Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard often occupies a peculiar position in the general education curriculum. Since it is included in many anthologies of world drama, The Cherry Orchard is readily available for use in those humanities courses which would consider such works as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Jonson's Volpone, along with two or three plays by Shakespeare, as the appropriate texts for a study of the drama. The critical reputation of Chekhov's play, coupled with this accident of availability, leads those who feel that modern drama should somehow be represented in a humanities course to select The Cherry Orchard for this purpose. Thus The Cberry Orchard is most often chosen by teachers of the humanities with a sense of reluctance, for lack of a better alternative rather than for any intrinsic qualities of the play as a work specially suited to the purposes of general education.

It is for this reason that I believe the position of The Cherry Orchard in most humanities courses is insecure and uneasy. Such a contention is borne out by the widespread perplexity about how to teach the play in the classroom. This uncertainty about the play may even produce in some teachers a feeling of distaste for the work as something questionable, strange, and abnormal in both form and content. "Morbid" and "decadent" are words frequently used to characterize Chekhov's subject, if not by implicit extension his method and point of view. As far as structure is concerned, the play is admitted to be "formless," and it is only in terms of lyricism, symbolism, and atmosphere that Chekhov's dramatic technique seems susceptible of treatment.

In these terms, The Cherry Orchard would appear to be a literary anomaly, indeterminate in its artistic shape and in its moral dimensions. The case against its inclusion in a humanities course seems very strong, for what could serve as a poorer introduction to the drama than a formless play which utilizes non-dramatic means to create a mood of pathos? Therefore, once a humanities course has adopted The Cherry Orchard, the problem of justifying its inclusion in the curriculum becomes an acute one. What type of play do we intend The Cherry Orchard to represent in a general education course? Since this question is usually asked only after the problem has arisen, the customary answer resembles a rationalization or apology rather than an enthusiastic argument on behalf of the play.

The usual reply to the question is that The Cherry Orchard is a representative of the type of play that deals with social problems. The term "problem play" is often heard. The editors of anthologies in their introductions tell us that The Cherry Orchard deals with "the passing of the old regime in Russia," with "changing Russian society," and with "the tragedy of pre-revolutionary Russian life." It is felt that the social theme gives The Cherry Orchard dignity and seriousness and prevents the play from being merely morbid and depressing.

I should like to challenge the value of this approach. No one questions that The Cherry Orchard has value as a social document, just as almost any great play or novel does. However, to make The Cherry Orchard "an augury of a new order in Russia" (as Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro has been made a prophecy of the French Revolution) is to distort the meaning of the play in order to make it serve the ulterior purposes of the historian and the social scientist. If we are to justify the use of The Cherry Orchard in general education, it will not be by reducing Chekhov to the role of providing data on social conditions. Rather, it must be by the qualities of the drama as a drama. If it is really anomalous, it is inappropriate for a general humanities course, whatever its social preoccupations. Should we seriously maintain that its failings as representative drama are compensated for by its being an accurate picture of Russian society in transition?

Unfortunately, The Cherry Orchard continues to be regarded as social drama, and this is the aspect of the play which receives public attention and conditions our thinking about it. For example, not very many years ago an adaptation of the play appeared on Broadway. In this version the plot and characters were transferred to an American setting because the adapter thought he saw a parallel between the social picture given by Chekhov and the conditions in the South toward the end of the last century. In this play, called The Wisteria Trees, Madame Ranevskaya is transformed into a slightly faded southern belle who owns a plantation overrun with wisteria, and the characters drink mint juleps and eat corn bread instead of vodka and cucumbers. The social theme—which has become the relation between the races—even gains in emphasis by the transposition. The only quality lost is, I should maintain, the entire sense of the play as Chekhov wrote it.

Once we are willing to abandon the idea of The Cherry Orchard as a problem play or social drama, I believe it is possible to find the real justification for its inclusion in a humanities course. It will even be possible to assert that The Cherry Orchard can be a crucial work in such a course because of the important literary questions that it raises. If it comes at the end of discussion of certain tragedies and comedies, it can appropriately serve as a vantage point from which to survey all that has been learned from such a study of the drama. At this point the students should profit from being confronted with a play that does not seem to fit into any recognizable pattern and that at first puzzles them as to how to react to what they read.

For these reasons, The Cherry Orchard represents a challenge to the students' newly acquired skills in reading and interpreting a complex and difficult work of art. That this is not merely a matter of labels, not an imaginary or an academic problem, can be indicated by the different and contradictory interpretations that have been given to Chekhov's play by actors, directors, and critics.

I should like to suggest in this [essay] how I believe such an investigation of The Cherry Orchard as a literary type can be carried out along lines relevant to a general course in the humanities. By the examination of a difficult play like The Cherry Orchard in terms of a genre with which the students are already acquainted, not only will the play itself receive a thorough exploration, but also the concept of the genre will be tested and enlarged. If we assume that the students in a humanities course first read several English comedies such as Volpone and Twelfth Night, then a discussion of The Cherry Orchard as another representative type of comedy will serve a special function as a conclusion to the study of this genre. Therefore, from the following analysis of The Cherry Orchard, I shall attempt to show ways in which we may deduce some general principles about comedy which, I hope, will illuminate some of the differences between comedy and tragedy.

