[In the following excerpt, Tulloch analyzes the thematic and symbolic structure of The Cherry Orchard.]

The Cherry Orchard is unusual among Chekhov's dramas in that the central focus is not the problem of choice among the intelligentsia. Whereas The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters are all related to fundamental questions of identity for their author as a professional doctor and writer—the problem of art, the problem of science, the problem of education and upbringing—The Cherry Orchard is a play about social mobility and change. In particular, the play examines a moment in time when large-scale industrialisation had made possible a proletarian solution in addition to the evolutionist-technological vision of his earlier literature. The estates on which the action of the earlier dramas takes place are of course historically typical, insofar that the specific problems and the conflicting responses are typical of the situation of intellectuals in a modernising autocracy. But they appear timeless, and the epic vision becomes a commitment of method, a matter of endurance, a programme for living in which a better future lies in the hands of each individual.

In The Cherry Orchard the estate is no longer timeless. It is threatened by a new order of modernisation which enables a peasant to become master of the estate which owned his family as serfs; and threatened, too, by other, more violent, aspects of industrial growth. The cherry orchard is confronted with the modern capitalist and the modern revolutionary. The question of choice, and with it the crisis of identity, while remaining individual is subsumed within broader social movements.

Each character typifies a social position in his response to the orchard. Trofimov sees in the trees dead souls; Lopakhin sees in them the opportunity for technology and growth; Madame Ranevskaya thinks only of style, elegance and the white figures of the past; Varya, a girl raised above her station by the kindly condescension of a status-conscious society, thinks only of saving that order through petty cheeseparing and recourse to religion, its official ideology. To say, however, that Chekhov poses the question of individual choice within the framework of social movements is not to interpret his play in the light of a straight-forward class struggle. Chekhov is favouring neither an aristocratic, nor a bourgeois, nor a proletarian solution.

By choosing the decay of a landed estate (and the complete inability of the old landowners to come to terms with the problem of farming without serfs) for his theme, Chekhov was not only selecting a problem about which he had written more than once, and of which he had a close personal experience, but also a typical contradiction of a society which tried to modernise yet, in terms of social stratification, stay the same. The situation in The Cherry Orchard is the moment when the autonomous world of tradition has been breached by the serf reforms and the will to modernise; when in Firs' words, 'everything is muddled', and action must be rational and decisive, yet within mores and institutions which remain ascriptive. The reactions of each landowner to the problem of debt differ at the personal level—Ranevskaya escapes to Paris, Gayev into dreams of liberal gentry and superfluous men, Simeonov-Pishchik into money-grubbing and a hand-to-mouth existence from day to day while he waits for something to turn up. But socially their reactions are qualitatively the same. They are simply incapable of adapting to the demands of a new rationality; Pishchik is as incapable of entrepreneurial activity when profitable minerals are discovered on his land, as Madame Ranevskaya is of profiting from the spread of new urban wealth to the country. Essentially they are people preoccupied with the old style of life, servants in livery, large tips to the waiters, casual philanthropy and amateur medical treatment for the poor—people who act from day to day, move from place to place, but really stay the same.

Yet the contradictions of the modernising autocracy have deprived these people of sureness of response. There is in The Cherry Orchard none of the rhythmic Arcadian symbolism of the English conservative tradition when it was threatened by the 'mob' beneath; nor yet a negative perspective, of angst, as the hero fights against frightful odds and fails. Neither allegory nor angst are possible moods for an author who stands outside a social group in decline, and views that decline with intellectual approval mixed with personal sympathy for those he knew and respected. Rather, the mood is elegiac, compounded of an intensely human crisis of identity at the personal level and a distancing, comic inconsistency of interaction.

