in the text itself. Chekhov had ended the second act with a hauntingly comic little scene about loss and lostness, set almost in the dark; Stanislavsky wanted instead to end it with Trofimov’s bright “premonitions of happiness.” He describes the moment in My Life in Art:
. . . when we dared to suggest to Anton Pavlovich that a whole scene be shortened, the whole end of the second act of The Cherry Orchard, he became very sad and so pale that we were ourselves frightened at the pain we had caused him. But after thinking for several minutes, he managed to control himself and said:
“All right, shorten it.”
Never after did he say a single word to us about this incident. And who knows, perhaps he would have been justified in reproaching us, because it may very well be that it was the will of the stage director and not his own which shortened a scene that was excellently written . . . After the stormy scene with the young people, such a lyric ending lowered the atmosphere of the act and we could not lift it up again. I suppose that it was mainly our own fault, but it was the author who paid for our inability.¶
A new copy of the play, including that revision and some further small changes, was submitted to the censors in January and approved for production. It was published in June 1904 and has remained the standard text for Russian productions and for virtually all the translations and adaptations the play has seen over the past century and more.
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The premiere of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904 has been called “one of the most influential productions of any play in the history of world theater.”** In a recent interview, the British playwright Tom Stoppard, who made an English adaptation of the play, referred to Chekhov as “one of only a handful of people who originated the modern theater.”†† But what Chekhov actually produced in The Cherry Orchard remains puzzling. Is it a tragedy, a melodrama, a comedy, “in places even a farce,” as Chekhov himself once said? Stanislavsky staged it in a serious naturalistic manner, with an invisible fourth wall, real furniture, windows, drapes, and all sorts of accompanying sounds (birds, farm animals). Vsevolod Meyerhold, who began his career in the Moscow Art Theatre, went on to a more abstract “lyrical-mystic” interpretation of the play under the influence of Russian Symbolism. Soviet productions emphasized the play’s historical and political aspects: the inevitable decay of the aristocracy, the foreshadowing of the revolution. There have been nostalgic “upper-class” interpretations, gloomy sentimental interpretations, radical Marxist interpretations, absurdist interpretations, occasionally even “tragi-farcical” interpretations. The running time has varied from ninety minutes to as much as six hours. There are no major theaters in the world that have not staged the play. The history of its adaptations and transformations amounts to a history of twentieth-century theater.
What is it about The Cherry Orchard that makes it so compelling and at the same time so elusive? Much of it has to do with Chekhov’s innovative composition, its essential indirectness, which implies much more than the words express. This had always been Chekhov’s way, in his stories as well as his plays, but in The Cherry Orchard it reaches final perfection. What little action there is—the auction of the estate—takes place offstage. The dialogue is not directed by a central conflict or the unfolding of a plot. It is all abrupt shifts, interruptions, non sequiturs; it goes off in different directions, like the bank shots and caroms of Gaev’s billiards. A common tendency in productions of the play (and therefore in translations or adaptations) has been to over-determine the interpretation in one way or another, to confine it to the elegiac, or the political, or the satirical, or the absurd. The essence of Chekhov’s art, on the contrary, is inclusion and simultaneity, the rapid shift from one tone to another, the mockery of the most moving moments with slapstick parodies of them—as, for instance, in the series of failed courtships that runs all through the play. The Russian critic Vladimir Kataev wrote in his book on Chekhov: “The principle of permanently changing genre is all-inclusive in The Cherry Orchard. Time and again the comic (the limited and relative) is deepened so that we feel sympathy, or, conversely, the serious is brought down to the level of obvious illogicality or repetition.”‡‡
These constant shifts require a high degree of attention to detail, from the audience, but first of all from the director and the actors. A good example of what Chekhov expected of them is given in an anecdote from Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art. Stanislavsky was preparing for the title role in Uncle Vanya, whom he conceived as a typical country gentleman and estate manager—a rough-clad horseman wearing tarred boots and a cap and carrying a horsewhip. Chekhov became terribly indignant at that. He said that everything was clearly described in the script and that Stanislavsky must not have read it! Stanislavsky looked through the script, but all he could find was a stage direction for Vanya’s first entrance in Act One: “Sits on the bench and straightens his foppish tie.”
“Of course,” Chekhov explained to him: “Listen, he has a wonderful tie; he is an elegant, cultured man. It’s not true that our landed gentry go about in boots smeared with tar. They are wonderful people. They dress well. They order their clothes in Paris. It’s all written down.”
“This little remark,” Stanislavsky adds repentantly, “uncovered the drama of contemporary Russian life.”§§
The Cherry Orchard is a fine texture of such revealing details, which give inward dimension and inward movement to people who might otherwise be taken for the stock characters of melodrama. Lopakhin is a case in point. He could be seen, and has sometimes been played, as a typical crude kulak, a money-grubbing peasant turned merchant. That is the social stereotype. But Chekhov warned Stanislavsky against it. At the end of October 1903, he wrote:
When I was creating the role of Lopakhin, it was your acting I had in mind . . . It is true that Lopakhin is a merchant, but he is in every sense of the word a decent man; he must be presented as a wholly dignified, intelligent individual, not remotely petty or capricious, and it seemed to me that this role, which is central to the play, would be a brilliant one for you.¶¶
The complexity of Lopakhin’s attitude toward the cherry orchard itself, if we pay attention to it, reveals the many-sidedness of his character.
Stanislavsky tended to draw out the production of the play, to linger over its tender moments, in his elegiac interpretation. Chekhov wrote in protest to his wife that the fourth act, “which should last twelve minutes at the most, takes forty minutes in your production.” The high comedy of the play depends, rather, on the quick succession of its shifts of tone and level. These shifts occur not only between characters, but within them—most importantly perhaps in Ranevskaya, who not only owns the cherry orchard but identifies herself with it. Nemirovich described her as “half Paris, half cherry orchard,” but her character is much richer than his quip suggests. Chekhov commented to his wife, who first played the role, “Only death can subdue a woman like that.”
Ranevskaya and Lopakhin are both central to the play. Socially they are opposites, the declining aristocrat and the rising merchant, but Chekhov is interested not in their social differences, but in the human situation that unites them. He makes that clear from the very first scene. And the same is true for all the characters. One thing that unites them is the cherry orchard itself, which is far bigger and far more than an ordinary plantation of fruit trees. They all come rushing into its presence in the first act; in the last act they all disperse again as the axe begins to fall. Having watched the play, we are left with all of them, with each of these separate lives, as Chekhov’s pitiless but compassionate art has brought them together.
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This edition of The Cherry Orchard is unusual in that it includes translations (not adaptations) of two complete texts of the play: the script that Chekhov gave to the Moscow Art Theatre in early December 1903, which was his final version; and the script as revised by Stanislavsky and his colleagues for the 1904 premiere, which became the standard version. As we worked on the translation of the standard text, we became interested in what exactly Chekhov had originally given to the theater. We found the differences fascinating and important enough to justify printing full translations of both versions—with the hope that