As I have already suggested, this investigation starts with a problem and should be especially suitable to treatment by the discussion method. I shall therefore present my analysis in the terms of such a discussion and first raise objections in the form of typical questions and then attempt to answer them.

The first reaction to any proposal to consider The Cherry Orchard as a comedy will probably be one of disbelief. This must be our starting point. How could anyone possibly call a comedy a play in which the heroine's husband dies of drink, her son drowns, her lover deserts her, and she returns to the one thing in the world she loves—her home and cherry orchard—only to have them taken from her and destroyed, only to be turned out into the unfriendly world again, all alone? Furthermore, the other characters, who also love the orchard, are scattered at the end of the play, and the faithful old servant Firce is left behind, locked up in the deserted house—perhaps to die. Wouldn't a person have to have a warped sense of humor to find this story comic? Here is the first objection to calling The Cherry Orchard a comedy. It is an objection in terms of the plot, which seems to be composed of unhappy events and to have an unhappy outcome.

A further objection might be made in terms of the characters and their emotions. Practically every character in the play from Madame Ranevskaya to Dunyasha the maid is deeply sensitive. Hardly a page passes that someone doesn't weep or give voice to strong feelings. At the end of the play Madame Ranévskaya and her brother Gaieff fall into each other's arms and sob. Aren't these the reactions we expect from serious, not comic, characters? How could we possibly reconcile the strength of feeling all the characters display toward the orchard with a comic point of view?

A final objection might then be formulated on the basis of our reaction as audience to what we see on the stage or to what we read. Don't we pity the central characters and feel sorry for them in their misfortunes? Then doesn't a play of this sort have a depressing effect rather than a comic one? Don't we close the book or leave the theater feeling sad?

It would seem, then, that neither the plot of the play, nor the characters, nor the effect of these two upon the audience is in any way comic. This is the problem and these are the questions that The Cherry Orchard raises. If we imagine for a moment that we are producing and directing a production of the play, it becomes of the greatest importance to answer these questions satisfactorily before attempting to tell the actors how to speak their lines. By making the problem as real and as difficult as possible through the use of these three objections, we can insure that our answers and explanations will involve us in a thoughtful examination of each of the elements of the play and be the result of a thorough reading. It will be appropriate to take up each of the objections in order.

The first objection is that the plot is made of unhappy events, has an unhappy outcome, and is thus not at all comic. However, in such a summary of the action of the play, we are telling the story as it might appear in a novel, starting with Madame Ranevskaya's unhappy marriage, following her through the death of her son Grisha, her unhappy love affair in Paris, and her desertion by the man who had lived off her money, and finally ending with her return home and the loss of her estate. Now the play itself presents only the last stages of this long story, and we learn what happened in the past, not by seeing it presented directly, but by having it narrated by various characters in the course of the play.

Thus we can say that The Cherry Orchard begins toward the end of a sequence of events which goes back over many years, instead of showing us directly that whole sequence. In this respect, The Cherry Orchard is unlike a play such as Macbeth which traces through the major events of the plot over a period of many years; and it resembles to some degree a Greek play like Oedipus which begins at the very end of a long story with the final moment of crisis. However, The Cherry Orchard does cover a period from May to October of one year and therefore presents not only the final moment in a long progression but also several selected stages leading up to the final moment. We shall return a little later to this question of time, and then we shall have to ask why Chekhov, concentrating as he does on the moment of crisis, wishes to present the elapsing of several months.

The important point for our present discussion is to fix the limits of the action in order to determine what sort of plot the play has. We notice now that the action of the play is inclosed within the arrivals of the first act and the departures of the last act. In Act I we see the various characters assemble about the cherry orchard—some coming from far off, some from nearby. In the last act we see all these characters dispersed and scattered, with the exception of old Firce, who is forgotten. The action of the play in some way brings about the change from arrival to departure, from gathering to dispersal.

What is it that brings about this change? Obviously, it is the selling of the estate and orchard. Most plays contain some basic problem or conflict which the characters must face; and the resolution of this problem or conflict, either successfully or unsuccessfully, will affect the lives of these characters. Clearly, the problem in The Cberry Orchard is the approaching sale of the property. Can the sale of the estate be avoided and the orchard saved? This is the central question for all the characters; the fact that they are unsuccessful in dealing with this problem brings about the end of the play, the departures in Act IV.

That people are unsuccessful in solving a problem involving the loss of what they love most may not yet strike us as comic, but at least we have a new and accurate formulation of the action of The Cherry Orchard, which we can now describe as the unsuccessful efforts of the owners of the orchard to save their property in the face of its approaching sale.

