarkable, it’s our cherry orchard” (803). She certainly refuses to
acknowledge that the orchard would not have a maintained any value in and of itself. She then
diverts the conversation toward Paris and crocodiles. So, she would continue to do with many
other different tangents, whenever the topic of selling the orchard arose.
Andreyevna is the principal connector to the cherry orchard, the great fortune squandered
whose overabundance lay scattered around her. She becomes the character parallel of the
wasteful, yet beautiful, symbol that is the orchard: “in the kitchen the old people get nothing but
dried peas, while I squander money foolishly… (Drops the purse, scattering gold coins.) There
they go…” (807). The way Chekhov presents her is almost wholly farcical, were it not for her
traumatizing experiences of losing a husband, then child, and attempted suicide due to an abusive
lover. Those things she calls “sins,“ namely her squandering and indulgence in sorrow and
spending for the sake of others, are the way Chekhov lets us know that no class is spared the
misfortunes of living and that these can be comedic as well, because, after all, survival,
continuity, is paramount to all. Andreyevna, like the others, is alone in her unique mode of
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struggle. Not only does she not understand what is needed of her, but no one else understands,
not even her daughters.
As the central memory character of the play, Andreyevna would have tipped the whole
construction of the play in favor of tragedy had it ended with Act three, but the developments of
Act four are what refurbish the characters with a resilience becoming of real life and
tragicomedy. There, Gayev, Andreyevna’s brother, feels quite relieved now that the whole
orchard affair is settled and Anya is ready to begin a new life of learning. Unexpectedly,
Andreyevna, who has not experienced anything resembling recognition, is somewhat relieved as
well, but maintains her same modus operandi: “I sleep well… I shall go to Paris and live there on
the money your great-aunt sent to buy the estate - long live Auntie! - but that money won’t last
long” (818). Her earnest departure signifies a loss, but only relative to the symbolic and
nostalgic, she does not fall with the house, she leaves it.
The third principal character that informs the tragicomic message of the play is Trofimov,
the “eternal student” (805). His puer ideology is found distasteful by both sides of the
tragicomic equation, namely Lopakhin and Andreyevna. Trofimov, Grisha’s former tutor, comes
last in the order of appearance and carries with him a farcical element of self-admonition. When
he says, about the intelligentsia, “ We’d do better to remain silent” (810), he means himself.
Nevertheless, he is the one analyst who points out the symbolic significance of the orchard, who
has sacrificed and profited from it in a social context: “Don’t you see that from every cherry
tree… human beings are peering at you? To posses living souls - that has corrupted all of you”
(811). His moral magnitude, throughout, is elevating, but his lack of personal history makes
him, like the world he speaks of, theoretical. The irony of his life, the perceived notion that he
knows how to correctly live it, but has not yet done it, is tragicomic.
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Andreyevna calls him off on his philosophical affectation about the future that must be
embraced, by pointing out the great losses and suffering he has not yet experienced, unlike her.
She asks him to take pity on her history, which symbolically, is the common history of the
Russian people, to which Trofimov replies: “You know I feel for you with all my heart” (814).
That statement, Andreyevna say, “should have been said differently” (814), because he is,
actually, not sympathetic in his tone; he is not conversant with her history nor does he see its
value to everyone. Trofimov does not appreciate Andreyevna as part of his past, unlike
Lopakhin, who holds a clear relation to her that breaks through in places. Trofimov is never
materialized as part of the drama and exists, ironically, as a surface criticism of the revolutionary
ideologies of the time.
The last character who helps carry the play to its irresistible end is Varya. Her piety and
loyalty functions as a synthesizing character between the classes. Being the adopted child and
aspiring laborer, shows in her the possibility of connection between the social strata. She holds
the keys to everything in the house and it is significant that she should be an orphan, because it
speaks of the irresolute conception of what the new Russia should be and where it should come
from. She shares in the historical memory of Andreyevna, and is protective of her and her estate,
but also has a practical sense of how it should be kept, what must be sacrificed. But her piety,
her prayers to God, are only to keep the status quo of her upper class, thereby empty.