In their isolation the landowners are marginal and anomic figures. Ranevskaya, the aristocratic woman who married beneath her station, travels from place to place seeking purpose in locations and in a lover who cheats her. Faced with the sale of the orchard she retreats into her past when everything was elegant and certain. Gayev also retreats into the past, given an extra and pompous dignity by his references to learning and social service. But his relationship to reason and the Enlightenment is empty; it goes no further than justifying the continued existence of the unproductive orchard on the grounds that it was mentioned in the Encyclopaedia. For all his escape into a pathetic flow of words, his refrain, 'I'll be silent, I'll be silent', is that of a man lost. Anya is aroused by the revolutionary ideals of Trofimov, but the vision of a new life of this naive girl is strangely mixed with the intention of planting another orchard and living happily ever after with her mother as they read to each other in the long evenings. Varya is divided between a desperate attempt to save the old order, to which she would somehow or other attach Lopakhin, and a desire to escape into the nun-like existence of Ol'ga in "Big Volodya and Little Volodya." Increasing mobility within this crumbling, self-conscious structure simply intensifies social marginality which, in the absence of a confident and coherent symbolic system becomes spiritual anomie as each individual faces alone the meaninglessness of his existence.

But there is little tragedy. Spiritual isolation is signified by a comic failure of communication when characters are collectively faced with the reality of change. So when Lopakhin first suggests the need to cut down the cherry orchard and let the land for summer villas, the reaction among the landowners is a comic and trivial dialogue of escape. Firs speaks of an old recipe for drying cherries; Ranevskaya asks for the recipe, but it is lost. Pishchik then asks whether they ate frogs in Paris, and Ranevskaya says she ate crocodiles, which Pishchik greets with great wonder. Lopakhin tries again with his plan. Gayev replies 'what idiocy!' and after a brief exchange between Varya and Ranevskaya which reveals both the former's workaday ritual and the latter's asylum in Paris, Gayev launches into his famous oration to the old and venerable bookcase which has been the source of his family's devotion to the people for so long. Silenced by Lopakhin's irony, he retreats into his billiards talk, and almost immediately the remaining landowner, Pishchik, reveals his extraordinary unconcern for the realities of life (and medical science!) by swallowing all of Ranevskaya's pills. Each individual responds quite typically to Lopakhin's suggestion; and each response reveals inner isolation. Yet the interaction, revealed as a collective style of life, is comic and absurd. The private worlds of Ranevskaya, Gayev, Varya and Pishchik, sad and lyrical though they may be, are a focus of irrationality, and thus, situationally, of the absurd.

It is within this overtly comic and nostalgic mood (which is nevertheless serious and sometimes fearful) that Chekhov is able to portray the genuine human values which are overcome in his works. As in The Seagull, the typical time perspective associated with the ascriptive society is a tension between time that passes meaninglessly, often absurdly, and the desire to make time stand still. The tension is rendered in mood by the relationship between broad comedy and nostalgia in the play; and scenically by beginning and ending the play in the same location, yet a location grievously altered.

Act I introduces the problem of the cherry orchard in a location of compulsive nostalgia: the nursery of generations of cherry orchard owners, each one (as in The Three Sisters, but in a more genteel setting) growing in the image of his parents. For Lopakhin active decisions about the future of the orchard are urgent, 'time flies by'; but for the landowners, accustomed to a different time scale, there can be no meaning in its passing. It is better not to consider the matter; something will turn up—an act of God, or of rich grandmamma; Anya may marry a wealthy man, or money may be won on a lottery ticket. Meanwhile resort to nostalgia can convince that nothing has changed:

Oh, my childhood—my dear, innocent childhood! I once used to sleep in this nursery. I looked out from here at the orchard. Each morning that I awoke happiness awoke with me, and then the orchard was exactly as it is now. White all over—it hasn't changed a bit.

Objects which relate them to their youth are plentiful in the nursery: toys, little tables, aged bookcases, faithful retainers. And when the thought arises, 'strange though it may appear', that action must be taken to save it all, they can look into the eternal orchard and see the ghost of their mother walking. Faced by the visible passage of time, the dying and ageing servants, the balding Trofimov, the compulsion to nostalgia is even greater. For Ranevskaya, who throughout the play is torn most acutely by the tension between time passing and time past, Trofimov can only bring to mind the memory of her dead son—which is, in itself, a sign of an uncertain future. Nostalgia is then incorporated within a wider but equally escapist mood—fatalistic guilt in which everything, the passing of time, the sale of the orchard, the death of her child, are the punishment for her past and an act of God. Varya takes up the theme of dependence on God's mercy, while Anya, whom Ranevskaya loves with all the resonances of nostalgia, lives anew the innocent naivety of her mother's early days. Thus the dialogue between the flower-like innocence of youth and a trust in God for its passing, which continually tears Madame Ranevskaya, is acted out by her 'daughters'. As the close-knit family prepares to sleep with its memories and pious hopes, these two girls, these two values, see the Act to its close. Everything is in decay, but the scene is tranquil. 'From far away' the sound of a shepherd's pipe is heard, an echo of Chekhov's story "The Pipe", where an old shepherd plays nostalgically, complaining that Fate, God, the Emancipation, have destroyed the real gentry (when half were generals), and destroyed with them the fertility of Nature. The mournful sound responds to the nursery's proper tone, relating it to the orchard just outside—but to the cherry trees' timeless and beautiful past (when, as Firs too would say, the place was full of generals) and not to their present decay. It is a sound which evokes the enclosed nostalgia of the nursery, embalms the dialogue of fragile innocence and fatalistic experience, and speaks of man's inability to comprehend the world beyond the nursery walls.