Then the plot of the play will be concerned with these efforts to save the orchard. What are these efforts? Gaieff has four different ideas: the first is that he might inherit a fortune from somebody; the second that his niece Varya might marry a rich man; the third that his rich aunt might give him enough money; the fourth that he might get a job in a bank. How sensible or practical are any of these hopes? When we consider that to pay their debts they need several hundred thousand rubles, we see that Gaieff's schemes are ridiculous and absurdly unrealistic daydreams. For example, in Act II, Gaieff says: "I have the promise of an introduction to a General who may lend me money on a note." His sister comments: "He's out of his head. There's no General at all."

And what does Madame Ranevskaya do herself to prevent the loss of her homestead? She lends money to Pishchik, a needy neighbor; she gives money to a tramp; she holds a ball and hires an orchestra the day of the auction. Here is plenty of action, but it is all of a sort not to save the orchard but rather to make its loss absolutely certain. Therefore, we can say that the characters act in such a way as to insure that what they are trying to prevent will take place. Their actions, supposedly designed to save the orchard, are so futile and ludicrous that either they are utterly useless or they even tend to impoverish the family still more.

In other words, the actions of the characters are inappropriate, inadequate, and irrelevant to the situation in which they find themselves and to the problem they face. It is for this reason that we can say the action of the play is purely a comic one and one of the most perfect comic plots ever created.

Very early in Act I Varya tells Anya, "The place will be sold in August," and a little later Lopakhin announces to all: "If we can't think of anything and don't make up our minds, then on August 22 both the cherry orchard and the whole estate will be sold at auction. Make up your mind! I swear there's no other way out."

As Dryden points out in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, it is a highly effective dramatic device to set a long-awaited day when something decisive will take place, on which the action of the whole play hinges. Chekhov uses the ever present threat of the sale of the orchard to contrast with the ludicrous preoccupations of the characters and their ridiculous responses to the threat. They reveal themselves to be totally incapable of the necessary, practical activity.

Let us look a little more closely at Chekhov's technique. In Act II Lopakhin continues to plead with Madame Ranevskaya to make a decision. He says: "We must decide once and for all: time won't wait. After all, my question's quite a simple one. Do you consent to lease your land for villas, or don't you? You can answer in one word: yes or no? Just one word!" "Who's been smoking such abominable cigars here?" replies Madame Ranévskaya.

Those two speeches contain in miniature the essence of the whole play, its plot and its humor. Most of Chekhov's comedy comes from this kind of incongruity—the trivial response to a serious situation. Thus there are many references to petty, undignified objects which seem to obtrude upon the important problem of how to save the orchard. Trofimov can't find his galoshes, Gaieff continues to eat candy and play his imaginary billiard game, and all kinds of food keep popping up at what should be solemn moments—frogs legs and herring and nuts and pickled cherries. While Charlotta Ivanovna, the lonely German governess, delivers her soliloquy at the beginning of Act II, "I haven't anybody to talk to … I haven't anybody at all," she is munching on a cucumber. Likewise, when Gaieff returns from the auction, where he could do nothing to prevent the loss of his estate, he comes back not entirely empty-handed; he says, weeping, to old Firce: "Here, take this. Here are anchovies, herrings from Kertch.… I've had no food today." His heart is broken, but he remembered the anchovies.

I should like to suggest as a general axiom that such an incongruity between situation and response, between the serious and the trivial, is one of the fundamental sources of comedy. Nothing more quickly deflates the tragic dignity of a character and brings him down to the level of common humanity than a sudden annoyance at cigar smoke or a craving for a cucumber. Imagine Macbeth during his soliloquy: "I have lived long enough. My way of life / Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf," all at once overcome with an urge to have a bowl of home-made Scotch broth with barley.

We are now in a position to look a little more closely at this type of comic plot and see whether we can describe precisely the kind of comic incongruity with which we are dealing. For example, in a comedy such as Volpone there is an incongruity between the wit, intelligence, and eloquence of Volpone and Mosca and the unworthy and degraded ends for which all their talent is expended.

In The Cherry Orchard the reverse is true. The end of saving the orchard is worthy, but the characters are unable to engage in even the simplest plans or schemes to raise money; they are incapable of managing any business affairs. Although both plays center around money problems, in The Cherry Orchard squandering, not greed, is the comic failing of Madame Ranevskaya and her brother. In Act II, Madame Ranevskaya tells her friends: "I've always scattered money about without being able to control myself, like a madwoman." The Cherry Orchard is the comedy of the spendthrift or the wastrel. With the exception of Lopakhin, the principal characters are too foolish and footless to hold on to their dearly beloved possessions.

A brief examination of the structure of The Cherry Orchard should confirm these observations about the nature of the plot and the incongruities which it presents. We might begin this discussion of the organization of the play with a simple question: Why does the action of the play begin with the return of Madame Ranévskaya from Paris? In order to answer this question, we must first ask about her motive for coming home.

