Sierra Prasada

Is there any production of The Cherry Orchard that has managed to satisfactorily resolve, in the author’s favor, the initial disagreement between Moscow Art Theatre director Constantin Stanislavski and Anton Chekhov? Stanislavski, on seeing the completed play script sometime in 1903, called the play a tragedy. Chekhov insisted that it was a comedy, even a farce. The play premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre on January 17, 1904, just six months before Chekhov’s death at age 44 from tuberculosis.

The productions I’ve seen (including three of those pictured, above) have tended to emphasize the blue notes – poignancy, nostalgia, melancholy, grief – and, as the action of the play unfolds, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine it staged as light entertainment, which demands and generally receives (in art, that is) a happy ending.

Chekhov’s final play revolves around the return of a Russian family to their estate after a long absence; they’ve fallen on hard times and are prepared to trust in God but refuse the help of man to save their ancestral home and their beloved cherry orchard from the auction block. In this excerpt (from the first act of Paul Schmidt’s emphatically American translation), Liubóv Ranyévskaya and her teenage daughter Anya, entourage in tow, have just decamped from the railroad station, late one night in May:

LIUBÓV ANDRÉYEVNA: I can’t believe I’m really here! (Laughs) I feel like jumping up and waving my arms in the air! (Covers her face with her hands) It’s still like a dream. I love this country, really I do, I adore it. I started to cry every time I looked out the train windows. (Almost in tears) But I do need my coffee! Thank you, Firs, thank you darling. I’m so glad you’re still alive.

FIRS [the family serf turned servant]: Day before yesterday.

GÁYEV [Liubóv's brother]: He doesn’t hear too well anymore.

LOPÁKHIN [businessman]: Time for me to go. I have to leave for Hárkov at five. I’m really disappointed; I was looking forward to seeing you, have a chance to talk. . . You look wonderful, just the way you always did.

PÍSCHIK [neighboring landowner]: (Breathes hard) Better than she always did. That Paris outfit . . . She makes me feel young again!

LOPÁKHIN: Your brother here thinks I’m crude, calls me a money grubber. That doesn’t bother me; he can call me whatever he wants. I just hope you’ll trust me the way you used to, look at me the way you used to…My God, my father slaved for your father and grandfather, my whole family worked for yours; but you, you treated me differently. You did so much for me I forgot about all that . . . I’ve got a great idea. Now listen, here’s how it works: your place here is fifteen miles from town, and it’s only a short drive from the train station. All you’ve got to do is clear out the old cherry orchard, plus that land down by the river, and subdivide! You lease the plots, build vacation homes, and I swear that’ll bring you in twenty-five thousand a year, maybe more.

GAYÉV: What an outrageous thing to say!

LIUBÓV ANDRÉYEVNA: Excuse me…Excuse me, I don’t think I quite understand.

LOPÁKHIN: You’ll get at least twenty-five hundred an acre! And if you start advertising right away, I swear to God come this fall you won’t have a single plot left. You see what I’m saying? Your troubles are over! Congratulations! The location is terrific; the river’s a real selling point. Only thing is, you’ve got to start clearing right away. Get rid of all the old buildings. This house, for instance, will have to go. You can’t get people to live in a barn like this anymore. And you’ll have to cut down the old cherry orchard.

LIUBÓV ANDRÉYEVNA: Cut down the cherry orchard? My dear man, you don’t understand! Our cherry orchard is a landmark! It’s famous for miles around!

Images: (clockwise from left) Judi Dench and Frederick Treves, 1981 BBC production; Zoë Wanamaker, The National Theatre, 2011; Dianne Wiest, Classic Stage Company, 2011; Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, The National, 2001; Moscow Art Theatre, ca. 1923.

A clip from the BBC staged 1962 production of The Cherry Orchard with Peggy Ashcroft as Liubóv Ranyévskaya, Judi Dench as Anya, Dorothy Tutin as Varya and John Gielgud as Gáyev.

Another clip from the BBC’s 1981 production with Judi Dench now playing Liubóv Ranyévskaya, Frederick Treves as Gáyev, Suzanne Burden as Anya and Paul Curran as Firs. This clip ends just as the excerpt from Monday’s post begins…

Around 1892, journal editor V.A. Tikhonov wrote to request some biographical information from Anton Chekhov, and the author’s reply appears in Janet Malcolm’s 2001 book, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey:

Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia – and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V.A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov's] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa.

My collections of stories are “Motley Stories,” “Twilight,” “Stories,” “Gloomy People,” and the novella “The Duel.” I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately.