Act 2 confronts us with a dramatic scene change. The nostalgic claustrophobia of the nursery is gone, and the world beyond assumes its contemporary form. In sharp contrast to the enclosed space of Act 1, the author insisted on a boundless view of Nature, 'a sense of distance unusual on the stage'. In this place beyond the nursery, time is clearly not without significance. Man has related with Nature, and technology has spread; for beyond the poplars there are telegraph poles, and a town is to be seen on the far horizon. The drama is purely visual, in the scene change itself. The vision of Nature and technology stands in quiet testimony to the meaningless enclosure of time and purpose in the previous Act. The sound of the shepherd's pipe belonged to the nostalgia of the nursery. The world of change, however, is no more than a mute backcloth to the antics of both masters and servants.

When the sound of change does come out of this vast environment, these people will not recognise it, because they do not understand its sequence or its laws. For Gayev the railways are useful merely to take him to town, where he can converse with the waiters about the Decadents, and then to bring him back in time for a game of billiards. For Ranevskaya the sequence of life's change, from innocent upbringing, through marriage to a drunken spendthrift, to the arms of the usual lover, and from the death of her son, through desertion in Paris, to attempted suicide, is explicable only in religious terms—sin, and appeal to the mercy of God. Meanwhile she squanders money just the same, pours her love and her hopes on Anya and Varya, and prefers to ignore the issue of the orchard for 'what we were talking about yesterday'. The lives of these 'improvident, unbusinesslike and strange people' has simply not been patterned to ordered change, and when something new occurs passive fatalism is the only available response.

Time for them has always been cyclical—the filtering of generations through the nursery—and when instead it manifestly destroys, their reactions are confused and fearful. Madame Ranevskaya clings helplessly to Lopakhin (the agent of change whose message she cannot heed or even understand) because 'I keep imagining that something awful is about to happen … like the house collapsing on us'. A tramp comes by, and, like the peasants on the steppes, they are filled with wonder and fear by the sounds and strange figures of the expanse beyond them. And also like the peasants who cling to their protective fire, they retreat to their own enclosed world where, in Act 3, we find them once more, amidst the brightly lit chandeliers and luxurious fittings, whirling to the dance and drowning the outside world with the brash sounds of the ball.

Act 2 has opposed a world of purposeful change to the encapsulated time of Act 1; and the response of the landowners is, typically, not so much to reject as to flee from it as something disturbingly incomprehensible. Pishchik's dance calls, which, like the lotto calls in The Seagull, assert a timeless repetition, are more familiar and more comforting. Yet time does move on; it is the day of the auction, and the social poverty of the ball itself is an insistent comment on change. Madame Ranevskaya waits helplessly for this final judgment on her past, Varya continues to call on God, and Anya dances, a butterfly heedless of time. Meanwhile Sharlotta, engaged as always in tricks, produces something from nothing, thus parodying by sleight of hand the full scope of the landowners' vision. For Ranevskaya it is a time of pitiful decline and, with the entry of the new owner, collapse. This woman, once brought up with the tenderness of a flower like Anya, has no knowledge or inner resources with which to face the crisis; and when to Trofimov's claim to be above love, she answers 'I suppose I am below love', there is an echo once again of the ascriptive division of the Russian woman between the idealist and the seducer. Her only recourse, in fact, has to be external, back to her seducer. Though she knows she will be 'going to the dregs', she cannot bear to hear Trofimov speak in spiteful categories about her lover—it is the kind of callous 'truth' with which the revolutionary, like Lvov in Ivanov, destroys.