Here the gradual unfolding of the past gives us the explanation. We learn that after running off to Paris with her lover, Madame Ranevskaya continued to spend money recklessly, even buying a villa at Mentone on the Riviera by mortgaging her Russian estate and getting head over heels in debt. Finally, the French villa was sold to pay her debts, her lover ran off with another woman after robbing her of everything she had, and Madame Ranevskaya was left penniless and unable to pay her debts on her Russian estate. At this point she comes home, and the action of the play begins.

We can now see that the reason why she returns is that she has no more money left; she must attempt to save the estate and solve her financial problem. Thus the action of the play begins with her coming home, since it is her return which poses this central financial problem.

The turning point in the play occurs in Act III, when we learn that the merchant Lopakhin has purchased the estate. What is the nature of this turning point? It is a complete reversal, a total upset, since the estate now passes into the hands of the man who seemed least likely ever to own it—Lopakhin, son of a former serf on that very property! Here is another aspect of the comic incongruity of The Cherry Orchard: Not only have the owners lost their estate through their own folly, but it now belongs to the man that no one could have imagined as the new owner. The incongruity is made doubly ludicrous by the fact that Lopakhin is the one character in the play who had sincerely made repeated efforts to save the estate for its rightful owners. Chekhov has made this reversal quite probable, yet at the same time comically surprising, by his careful development of the relationship between Madame Ranevskaya and Lopákhin.

In Lopákhin there is a constant alternation between his old self, the son of a serf, and his new self, the rich businessman. At the turning point in Act III, when Lopakhin arrives flushed with his purchase to announce that he is now owner of the estate, Chekhov reminds us of the incongruity of his new position by the fact that Varya, who has threatened to hit the pompous, insolent clerk Yepikhodov, actually strikes Lopakhin by chance as he enters. The new master of the estate is hit over the head with a stick as he arrives to proclaim his new power, and this incident recalls to us the other Lopakhin—the small peasant boy beaten by his drunken father.

If the announcement of the sale of the orchard represents the turning point in the play and the resolution of the central problem, what is the function of the final act? The last act presents the consequences of this solution; we must see how the failure to save the orchard will affect all the characters. Thus if the arrival of Madame Ranevskaya initiates the action and poses the basic problem, it is not until her departure that the action ends, that her failure to solve the problem is presented to us in its entirety. Thus the setting of Act IV parallels that of Act I, except that the room is now empty and dismantled. As before, the characters were waiting for the train to arrive, now they are waiting for it to depart.

These remarks will have to suffice as an examination of the plot, the structure, and the revelation of the past. Our observations about the inability of the characters to change and meet new circumstances bring us to our second point. We raised the objection that the emotions of the characters are of too great depth and seriousness to be comic. For example, there are the passionate outbursts of Trofimov, Madame Ranevskaya, and Gaieff. Perhaps these characters are incapable of acting effectively in a given situation, but they can at least feel profoundly, and this makes them pathetic and moving rather than comic. After all, King Lear is incapable of acting effectively, yet he is deeply tragic. Couldn't a similar case be made for Madame Ranevskaya and the others?

In order to answer this question, we must return to an earlier problem we left unresolved: the elapsing of time in The Cherry Orchard. Why does the play cover a period of six months? We can see now that this period from May to October is necessary to show the characters' repeated and continuous failure to act intelligently in a situation that demands practical action. A more limited time-span would not have shown effectively the change in the circumstances of the family, and, at the same time, their complete inability to change themselves and to grasp the reality of what is happening to them. To estimate rightly their flagrant wasting of opportunity, we must feel the passing of time and experience the difference between the household bustling with activity in May and the deserted room in October, without curtains, furniture and with suitcases piled in the corner.

Here we touch on the central fact about the characters in The Cherry Orchard. Their responses are always the same. To Dunyasha's announcement about Yepikhodov's proposal, Anya says, "Always the same …"; Madame Ranevskaya tells Gaieff, "You're just the same as ever"; and Varya says of Madame Ranevskaya herself: "Mother hasn't altered a bit, she's just as she always was." Trofimov will always go on being a student—like all the others, he is growing old without growing up. The characters age but remain unchanged, learning nothing from life.

They share a common past which they love to talk about; they would really like to go back to those good old days. They wish to return to their childhood and be children again; they can't seem to realize that things aren't as they used to be, that they have to face certain responsibilities. Instead, they refuse to face reality. By living in the past, in a world of dreams, they hope to avoid having to live in the present and make hard decisions. Although the orchard will be sold in a few months, all they do is talk about the wonderful old days.

Naturally enough, the old servant Firce is an extreme of this type; he lives entirely in the past. He even regrets the emancipation of the serfs. He remembers in the happy old days of slavery, fifty years ago, they dried the cherries from the orchard and made them into a most wonderful jam—when he is asked how it was done, he mutters that the recipe is lost and no one remembers how. Old Firce lives his life in this foggy, imaginary past when everyone was happy and didn't know why. And so it is with all their past happiness: the recipe is lost, and no one remembers how.