It is significant that Lopakhin should quote Hamlet, misrepresenting Ophelia when there
is talk of the possibility of his wedding with Varya: “Aurelia, get thee to a nunnery… O Nymph
in thy orisons, be al my sins remember’d!” (811). In his mispronunciation is implied a
disconnect between their classes, as well as the fact that Hamlet seems to reject Ophelia before
killing her father. The particular allusions to the “nunnery” and “orison” (prayer), bring to mind
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Varya’s faith, which lies along her social class. Further on, when Lopakhin fails to propose to
Varya, she falls in tears because that was her last chance at keeping her mother’s old way of life and her own, for that matter. Lopakhin is indecisive, non-idealistic, and does not empathize with
their plight. The synthesis that Varya and Lopakhin’s wedding could have represented does not
draw to a close, but this does not make for a tragic motif, because she never really loved him in
the first place. Such an estrangement is actually a felicitous resolution, because, as a
tragicomedy, the play is about resilience, about how people may take a long time to fall, but pick
themselves up, immediately, so as not to seem undignified, which is funny to an extent.
In the four characters aforementioned, one can find much room for both comedic and
tragic performance possibilities. There is much room for mournful or comic exaggeration in all
the characters’ vagrant speeches. The comedic aspect of this tragicomedy lies in the possibilities
of its characters. Their individualities, though dispossessed of their initial conditions, continue to
aspire for more. This worldview is closer to survivalism, rather than optimism. Chekhov,
reflecting on Russia, envisions the human condition as a process rather than an end. As with his
prose, he did not marry one philosophy or the other, like say, a tragic sensibility, but simply put
man on stage as he saw him in reality: man inventing himself through his history and making
absolute sense of it in spite of everyone else. As Lyudmila Parts would argue in her book, The
Chekhovian Intertext:
Chekhov’s aesthetics, on the other hand, incorporate the idea of the missing norm
into the very fabric of his realist method… ‘Showing life truthfully’ [Chekhov] is
a constitutive part of 19th century realism, but Chekhov’s emphasis is on the
method (‘truthfully’) rather than the content (truth): to show life truthfully is not
the same as to show the truth about life; to enable the search for the norm is not
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the same as to champion one definite idea of it. (Parts 74-5)
Indeed, what Chekhov does is extract life through a throat-straining straw, but it is the symbolic
essence of it. He does not engage the ideologies and historicity of his times in their exactitude,
but his audience does. He conspires with universals, which do not fail to find their
correspondence in any given human historical era, but Chekhov’s communication proves its
independence in that it never fits perfectly the mindset of the ideologue.
Chekhov speak transcendentally, to the tragicomedy of life, to tears that discover a smile.
He is ruthless in his conception, in his treatment of the audience. He wants them to experience
and feel how he feels, hopeful in the midst of falling pieces that no longer fit. “The function of
the ‘cherry orchard’ motif in the cultural memory of the 20th century: a metaphor of beauty and
loss” (Parts 116). There is an individualist vs. a collectivist view of the audience toward the
cherry orchard. The individualist sees the individual’s loss of property at the greedy hands of
another; the collectivist sees proletariat purposefulness and sacrifice for the sake of progress
(Parts 117). During the Stalin Era, the play was predominantly a comedy, but starting in the
1960’s with the heightened intellectual awareness of the individual and his inability to accept
loss, the psychological aspect of the play trumped the political vision (Parts 120). The can serve
both attitudes because it contains symbolically universal modern tensions.
Furthermore, it is highly relevant that this play should converse with Hamlet, because it
too has an element of self-defeating reluctance; of individual determinism vs. societal duty. The
central individualist of both plays exalts him or herself in preparation for the fall. The paralysis
of both central characters in Chekhov and Shakespeare is relate to a cultural myth, which
involves the individual in conflict with the collective as it is traditionally done since Oedipus
Rex. Yet, in Hamlet, the individual is bound by duty and he must deny his self-determinism,
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though ever so reluctantly. Correlatively, in The Cherry Orchard, the individual is bound by
socio-economic restructuring and she must deny her worldview. In this sense, Chekhov’s play
attains a greater scope than Shakespeare, socially, though without the religious connotations
shown in Hamlet. In Chekhov, as in modern times, the parlance is secular, and greatly more
admissible to the modern mind, where the affairs of the faith have often been replaced by socioeconomic matters both philosophical and practical.