In Act 4 the family location has shrunk back to its real temporal and spatial proportions, the enclosed nostalgia of the nursery. But the nursery is bare. All the objects of nostalgia in which Gayev and Ranevskaya could hide from their fate have been stripped away. Time has actually passed, and the absurdity of it all for these people is emphasised by Pishchik's unexpected and quite undeserved fortune, and his final 'Don't worry, all things finish in their time'. Gayev will take a job in a bank, which will certainly prove to be a fiasco. Ranevskaya will return to Paris, keep her lover on the limited sum grandmamma sent for the estate, and then will be a pauper. Even her last wish comes to nothing: the sick Firs is not taken to a hospital but is left in the deserted house; and Varya will never be married to Lopakhin.

In a most moving scene, alone on a bare stage, illusions spent, Gayev and Ranevskaya weep quietly together, unheard by Trofimov and Anya whose illusions are just beginning; and whose naively hopeful calls begin the whole process of empty dreams again in a new form. Finally Firs, alone and near to death, speaks Chekhov's deep sympathy for those caught in this process of meaningless time:

Life's over as though I'd never lived.

The summary of life by an abandoned servant is entirely appropriate, for in this play without the foregrounding of the usual love triangles, servants perform an important structural role. In plays which considered the mediating role of art, education etc. such as The Seagull, Chekhov was able to portray the relationship of authentic and false choices as relations of love, and so give them dramatic immediacy. The Cherry Orchard demanded a rather different thematic organisation since here he was dealing with a whole order in decline, in which he knew people as deserving of sympathy as Trigorin and Treplev, yet who collectively created the world of Arkadina. In a play which demonstrates the humanity of these people, yet also displays the harsh social network on which the humanity rests the close analysis of the world of the servants is not coincidental.

Each of the landowning group finds a reflection here. Thus Firs, like Gayev, is always looking into the historical past; Yasha, like Ranevskaya, seeks escape to Paris; Dunyasha, like Anya, escapes into dreams; Sharlotta, like Varya of doubtful birth, drowns her unhappiness in ritual too (Varya in keys and dried peas and Sharlotta in tricks); and Yepikhodov, as submissive to fate and to women as Pishchik, like him stumbles from one chance occurrence to another. Moreover, the servants' style of interaction reflects that of their masters. At the beginning of Act 2, their response to the natural and technological world beyond them is prologue and paradigm for the landowners' mixture of spiritual isolation and comic interaction. Thus Sharlotta, abandoning her tricks for a moment, says thoughtfully,

… Where I'm from or who I am I don't know… I don't know anything… I'm longing for someone I could talk to, but there is no-one. I have no-one.

The desire for direct relations and the weariness with rank of a governess who performs tricks on command is identical with the loneliness of Chekhov's "Bishop": her words are his:

I've got nobody to talk to. I'm alone, quite alone.
I have no-one and … and who I am, or what
I am alive for, no-one knows.

The theme is taken up by the clerk Yepikhodov:

I don't really seem to know the direction I want to go, or what I'm really after—that is to say, should I live or should I shoot myself, as it were.

(In an earlier version of the play which, according to Stanislavskii, Chekhov rather unwillingly altered, Firs too was incorporated in the anomic theme).

These lonely cries are enmeshed in a trivial and comic interaction in which Yepikhodov courts Dunyasha while she courts Yasha, who shows off to everybody, Sharlotta munches a cucumber, and Yepikhodov waves a gun about, explaining the fact that cockroaches get into his kvass by fatalistic laws of history. However, the structural importance of the servants is not simply as a comic parody of their masters (who, after all, do that for themselves). It is not the pretension of the masters that is laid bare by the servants, as, say, in a play by Moliere, but their humanity—which is genuine, but at a cost. The servants have an 'alienating' function in the Brechtian sense, a 'making strange' of familiar scenes (there was certainly nothing new about dramatising the decline of a landed class)—thereby, supposedly, channelling the audience's patterns of response away from emotional identification with a group which, intellectually, Chekhov disapproved.