Madame Ranevskaya and her brother are like Firce in that they recall without cease the nursery and their ecstatically happy childhood. But by the end of the play they seem to have learned nothing at all from their experiences and to have matured in no way as a result of all their emotions. We can well imagine that Madame Ranevskaya will feel the loss of the estate chiefly when she talks about it to others, that she will weep and gush sentimentally about the orchard and the nursery, about her girlhood and days of innocence, as she sits in that small smoke-filled room on the fifth floor in Paris. Likewise, her brother Gaieff will embarrass and bore the people at the bank with his repetitious effusions about the "dear and honored" hundred-year-old cupboard, instead of doing the least bit of work.

It is this fixity, this lack of adaptability of the characters' emotional responses that makes them comic. We soon come to assess the emotions of Madame Ranevskaya and Gaieff as sentimental and excessive rather than tragic. That we are to laugh at Gaieff's foolish sentimentality is clear because the other characters try to shut him up and make gentle fun of his outbursts. His continual stock response: "Red into the corner!" as though he were playing billiards, is an example of such comic fixity on a simple, mechanical level. The self-pitying, self-dramatized outbursts of Madame Ranevskaya represent the same source of comedy on a psychological level.

On the basis of the foregoing analysis, I should like to suggest another axiom: In comedy the characters do not change profoundly because of the experiences they undergo, but they continue making the same responses, repeating the same errors, committing the same follies. The more we learn about Madame Ranévskaya's past, the more we see that her present difficulties are a result of an incorrigible nature which has not changed. She is consistent in her behavior; having created the unpleasant situation in which she finds herself, she is unable to extricate herself from it for just the same reasons. Furthermore, we can easily picture a comic figure such as Madame Ranevskaya continuing to act in the same way even after we have left the theater or closed the book. This is just the opposite of the shattering experience of tragedy which either ends the hero's life or utterly transforms it.

On the other hand, Madame Ranevskaya has never come to grips with reality and never will; she will go on living in the world of illusion, talking about herself and weeping over herself. It is this contrast between illusion and reality which makes all the characters in The Cherry Orchard part of the same comic vision. Let us now look at the other characters and see the particular illusions in which they live.

The servants are caricatures of their masters, with whom they mingle in a ridiculous and incongruous fashion. Dunyasha is just a maid, but she dresses and acts like a lady, her hands are white and delicate, and she has become so sensitive that she almost faints from nerves. Yasha is only a footman, but he has turned into such a Frenchified fop in Paris that he feels quite superior to his masters and turns up his nose at Lopakhin's bottle of domestic champagne (although he manages to finish it single-handed).

Yepikhodov is a lazy clerk who has great intellectual pretensions because he has read Henry Thomas Buckle's The History of English Civilization, but his shoes squeak. He also accidentally tips over chairs, breaks dishes, and puts trunks on hatboxes, and these calamities lead him to proclaim grandiloquently: "Fate, so to speak, treats me absolutely without mercy, just as a small ship, as it were." He finds cockroaches in his wine glass and becomes a fatalist, threatening to commit suicide if Dunyasha throws him over for Yasha. As he strums his guitar lugubriously, he says: "Now I know what to do with my revolver." In other words, Yepikhodov is a pompous fool who imagines he is as poetic and mysterious as Hamlet.

Lopakhin is all dressed up "in a white vest and brown shoes," seemingly successful and cultured, but the reality is that he's a peasant in origin and in spirit, and his past keeps showing through the veneer. In Act II he confesses that he's really a fool and an idiot and that his handwriting is just like a pig's!

The one character who understands and explains this kind of contrast between illusion and reality is the student Trofimov. He points out to the others: "It's obvious that all our nice talk is only carried on to delude ourselves and others." Trofimov sees clearly the contrast between ideals and facts, wishful thinking and actual practice. Because of this, we might suspect that Trofimov is a spokesman for the author and not a comic figure, and we might think that we are to take quite seriously his talk about the future.

Let us look at Trofimov a little more closely. His creed is expressed in the phrase: "We must work"—which is what none of the characters do, Trofimov included. In fact, he has been wasting his time for years with some vague and endless course of study at the university. Trofimov penetrates the delusions of everyone but himself. He is perceptive enough to recognize that by clinging to the orchard the others are refusing to face reality, but he doesn't see that he likewise is escaping from the present with his beautiful dreams of the future. His talk of the future is as much sentimental rhapsodizing as Madame Ranevskaya's gushing about the orchard and poor little Grisha her dead son.

Trofimov informs all the others: "Mankind goes on to the highest possible truths and happiness on earth, and I march in the front ranks!" But he's marching without his galoshes, which he still can't find. He is the perfect type of the seedy, balding bohemian with elaborate theories and very little common sense. His contemporary counterpart is well known to all of us.

From these observations about character, it would be possible to indicate as another axiom that one of the basic incongruities in comedy lies in the inability of the characters to tell illusion from reality. Here we can make a distinction between The Cherry Orchard, on the one hand, and earlier English comedies such as Volpone and Twelfth Night, on the other. In the two Elizabethan plays, one group of characters deliberately dupes or tricks another and helps to produce the delusion, whereas in The Cherry Orchard the characters are self-deluded. In fact, they wilfully resist any efforts made to enlighten them on their true characters and state of affairs; they prefer to remain oblivious to the real world.