This cultural myth represented in The Cherry Orchard has also extended its reaches into
the academic culture of drama, where Chekhov’s influence acts in the same way that Hamlet
does, with a subversive counter-interpretative rationale. The performance possibilities of The
Cherry Orchard, the fact that it may become a comedy, makes the play a genuine incomplete
text. “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”
(Pritchett 222). The floating characters who do not seem to know how to communicate with
each other carry a greater performance value because the space of their communication must be
filled in by the performance of the actor, who will give them relational weight, finally, on stage.
Where Hamlet discusses impassively and irresolutely with the self, Chekhov introduces semiinterdependent selves with even more fragmentary spoken experiences, who can only reach out
halfway to each other because the other half relies on the gestures given by an actor’s
performative actions and the isolating history of the characters.
From that performative space created by the playwright, we can still recognize his
comedic intention, which is an effect of his worldview, his consideration that man must always
be at odds with something: “In Chekhov’s world a comic effect is most often the result of a
simple confrontation or collision, a superimposition or juxtaposition, of incompatibles” (Kataev
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42). Man, as Chekhov might have seen him, is a creature that cannot, or will not, live in
communal peace, though that is what he would claim to desire most - this is the irony of man and
life. Moreover, the flux of reality and society, which is driven by other men, makes it impossible
for an individual to find a stable nook in existence. “Comedy arises when a person who follows
one system of ideas is incapable of mastering any other” (Kataev 44). But this is also an
approximation to what is tragedy. Kataev, who reviewed more widely the prose works of
Chekhov might have failed to acknowledge the nuances of theater, its need for magnitude.
Nonetheless, Kataev seems to have meticulously catalogued Chekhov’s prose characters enough
to have arrived at those comedic determinations. In a way, Chekhov seems to have translated the
roundness of his prosaic characters’ construction into drama, creating an uncommon effect that
excursions upon a character-driven approach, rather than a plot-driven one.
Kataev speaks generally about Chekhov’s works, stating: “In Chekhov there are not
negations without an affirmation, just as there are no affirmations without a negation. It is from
seizing upon one kind of general conclusion that the most typical mistakes in interpreting
Chekhov may be said to derive” (Kataev 168). Moreover, in the short stories no character ever
gets a hold of the absolute truth, they can only express a very personal view. Kataev sees how
the writer’s heroes miss the general conclusions: “the opinions, behavior, and position of any
character are to be seen as particular instances of more general phenomena. They are examined
from a higher point of view, as material for the author’s comprehensive analysis” (Kataev 168).
In other words, not character alone is able to express what is true about the author’s aim, because
Chekhov appoints much of the revelation to the phenomena surrounding him and to the other
characters interactions as well, “the strange dislocated sentences, each so erratic and yet cutting
out the shape so firmly, of the realism, of the humor, of the artistic unity” (Woolf par. 5) . As in
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his prose, his drama expresses truth in parts, in fragments that become comprehensive in the end.
Truth is never central, it is always subjective and particular in Chekhov’s works; this peculiarity
is what approximates his works closer to real life.
Giving the playwright the position of influence he has gained through the years and
literary movements, Kataev comments that the balance of negatives and positives in Chekhov
was often misinterpreted by Modernists, in that they only saw the disparaged individual
presented by himself unable to understand his reality. The critic affirms that Chekhov
“determined the conclusions of many artists in the twentieth century” (Kataev 169), but that he
aimed at a harmony of measure between parts, unlike the Modernists who were ever searching
only using a central self. Chekhov’s way of portrayal is not wholly existentially disparaging and
self-indulgent, it has a Russian feel for survival, “one of the most frequent and definite
conclusions is that in spite of everything, one should not do nothing, that it is impossible not to
try to make something out ‘in this world,’ in which most of the time ‘you have to make sense of
anything’” (Kataev 170). Chekhov is hopeful, yet a defeatist, a stance in The Cherry Orchard
that is closer to the contemporary sensibilities of Post-Modernists, with even the same absurdist
tinge that, in spite of itself, aims at harmony.
The tragicomic approach that is now widely used by the best recognized contemporary
playwrights, owes something to Chekhov’s vision. The Cherry Orchard, as “the most celebrated
production of 20th century world drama” (Kataev 268), is a play that has spoken to the modern
mind for over a century, perhaps because of its resolve to survive in spite of itself, or vice versa.