Hence Firs' nostalgic aspiration for a time when the 'peasants knew their place and the gentry knew their place'—when in fact peasants were flogged, generals danced at the balls and there was no proper medical treatment for the servants—puts into historical focus Gayev's effusive:

you have promoted within us the ideals of public
service and social consciousness.

Similarly, the social climbing Yasha, who is prepared to dally with Dunyasha (but not publicly because of his status) and who is ashamed of his peasant mother, not only reproduces at a lower social level the avarice and vulgarity of Ranevskaya's lover, but comments on the whole framework of ascriptive love relations—on Ranevskaya, who like Dunyasha, is 'below love', on her sin of marrying 'beneath her', and even on the attempted match of Varya and Lopakhin which would have fitted social convention so well. Dunyasha, 'like a flower', and with her preoccupation with makeup and mirrors, reflects not only the 'spring blossom' Anya, but her mother's giddy and lost innocence too, and beyond that all the other cherry orchard ladies, dressed in white, educated to dazzle socially with the latest hair-style and Paris fashion. Sharlotta, whose spiritual isolation is less protected by the layers of nostalgia of her betters, parodies with her baby noises in the final Act Ranevskaya's only remaining resource: personal and familial resurrection in Anya—so a moving and human moment is shown to be an empty response to the pressure of choice. One can only pity Ranevskaya, but her actions have deprived Sharlotta and Varya of meaning too. And when in Act 2 Yepikhodov, with his back to the expansive technology beyond him, assigns to unchangeable historical laws the trivial events of his life, he too goes beyond comedy, lighting up not only Gayev's equally futile attitude to technology and his 'you'll still die in the end, whatever you do' response to Trofimov's ideals, but also the whole immobile crowd of these cherry orchard people who find change 'so vulgar'. Even the tramp, emerging as if out of the sound of the breaking string, has an alienating function: Varya is frightened of this man who speaks of the suffering people she has been raised above; Ranevskaya gives him money, and her kindly generosity is given perspective as the typically static philanthropy which, Chekhov once wrote to [A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891], 'in Russia has such an arbitrary quality'. A man wanders ill, he is given money and wanders out again—and behind him there is the growth of a rational technology-

A whole order is tied together with this immobile procedure; and the same reforms which created zemstvo medicine are here seen as the 'troubles'. Moreover, the order in decline may itself 'leave its mark'. Everyone is involved in ritualised actions:

1. the class in decline—Ranevskaya always giving money away, Gayev potting the red and eating sweets, Pishchik borrowing money and saying 'extraordinary thing';
2. the lower classes who aspire to rise—Dunyasha always powdering her nose, Yasha always giving himself airs and saying 'what stupidity';
3. and even those who have risen—Varya always cheeseparing and spying on the lovers, and Lopakhin constantly being deferent and waving his arms about. Thus the new order of social mobility is threatened with inclusion as the traditional world adapts and renews itself.

It is clear in the values of the younger servants, in the deference that Anya and Varya expect from them, and particularly in Lopakhin's consciousness of hierarchy, that the real human crisis does not lie in the historical decline of a particular group. It lies in the division of human personality by ascriptive values which existed in Firs' golden past, continue in the present, and threaten to be incorporated in the merchant values of the future (as Chekhov had shown in earlier works, such as "The Mask" and "My Life"). The social crisis of the landowning class, and their particular anomie, is thus not the central one of the play. The social crisis rather clarifies the loss of wholeness by tearing away the comfortable ideology which hid it hitherto. Just as in "Dreary Story" and "Bishop" Chekhov used the impact of physical decline to reveal the meaningless passage of time, so in The Cherry Orchard he uses the impact of social decline to reveal the same thing. The question of identity and the problem of meaning extends beyond this class to the process of modernisation itself. As Lopakhin says, 'what hordes of people there are in Russia, my friend, who have no aim in life at all!'