Such self-delusion manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of the principal forms it takes is egotism or self-centeredness. Each character is so wrapped up in himself that he is hardly aware of those about him. Although all the characters are intimately connected to the family group through deep ties in the past and through their love of the estate and the orchard, preoccupation with self produces an isolation of each character from all the others. The comic separateness of characters who should be close to one another is emphasized by their disregard for and deafness to what others are saying and by their persistence in thinking their own thoughts aloud.

On the simplest level, this deafness is quite literal, as in the case of old Firce, who once again represents the extreme toward which all the other characters tend in varying degrees. Firce lives in a world of illusion all his own because he is hard of hearing. His comments are nearly always irrelevant because he does not know what the others are talking about, quite literally as well as figuratively. When Madame Ranevskaya first sees him after her return, she goes up to him and says emotionally, "Thank you, dear old man. I'm so glad you're still with us." Firce replies, "The day before yesterday." A little later on, a propos of nothing at all, he mumbles, "They were here in Easter week and ate half a pailful of cucumbers."

On a less obvious plane, all the characters are deaf and go on muttering irrelevant things to themselves, unheeded by the others. When Dunyasha tells Anya that Yepikhodov has proposed to her, Anya says, "I've lost all my hair pins …" and later Anya falls asleep while Varya is talking to her. Pishchik even falls asleep in the middle of his own conversation when he is talking! Just at the moment that Varya first announces to Anya that the estate will be sold in August, Lopakhin sticks his head in the door and, for a joke, moos like a cow. There is a special comic irony here in that this is the future owner of the estate commenting on the central problem of the play, the chances of saving the orchard. No one pays any real attention to anyone else. Gaieff even talks to waiters in restaurants about the decadents!

Thus the self-centered isolation of the characters produces a lack of communication, a failure in expression. This lack of communication is one of the principal sources of comedy in The Cherry Orchard and appropriately brings us to a discussion of the comic use of language. If, in tragedy, language is used for maximum eloquence and expressiveness, in comedy language is abused for maximum nonsense and confusion. I should like to propose as another axiom that in comedy the resources of language are deliberately misused. This misuse takes the form of excess in many English comedies of the Shakespearean period. For example, in Volpone we see eloquence and rhetoric pushed to ludicrous extremes and put to unworthy uses in Volpone's mountebank speeches and in his pleas and arguments to Celia.

In The Cherry Orchard there is also an abuse and misuse of language, but it is in the opposite direction. Rather than an excessive glibness, there is a deficiency in articulateness. Old Firce's disconnected mutterings give us the essence of the comic use of language in The Cherry Orchard. Each character talks to himself about something irrelevant to the present situation, usually about something in the past either trivial or personal to the speaker, the significance of which cannot be grasped by the other characters.

Characteristically, the non sequitur or meaningless remark which doesn't logically follow what has gone before is the primary source of humor in Chekhov's use of language. The non sequitur not only expresses a momentary illogicality but, in the comic world that Chekhov creates, expresses the characters' reaction to their situation. Their response to the approaching sale of the estate is a non sequitur indicating the world of illusion in which each lives.

Even if these answers to the first two objections to calling The Cherry Orchard a comedy are found to be satisfactory, won't it still be possible to assert that the spectacle of this group of foolish, bungling, impractical characters being dispossessed and cast out into a world with which they are not fit to cope is not a comic one? A perceptive reader may be willing to grant that the characters are as incompetent as we have described them and that their actions are futile and inappropriate, but he will insist that the effect of seeing lonely, irresponsible people come to an unhappy end is one of sadness, not comedy. He might well argue that we feel sympathy and even pity for Madame Ranevskaya, Gaieff, Varya, old Firce, and all the rest, and ask whether these emotions are compatible with the conception of comedy which we have been developing. It will then be necessary to investigate the problem of the unhappy ending and the matter of comic sympathy if we are to convince this perceptive reader that he is actually experiencing comic, not tragic, emotions.

As concerns the unhappy ending and its supposedly sad effect, there are two answers. The first is that the denouement of the play is not quite so unhappy as it may at first appear. Although Madame Ranevskaya and her brother dread the loss of the estate before it takes place, after it has happened they seem to be surprisingly indifferent to the reality. Gaieff comments gaily: "Yes, really, everything's all right now. Before the cherry orchard was sold we were all excited and worried, and then when the question was solved once and for all, we all calmed down, and even became cheerful. I'm a bank official now, and a financier … red in the center; and you, Liuba, look better for some reason or other, there's no doubt about it." Madame Ranevskaya replies: "Yes. My nerves are better, it's true. I sleep well.… I'm off to Paris. I'll live on the money your grandmother from Yaroslavl sent to buy the estate—bless her!—though it won't last long."

A fine use for grandmother's money—to go back to Paris and live with her lover! Here is the crowning irony and incongruity: the money that was to be used to save the beloved estate will actually be used so that Madame Ranevskaya can continue a little longer in her loose, shiftless life!