I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me.

I grasped the secrets of love at age thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin.

However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.

A French Russophile coined the famous quote, “We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat,” and Nikolai Gogol likely had an influence on Chekhov, born 50 years after the realist pioneer.

But it is Chekhov’s overcoat – or, perhaps, his iconic pince-nez – from under which modern drama originally emerged, at least according to The New York Review of Books, reviewing the Classic Stage Company’s 2011 production of The Cherry Orchard. Writer Giles Harvey references a characteristic speech from the play in which Madame Ranyévskaya wordily rebukes her brother for his empty talk:

It is a typical moment that showcases Chekhov’s greatest artistic discovery, one without which much of twentieth century literature would be unimaginable: that plays and stories could be made out of life’s dross, the anti-drama and non-events that comprise so much of day-to-day life for most people.

Translator Paul Schmidt echoes the same idea in the introduction to his volume of Chekhov plays:

What Chekhov accomplished, in a kind of miraculous progression through those four last plays, was gradually to cut away the melodramatic moments of the ‘plot,’ or shift them offstage, leaving finally only his characters’ helpless, unheeding responses to those moments.

And suddenly the whole fabric of nineteenth-century theater collapses. The rule of causality, the idea that every act is subject to consequences, that morality is a matter of rectitude or retribution – all that vanishes . . . Chekhov’s own description of what he was up to is best: ‘What happens onstage should be just as complicated and just as simple as things are in real life. People are sitting at a table having dinner, that’s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.

There are few significant historical figures who cannot claim more than one biography, and the convenient fiction of a definitive biography enables readers to feel at once informed and pleasantly unburdened.

The title of “definitive” biography appears to be still up for grabs when it comes to Chekhov and, on a whim, I chose to read two biographies, both published in the mid-1980s, Henri Troyat’s life of Chekhov, translated from the French, and V.S. Pritchett’s Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free.

The equally prolific Russian-born French citizen Troyat and British author and critic Pritchett are fascinating men in their own right, and it’s clear why Chekhov’s life might have appealed to them. Both made their entrances around the turn of the century, Pritchett in 1900 and Troyat in 1911, and both fled their homelands for Paris, staking a claim to literary careers before they turned 30. Both were renowned, in part, for their short stories. And both enjoyed a longevity and productivity that Chekhov surely would have envied, living, writing and publishing into their mid-90s.

While Troyat’s title gives away nothing about his interpretation, Pritchett’s sympathy with Chekhov’s desire to view himself a “free artist” is palpable. Troyat steers clear of such epithets and tries to stay true to each stage of Chekhov’s life, tracking his development from a writer who wrote short and quick for the money to a committed artist, though one who could never quite bring himself to abandon his “wife” (medicine) for his “mistress” (literature). Pritchett clearly finds the emerging thread of Chekhov’s destiny more compelling, and his biography sets aside more time for the literature itself.

Both books nicely capture Chekhov’s voice by quoting liberally from his prodigious letters, but the differences between the two – they disagree, for instance, as to Chekhov’s dying words – point to the flexibility and limitations of biography. A couple of other illustrative examples:

• Troyat quotes Chekhov as saying: “When I was a child I had no childhood,” whereas Pritchett suggests that “Chekhov’s dark memories of his childhood are less concerned with himself than with the bad effects their severe upbringing had upon his older brothers,” who became disconsolate alcoholics.

• While Troyat recounts young Chekhov’s attempt to learn tailoring and the trousers he made for his brother that “turned out so tight that the family dubbed them the ‘macaroni trousers,’” Pritchett notes that Chekhov succeeded in “making a pair of trousers, fashionably narrow in the leg, for his second brother.”

To read more than one biography, then, forces one to acknowledge the insufficiency of any one volume in capturing more than a two-dimensional snapshot of the subject. A biography is, ultimately, an argument skillfully disguised as a story that conjures someone who might, plausibly, have been the subject; it does not chronicle what they were really like. (‘Really like’ to whom, anyway? we might well ask.)

Is it enough, then, to read two biographies? Why would it be when, in Chekhov’s case alone, there are dozens of biographical texts? Were the temptations of a coherent story less deeply felt, we might be more skeptical of the idea that the vast tapestry of a life can be reduced to a king-sized crazy quilt. As it is, we prefer the fiction of fact to the fact of fiction.

Image: Anton Chekhov, artist and date unknown.

Over at The Guardian, Philip Pullman, author of the splendid trilogy His Dark Materials reads his favorite Chekhov short story, The Beauties (online text).