Against the passive and hierarchical world of the landowners, Chekhov sets two forms of modernisation, embodied in two major characters, the revolutionary Trofimov, and the merchant (and former peasant) Lopakhin. It is their activist dialogue which carries Chekhov's vision. Trofimov in fact articulates a number of Chekhov's cherished beliefs—in the importance of science and art, education, and an intelligentsia which works:

Mankind is constantly marching forward, constantly perfecting itself. Everything which we can't understand at the moment will one day be comprehensible. But to reach this point we have to give everything to our work, and we have to help those people who are seeking after truth. Here in Russia, hardly anyone has begun to work as yet. The great majority of intellectuals that I know don't search for anything, don't do anything and as yet are incapable of working.… They merely chatter on about science and don't know a lot about art either.

Yet for all his talk about love for the people, unremitting toil and science, Trofimov is conspicuously unable to love, work or be scientific. Despite the obvious tenderness of the inner man, Trofimov does his best to drive out sentiment. He claims that his relationship with Anya is above love:

… we are above love. The whole object and meaning of our life is to rid ourselves of everything that is petty and illusory in life, everything that hinders our happiness and freedom.

Like Shamokhin in "Ariadne", he abstracts love, denying feeling. Nor does he work; he is the 'eternal student' who not only is criticised by the other characters for doing nothing, but himself admits that he will probably be a student for the rest of his life. And … in his eagerness to generalise, he also denies the achievements of contemporary science. His famous speech about the frightful condition of workers draws too much on revolutionary abstraction to be accurate. In denying the great advances made in zemstvo medicine (of which Chekhov was so very proud) Trofimov is opposing the evolutionary vision.

Like all of Chekhov's revolutionaries Trofimov has become, despite his undeniably sympathetic qualities, a 'walking tendency', with a simplistic ideological vision that makes him prone to categorise quite brutally all those about him. Thus his attitude to the orchard is not scientific but revolutionary—the landowners must atone for the dead souls who cry from the trees about years of persecution. Significantly, he tries to categorise Lopakhin according to a determinist Marxian formula—the necessary evil of a bourgeois period in Russia:

My opinion of you, my dear Lopakhin, is simply this: you're a rich man, and soon you'll be a millionaire. Now, as part of the natural process by which one kind of matter is converted into another, you are a necessary evil—just as Nature needs beasts of prey which devour everything in their path.

It is interesting that Trofimov speaks a language of fatalistic Darwinism reminiscent of Van Koren to disguise the Marxist content from the censor; but it is not untypical, since for Chekhov both these value systems were part of the same 'inauthentic' paradigm.

Trofimov's vision of the future is as boldly uncontradictory as his evaluation of the complex Lopakhin. Having told Anya that they are above love, he continues, 'Onwards! We must march irresistibly together to that brilliant star shining there in the distance! Onwards, my friends! Let us not lag!'; and again 'It's upon us! Happiness is drawing closer and closer. I can almost hear its footsteps!' The speeches are as rhetorical as the vision is simplistic, and the whole thing is put into perspective by Chekhov in making Anya translate this new life into planting a new orchard with her mother, and in making Trofimov himself ludicrous and laughable. Like the revolutionary Dr Lvov in Ivanov, Trofimov is a prig, and Chekhov is eager to make him appear absurd, with a beard that won't grow and a premature impotence. He is, in Madame Ranevskaya's words, 'an absurd prude, a freak', and is so upset by her suggestion to take a lover that he falls downstairs. Also, like Chekhov's other revolutionary creation at this time, Sasha in "The Betrothed", Trofimov is dirty and down-at-heel. In every way he lacks beauty and wholeness, and despite his statement that man should not be proud since physically very imperfect, he claims to take a pride in being a 'moth-eaten gent'. He claims too, like Gusev, to be strong, and above the need for other men—yet he trails along on the coat-tails of the landowners.

Between on the one hand the student who deeply loves his mistress and her daughter, and on the other the revolutionary who believes that landowners have to atone for their oppression, there is an ambivalence of identity which deprives Trofimov of action, and so immerses him in the familiar rhythm of comic trivia and personal crisis with all the other characters of immobility. He is as irresolute as the family he clings to—and like them (and like Sasha again) this revolutionary is strangely anachronistic. At the end of Act 2, Trofimov tells Anya:

Your mother, you yourself, your uncle don't understand that you are living in debt, at the expense of others. You live off people whom you don't even allow into the house. We are at least two hundred years behind the times.