If we remember Madame Ranevskaya's resolve in the first act when she said, "I'm through with Paris" and tore up the telegrams from her lover, we see the comical nature of the denouement in which, after all her noble intentions to save the orchard and reform her life, she continues true to her unregenerate nature, throwing away her own and other people's money in a completely unworthy cause.

In the second place, it is a mistake to suppose that comedies always have happy endings for the comic or ridiculous figures. In fact, the reverse is usually true: the ridiculous figures do not achieve their ends, but they are in some way frustrated, chastised, or held up to laughter or scorn. Thus it is that the denouement of The Cherry Orchard is in some way frustrating for all the characters. It is this very frustration which unifies all the different lines of action in the play; everything goes wrong, no one accomplishes any of the things he sets out to. All the minor mishaps and failures are related to the loss of the estate as lesser frustrations around one central failure. For example, Lopakhin in Act I comes to meet the party at the train station, but he falls asleep and misses the train; Varya would like to marry Lopakhin and he her, but neither can ever get around to talking about it. Such misfortunes are even personified in one almost farcical figure, the clerk Yepikhodov, nicknamed "Two-and-Twenty Troubles." This frustration of the purposes of ridiculous figures is of the very essence of comedy. Just a moment ago we saw that the unhappiness produced thereby is not so great or so deeply felt as to be tragic and bring about any radical change in the lives of the characters. Therefore, we can conclude that the so-called unhappy end of The Cherry Orchard produces a true comic effect.

As for the objection that we feel sympathy for the characters, I should say that there is no reason why a comic figure should not be sympathetic. If we think of Don Quixote or Falstaff or Charlie Chaplin, we see that many of the greatest comic creations are very sympathetic. If we take sympathy to mean an "affinity between persons," a "liking or understanding arising from sameness of feelings," and the "ability to enter into another person's mental state" (Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language), then in one important aspect comic characters are much more sympathetic than tragic ones. We are more like comic figures. We admire and respect a man like Oedipus from a distance, and we are awed by Lear's sufferings; but we feel we share the same weaknesses and the same fallible human nature as comic characters like Madame Ranévskaya. We are close to them and do the same foolish things they do: we procrastinate, waste time, choose poor companions, spend money foolishly, and then feel sorry for ourselves and invent excuses. And many of us are like Trofimov: we've spent far too many years at the university over imaginary studies, until our hair has grown thin and we wear spectacles.

It is in this sense that comedy is just as profound as tragedy and perhaps more universal. Tragedy presents only the exceptional cases, individuals whose experiences are unique; comedy deals with types, with those traits all men have in common: their pettiness, egotism, foolishness, weakness, and hypocrisy.

From this point of view, tragedy and comedy are not to be distinguished one from the other by an unhappy or a happy ending. Rather, they are two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. In the tragic view we see nobility and relentless self-honesty even in the cornered murderer Macbeth; in the comic view we see an unkempt philosopher looking about on the floor for his galoshes and a middle-aged woman, ignobly in love, deceiving herself with sentimental lies. In this way, comedy sees the contrast between what man should be and what he is, between what he claims to be and what he actually does; and it exposes all imposture.

In these terms, comedy is a criticism of life and a critical view of human nature, and not merely a form. All the great comic writers from Aristophanes and Moliere to Chekhov and Shaw have been interested not only in creating works of art but, first and foremost, in criticizing the foibles and extravagances and the faults and vices of men and women. Jonson wrote: "The office of a comic poet is to imitate justice and instruct to life … to inform in the best reason of living." Chekhov says almost exactly the same thing: "All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realise that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves."

Despite their similarity of purpose, Chekhov, unlike Jonson in Volpone, is not concerned with vices like greed, jealousy, and lust which lead to violence and crime. Rather Chekhov is submitting to comic scrutiny the lesser follies of the bunglers in life—the half-baked sentimentalities, the fatuous emotionalism, and the wasteful absurdities of Madame Ranevskaya and her family and servants. Because they are kind, gentle fools with generous hearts and good intentions, we can sympathize with them and even pity them at the same time that we laugh at their utter lack of sense.

Such is the main line of argument which I believe can be profitably followed in a presentation of The Cherry Orchard as a comedy. However, the enunciation of these general principles and theories will be chiefly useful insofar as they enable us to understand and to enjoy more fully the play itself. Therefore, as a conclusion to this analysis, it will be of the utmost importance to present a detailed examination of certain portions of the text as concrete illustration of all that we have been saying about The Cherry Orchard. I should like to offer the following explications of two short scenes as examples of what can be done to show exactly how Chekhov's comic view operates in practice.

The first scene is the quarrel between Madame Ranevskaya and Trofimov which occurs during the ball in Act III.