A taste:

. . . but then I gradually forgot myself and surrendered entirely to the sensation of beauty. I no longer remembered the dreary step in the dust, no longer heard the flies buzzing, no longer tasted my tea. All I was conscious of was the beautiful girl standing on the other side of the table. My appreciation of her beauty was rather remarkable. It was not desire, not ecstasy, not pleasure that she aroused in me, but an oppressive yet agreeable melancholia, a sadness vague and hazy as a dream.

Listen to all 22 minutes here.

A so-called “problem” play bears little resemblance to a “problem child” – in the topsy-turvy realm of theater a problem becomes an invitation to limitless reinvention and amusement. No matter how many times the problem is “solved,” it begs a new solution to suit a new “now,” thus the enduring debate as to the proper mood of The Cherry Orchard, despite indications that some productions have satisfactorily resolved the most basic dilemma in the author’s favor.

A 1976 production, the cast of which included the young Meryl Streep (pictured above), “is not only a comedy, it is a comedy played as a tragic farce,” gushed Clive Barnes in The New York Times:

Because the players in this charade of decaying death are people rather than puppets you are touched, and because they are even clowns rather than people you are amused. When you are both amused and touched something very special happens to our hearts – they are uplifted to the giddy, bitter laughter of the gods.

Peter Marks, writing in 2002 about the only English-language film adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, neatly identifies the central challenge in adapting Chekhov: Characters’ “predicaments are often tragic and funny at the same time. In the wrong hands, the wry humor undercutting the sadness is lost, and all the tension melts away, leaving a stagnant puddle.”

Authorial intention, though it may loom large in the minds of some directors, clearly matters less when the author is no longer alive to be dragged red faced and shouting from the theater. An ideal Chekhov production today (and tomorrow) is, necessarily, a movement away from the original creation – from Russian into English (or another language), from parts written for specific actors in the Moscow Art Theater to sometimes radically new, contemporary incarnations, from the earliest naturalistically melancholy interpretations to “‘Alice in Wonderland’ absurdity”.

More adventurous adapators have ventured still further, exploring the wider circle of lives evoked by the play or those of the author himself and his family, such as Jovanka Bach’s Chekhov & Maria. In 2010, playwright Dan Rebellato described several such productions in The Guardian:

Helen Cooper’s portrait of the unhappy Mrs Vershinin, or Brian Friel, whose Afterplay imagines the meeting of Sonya from Uncle Vanya and Andrey from Three Sisters. Reza de Wet’s Three Sisters Two and Nic Ularu’s The Cherry Orchard Sequel place Chekhov’s characters in the tumult of the 1917 revolution. Other plays have wondered how Arkadina reacted to her son’s suicide and how the sisters would actually fare if they ever got to Moscow.

Rebellato himself penned Chekhov in Hell: “The first scene gives us the death of Chekhov; in the second, he is startled to wake from a 100-year coma and takes a bewildered tour of contemporary Britain, from lapdancing to reality TV, feng shui to Twitter.”

Image: Meryl Streep as the maid Dunyásha in the 1976 production of The Cherry Orchard at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

From an 1891 letter to writer and persistent admirer Lydia Avilova:

When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.

See more here and here.

From a letter to Aleksey Suvorin, one of Chekhov’s most significant publishers and benefactors:

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try to write a story about a young man – the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance – write about this young man who squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and who, one fine morning, finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.

Image: In the Classic Stage Company’s 2011 production of The Cherry Orchard, John Turturro starred as Lopákin, once the son of a serf and now a successful businessman.

In 2010, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth, The Guardian recalled his “brilliance in brief,” not only his own accomplishments but the advice he offered to other writers, the dictates he handed down:

The most famous of these is commonly known as Chekhov’s Gun, which he defined in a letter to Lazarev-Gruzinsky, his one-time co-writer, in November 1889: “one should not put a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” he wrote. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one, it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” The essence of the metaphor is clear: economy is everything.

Chekhov didn’t write mystery stories, so he had no reason to make use of red herrings, which serve the opposite function. He also had little needs for guns in his own life, since he didn’t enjoy hunting. Nor did he always conform to his own advice: In the second act of The Cherry Orchard, the clown-like Yepikhódov brandishes a loaded revolver. It’s not giving away much to point out that he never uses it; such a death would, of course, have carried the play into melodrama and away from the “anti-drama” of real life.

Just another reason it’s best to call them principles, not rules.

Image: Still from the 2010 film Anton Chekhov’s The Duel.