But at the end of Act 3, Lopakhin puts Trofimov out of date:

Oh, if only my father and grandfather could rise up from their graves and see what's happened here.… I have bought the very estate on which my father and grandfather were serfs, where they weren't even allowed into the kitchen.

In Chekhov's view it is the rational and beauty-loving merchant that makes the revolutionary anachronistic, and not the other way around.

In a play of ritualised action and withdrawal, it is Lopakhin alone who is mobile—both socially and dramatically. Undoubtedly there are elements of the old-fashioned, subservient Russian merchant about him, as well as elements of the more independent new capitalist who had just begun to appear in Russia. He is acutely conscious of his peasant origins and of the eternal hierarchy of the old order. At the same time he shows an equally acute understanding of change, and the profits to be gained from it. But he is certainly not the ruthless capitalist that Trofimov describes, nor even the type of grasping merchant Chekhov portrayed in earlier works—which is what contemporaries seemed to expect him to be. In his letters Chekhov insists that Lopakhin is not this type of merchant:

You have to remember that he is not a merchant in the crude sense of the word. [Chekhov to Ol'ga Knipper, 28 October 1903]

Quite unlike the shiftless Trofimov, it is around Lopakhin that the action moves. Chekhov's letters suggest that he structured his whole play round his development:

Yes, Lopakhin is a merchant. But he is a good man in the fullest sense; and his presence must suggest considerable dignity and intelligence. There should be no trickery or pettiness attached to him. I thought that you would make a great success of Lopakhin's role, which is the central one of the play. If you decide to play Gayev, get Vishnevskii to play the part of Lopakhin—he won't succeed in being an artistic Lopakhin, but he'll avoid being a petty one. Luzhskii would play the ruthless foreigner and Leonidov would make a kulak out of him. [Chekhov to K. S. Stanislavskii, 30 October 1903]

Chekhov's letter to Stanislavskii rejects the Western 'capitalist' and the Russian 'kulak' interpretation of the merchant, and calls for him to be artistic, intelligent, and thoroughly human, thereby countering those Soviet and Western interpretations which prefer to see Lopakhin as a brutal destroyer of beauty. (The Western 'aesthetic' analysis is as misconceived as the Soviet class one—typical of the former is Magarshack's [in Chekhov the Dramatist]: 'The cherry orchard indeed is a purely aesthetic symbol which its owners with the traditions of the old culture behind them fully understood… to Lopakhin it is only an excellent site for "development".' In fact it is Lopakhin and not the owners who understands this decaying orchard.)

Chekhov was equally adamant about the centrality of Lopakhin's part to Nemirovich-Danchenko:

If [Stanislavskii] decides to play Lopakhin and succeeds in the part, the play will be a success. But if Lopakhin is made trivial, played by a trivial actor, both the role and the play are certain to fail. [2 November 1903]

To emphasise the artistic sensitivity and humanity of Lopakhin, Chekhov added some words to the final version of the play, in which he makes even Trofimov recognise his qualities:

Your fingers are fine and gentle, like an artist's, and you are refined and sensitive at heart.

And to the actor Leonidov, Chekhov insisted that Lopakhin should 'look like a cross between a merchant and a professor of medicine at Moscow University'.

We are given in the letters the image of a man of intelligence, sensitivity and humanity, with features of both the artist and the scientist about him; and this is the image which Chekhov draws with great care in the play itself. Lopakhin loves beauty, but recognises the brutal reality of the world of serfdom which fashioned the values of the cherry orchard people; he regrets his poor education, but as a man of intelligence recognises the emptiness behind Trofimov's supposedly scientific conversation. Like Chekhov, Lopakhin was the grandson of a serf, and too near the people to romanticise them in an abstract or nostalgic manner. Like Chekhov, he was brutally beaten by his shopkeeper father as a child. And like Chekhov, the career of this man with artist's hands and the appearance of a professor of medicine is much concerned with squeezing the serf out of his soul—in terms not just of social mobility, but spiritual mobility as well. His tipsy but joyous cry from the heart in Act 3 is one of liberation, but his search for identity does not end with a merchant's possession of real estate. Lopakhin has a creative vision, of a new life evolving as the unproductive orchard is replaced by gardens where people grow things. In place of the decayed old order and their orchard where beauty hides stagnation, 'our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will one day see a new living world springing up here'—as always in Chekhov, the reference to the future children, and to the particular time-scale, is significant.