The play is a conundrum of ideals that carry the sensibility of the western mind, perhaps the
world, not just Russia; and its tragicomic reality gives us that little shimmer of hope in a world of
uncertainty that is really all one needs to continue.
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The characters have very outward comedic characteristics, like their quick mood changes.
Switching from the trivial to the emotional, make them seem like comic actors going through
their repartee. The social parodies that Trofimov and Lopakhin represent also form part of the
comedic set up that finalizes in the ambiguous anti-comedic climax of Firs. The critic Donald
Rayfield redefined the play in his book, The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, taking
into account those typical comic vices and farces, the non-sequitur dialogue:
And the spectator will realize that he has been misled by the initial stock comic
situation: two unmatched couples, two older people whose vices block a marriage,
the desperate need for a financial windfall, servants who exceed their duty. He
will realize that because he has been misled by traditional expectations that are
thwarted, this is a comedy in which the joke is against the audience, an anticomedy. (94)
The disconnect in communication between the characters of The Cherry Orchard, “disunity, selfabsorption, the inability to look at things from another person’s point of view: these are what
Chekhov sees in human relations and is demonstrating here” (Kataev 270). This view of
humanity is both tragic, comic, and humane in its compassionate acceptance of it. “It is
generally accepted that the task of any theater production of The Cherry Orchard is to strike the
right balance between the sand and the comic” (Kataev 280). All the characters believe and
indulge in their own way of casting what is “truth.” They mimic one another’s convictions and
bewilderments along class lines and existential lines, meaning that their own sense of confusion
is echoed, constantly. “Though the leap from one thought to another was so wide as to produce a
sense of dangerous dislocation, all the separate speeches and characters combined to create a
single impression of an overwhelming kind” (Woolf par. 3). Lopakhin, the one who would seem
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to own the comedic result, is stunned by the turn of events and apologetic for his fortune:
“Lopakhin embodies one of Chekhov’s basic and earliest creative themes: that of life’s hostility,
insuperable complexity, and incomprehensibility for the ordinary (‘average’) Russian” (Kataev
286). Indeed, Lopakhin is apologetic because he does not understand his good fortune - he does
not know what to do with it. There is an emptiness articulated in his apology, a sense that he will
never know the value others had given to that which he acquired.
The possibility of a future and the lack of a true communication between individuals
make the play a comedy in the eyes of Chekhov. Things do not come to an absolute standstill for
the characters; even in the nonchalant treatment of Firs, there is a symbolic signpost or point of
departure from where the other characters can proceed with their lives. According to Richard
Gilman: “The Cherry Orchard is an action of the “creating” mind, not the product of some
reproductive faculty; it’s an amendment and corrective to our ordinary, congealed, codified, and
presumptuous knowledge” (Gilman 207). Gilman unequivocally sees the live action potentiality
of the character’s speeches as open ended invitations for artistic interpretation; hence the mobile
“creating” rather than the settled adjective “creative” is applied to the action that is the play. He
refuses to see the play as a social representative of Russia and its times, but, rather, he sees it as a
poetic work of universal appeal, where loss is as ambiguous as good fortune and reality is a
tapestry of self-directing signs that mean ever so much. And that is real life, as Chekhov would
have it: people barricaded in their own stories, who read into their minute experiences and single
past interactions a world of hope to come.
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Works Cited
Ben-Shaul, Daphna. “Potential Life: Modeling the Void in Two Productions of The Cherry
Orchard.” Theatre Research International 34.2 (2009): 146-52. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.
Gilman, Richard. Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening Into Eternity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Print.
Kataev, Vladimir. If Only We Could Know!: An Interpretation of Chekhov. Trans. Harvey
Pitcher. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Klapuri, Tintti. “Temporality and Historicity in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.” ScandoSlavica 54 (2008): 50-61. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.
Parts, Lyudmila. The Chekhovian Intertext : Dialogue With a Classic. Columbus : Ohio State
University Press, 2008. Print.
Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. Print.
Rayfield, Donald. The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy. New York : Twayne
Publishers, 1994. Print.
Reid, John McKellor. “Polemic as Parting Advice: The ‘Argument of The Cherry Orchard.’”
Modern Drama 48.1 (2005): 30-54. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Feb. 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. “Review of The Cherry Orchard.” New Statesman 24 Jul. 1920: 446-447.
Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 55 (1995). Literature Resource
Center. Web. 29 Feb. 2010.