[Krutch was one of America's most respected literary critics. Noteworthy among his works are The American Drama since 1918 (1939), in which he analyzed the most important dramas of the 1920s and 1930s, and "Modernism" in Modern Drama (1953), in which he stressed the need for twentieth-century playwrights to infuse their works with traditional humanistic values. In the following review of a performance of The Cherry Orchard, Krutch offers the play as evidence of Chekhov's genius and singularity as a dramatist.]

For the third new production of its season the Civic Repertory Theater has chosen The Cherry Orchard of Chekhov and has made of the play, familiar as it is, by far the most interesting of the three. It is true that here, as usual, Miss Le Gallienne's production leaves something to be desired—that the limitations, financial and other, of her enterprise preclude the possibility of perfect finish, and that her sorely tried company is called upon by the exigencies of the repertory to perform feats of versatility beyond their capacity. It is true, furthermore, that neither her own good performance in the role of the self-effacing Varya nor that of Alla Nazimova (guest for the occasion) as the charmingly incompetent mistress of the orchard is enough to dispel that somewhat impromptu air which often marks the production at this theater. And yet the intelligence of the direction, coupled with the intelligence of the play, is sufficient to make The Cherry Orchard delightful to all those capable of seeing below a surface not quite so smooth as that to which Broadway is accustomed, and of relishing the delicately humorous genius of the author.

Important novelists have often been seduced by promises of fame and money to try their hands at the stage, but they have very rarely enriched either themselves or the drama. Chekhov stands almost alone among the great writers of fiction who have, with results other than regrettable, allowed themselves to be persuaded by importunate managers; and his unusual success is probably due in a very considerable measure to the fact that instead of going to the theater he made the theater come to him—a highly unusual proceeding, since nothing is more pathetic than the respect generally paid by the layman to the infantile "mysteries" of conventional stagecraft. Grave professors are reduced to a state of awed wonder by the pronunciamentos of any fourth-rate hack who talks about the "laws of the theater," and first-rate novelists who would show the door to any one who told them how to write in any other form accept complacently the imbecile suggestions of the "practical man of the theater," producing, as a result, plays which have none of the virtues of the professional litterateur and all the defects of the amateur dramatist. Chekhov, on the other hand, had the good sense to conclude that the public wanted him to be, in the theater as elsewhere, not a lumbering imitation of another, but Chekhov himself; accordingly he wrote two plays which are like no others ever seen upon any stage but which are, nevertheless, replete with all the virtues which made his stories unique.

The very soul of his method had always been the avoidance of anything artificially "dramatic," and he was wise enough not to alter it when he came to write drama. In The Cherry Orchard as in his stories the plot is insignificant; instead of clothing a narrative skeleton with thought and feeling he generates his moods and delivers his reflections in a manner which appears to be in the last degree casual. Strokes of characterization, flashes of humor, and unexpected touches of nature seem introduced almost at random; and yet somehow an unforgettable picture is evoked. Doubtless there is art in every line of this seeming artlessness, and Chekhov, indeed, complained at one time that he was writing it at the rate of four lines a day; but the art is not of any familiar sort. Others build upon a solid foundation. They are architectural and they attain solidity by placing stone upon stone; but he merely throws out one thread after another. Each is so fragile that a wind would blow it away, but we are soon enmeshed in a thousand of them. Out of delicacy laid ceaselessly upon delicacy comes strength.

If Chekhov meant to say, as in The Cherry Orebmd he apparently did, that the touching absurdity of the society he pictures was destined to be gradually and peacefully replaced by the cruder, though sturdier, race of peasants turned capitalists, then he was a very bad prophet indeed so far as Russia was concerned, but it is not for prophecy that we turn to him.

What we get instead is as delightful pictures as any contained in the whole realm of Russian literature of the charming childishness of those gentle people whose incompetence precipitated one of the bloodiest upheavals of history—pictures whose moods vary, as gracefully as the moods of the people who are their subjects, from bubbling gaiety to hopeless melancholy and back again. Never, moreover, was penetration more gentle than his. His insight spares no one and yet no one is really wounded. He is merciless in his exposure of every character and yet every one of them finds mercy. No one else ever stripped his characters barer than he, but no one else ever held helpless victims up to a kindlier ridicule. Good art is perpetually revealing how it can accomplish the impossible. Smiles and tears, satire and sentiment—what combination is generally more nauseous? But the combination is Chekhov's and Chekhov is great.

Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Greatness of Chekhov," in the Nation, New York, Vol. CXXVII, No. 3304, October 31, 1928, p. 461.