In the course of this quarrel, each tells the other painful truths. Trofimov tells Madame Ranevskaya that she is deceiving herself both about the orchard which must be sold and also about her lover in Paris, who is no better than a thief. In anger, Madame Ranevskaya answers that Trofimov is nothing but a schoolboy who has never grown up. She says: "You're not above love, you're just what our Firce calls a bungler. Not to have a mistress at your age!" Trofimov leaves in horror at the things that have been said, vowing, "All is over between us." It seems for a moment that there may have been a tragic realization of the truth of their accusations and hence a discovery leading to a final rupture between the two, which would be grave, since we know how much they care for each other.

But what actually happens? We hear a loud crash and learn that Trofimov has fallen downstairs in his haste to make an effective exit. A moment later he is back in the room dancing with Madame Ranevskaya, and the whole episode is forgotten. There could be no better illustration of the way in which comic characters bounce back and go on in their old unthinking manner, quite unchanged by what has happened. The fall downstairs ludicrously deflates Trofimov's solemn, "All is over between us," and his speedy return to dance with Madame Ranevskaya contradicts his words.

In this scene we see how Chekhov transforms what might have been a tragic quarrel into a ridiculous scene with an unmistakable comic effect by the use of the surprising anticlimax that terminates the scene. At just the most serious moment, the rug is almost literally yanked out from underneath Trofimov, and he falls flat on his face. The next moment he's back on his feet again—dancing!

The second scene I should like to examine comes at the very end of the play, the short scene in which we see old Firce locked up in the deserted house. I have mentioned this scene several times because I feel that it is of central importance to an understanding of the play. What is the effect of this scene which gives us our final impression of The Cherry Orchard ?

Before Firce appears, we have the departure of Madame Ranevskaya presented in the grand manner. She and her brother fall in each other's arms and sob. This seems to be the great emotional climax of the play. Madame Ranevskaya exclaims: "My dear, my gentle, my beautiful orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye! Good-bye!" This is where the ordinary dramatist would end his play, with the exit of the leading actress, as beautiful, as tearful, as emotional as possible. In fact, this is where the author of The Wisteria Trees did end his play, and, in the terms of the trade, this is called "good theater."

But a great dramatist like Chekhov does something much more than that. What Chekhov has done in ending the play, not with the farewell of Madame Ranevskaya to her orchard, but with the appearance of old Firce is exactly the same kind of comic anticlimax which we saw in the quarrel scene. Nothing shows better the shallow sentimentality of Gaieff and his sister about the orchard than the fact that they've entirely forgotten to insure that Firce will be taken care of, Firce the one person who has been blindly faithful to his masters.

Madame Ranevskaya has just said, "We go away, and not a soul remains behind." As if to contradict her, to show her persistence in error, old Firce then comes shuffling in, wearing slippers and white vest and dress jacket, and we have the final comic surprise and incongruity of the play. Failure and frustration of purpose prevail to the very end. The contrast of the sound of the axes, practical and efficient in their destruction of the orchard, with the picture of the feeble old servant still in livery lying down and falling asleep in the empty house expresses the central contrast between reality and illusion which has run through the whole play.

Firce reacts as he always has, thinking that Gaieff has forgotten his overcoat. "Oh, these young people!" he exclaims. It is appropriate that Firce end the play and have the last words, since he represents the extreme obliviousness to reality; his falling asleep is the final lack of response to the external world.

His last words enforce the whole comic meaning of the play. He says: "Life's gone on as if I'd never lived.…Oh, you … bungler!" This word bungler, which is a favorite with Firce, is used to describe practically every character in the play. It is the key word in The Cherry Orchard because it portrays the bumbling, muddled, sentimental failures that all the characters are. Thus The Cherry Orchard ends with delusion triumphant: Madame Ranevskaya leaves, intoxicated with her own words but failing to realize that her one loyal follower has been abandoned, and Firce himself remains bunglingly devoted to his bungling masters. The comedy is complete.

Lest this reading of The Cherry Orchard be thought too personal and unconventional to be sound for the purposes of general education, I should like to point out that we have Chekhov's own words about the play to serve as a guide. The following remarks which appear in different letters Chekhov wrote concerning The Cherry Orchard support not only the contention that the play should be regarded as a comedy but also the view that failure to approach the work in terms of its proper genre will result in serious misinterpretation.

Chekhov writes: "I shall call the play a comedy… It has turned out not a drama, but a comedy, in parts a farce … the last act is gay, the whole play is gay, light… why on the posters and in the advertisements is my play so persistently called a drama? Nemirovich and Stanislavsky see in it a meaning different from what I intended. They never read it attentively, I am sure."

Therefore, what I am urging is that we restore The Cherry Orchard to the proper tradition, the humanistic tradition; only by treating it as a comedy, along with other comedies, shall we be able to understand the play as Chekhov wrote it. We must read the play attentively, as the author suggests we should, and restore to the title the part most editors of The Cherry Orchard omit: A Comedy in Four Acts. In this way, I believe The Cherry Orchard can occupy an important position in any humanities course.

Daniel Charles Gerould, "The Cherry Orchard'as a Comedy," in The Journal of General Education, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, Vol. 11, No. 2, April, 1958, pp. 109-22.