So it is Lopakhin, not Trofimov, who finds meaning in work, and who responds 'scientifically' to the problem of the cherry orchard. It is Lopakhin who has the evolutionary and epic vision of a world of limitless potential peopled by giants. It is Lopakhin alone who, awkward and out of place with his gauche gestures in the claustrophobia of the nursery, does not turn his back on the sweeping horizons and growing technology of Act 2. Yet, unlike Trofimov, his visions are never left as vast generalities. While Trofimov talks arrogantly and abstractly of his place in the vanguard of progress in Act 4, Lopakhin's practical policy of replacing the infertile orchard goes methodically ahead:

TROFIMOV. Mankind is on the march to the ultimate truth, the most supreme happiness that can be achieved on earth—and I am in the vanguard!

LOPAKHIN. Will you get there?

TROFIMOV. I will… Either I'll get there or I'll light the way for others!

(The sound of an axe striking a tree is to be heard in the distance)

LOPAKHIN. Well, my friend, goodbye. It's time we went. We torment each other, and meanwhile life goes on just the same. When I work long hours without a break I think a bit more clearly, and then I seem to know the reason for living.

Trofimov's pause contrasts with the relentless sound of the axe, and his generalities with Lopakhin's enduring work. Thus in Act 2, in response to Trofimov's speech about the need of the intelligentsia to work on behalf of science and art, which concludes with the inaccurate generalisation about workers' conditions, Lopakhin answers pragmatically:

Now, I want to tell you that I am always up by five every morning. I work from morning till night. I invariably have my own and other people's money around me, and I get plenty of opportunity to see what kind of people they are. You only have to begin work to find out how few honest, decent people there are around.

Trofimov's speech begins with the exhortation to work by a man who never does, and concludes with a false generalisation; Lopakhin responds with a speech about real work in the present and concludes with the vision of a land fit for giants. It is the pragmatist as well as the visionary we need to remember. Lopakhin does not oppose Trofimov's appeal to science—indeed he subsumes it in his following words and actions. But he does oppose the abstractions Trofimov is committed to.

Despite the inconsistencies and occasional naivety of a peasant who has become a landowner, Lopakhin has no simplistic solutions. He recognises the human suffering as well as the hope that accompanies progress, and at the moment of his triumph weeps genuinely for the woman he had desperately tried to help. His maturity is of a dialectical kind: he wants to save the old class by changing it; he wants to preserve its human values while removing their social basis. The values of the old order should not be killed, as Trofimov would have it, but subsumed, incorporated within a new, growing humanity—just as Trofimov's vision of science is incorporated. Ranevskaya and Trofimov, master and revolutionary, are given value—or more precisely, both synthesised and rejected—by Lopakhin. But the way is hard, and unlike the revolutionary, Lopakhin cannot hear the footsteps of the new life:

How I wish we could get past this stage. If we could just change this unhappy and arbitrary life soon.

Lopakhin can feel Ranevskaya's tragedy, and knows, like Gurov at the end of "Lady with a Little Dog," that the way ahead is not simple.

Against Ranevskaya's suffering there is hope, and against Trofimov's hope, suffering: it is in this context that the sound of the breaking string can be understood. A detailed reading of the text surrounding its first appearance reveals a typical pattern. Ranevskaya wants to avoid the question of the cherry orchard by reverting to the talk of the past. Trofimov talks of the future of man and science—punctuated by Gayev's fatalistic pessimism, by Ranevskaya's eagerness to find some meaning in him, and by Lopakhin's irony over his pseudo-science. There follows Trofimov's speech about Russian intellectuals and the condition of the workers, then Lopakhin's practical refutation of it and his vision of a land fit for giants. Ranevskaya immediately trivialises Lopakhin's vision with her own fears:

Why on earth do you want giants? They're fine enough in fairy tales but they terrify me anywhere else.

The juxtaposition of her banality and Lopakhin's sense of potential induces a feeling of melancholy, emphasised by the guitar of 'twenty-two misfortunes', Ranevskaya's pensive 'There goes Yepikhodov' (repeated by Anya) and the going down of the sun. There follows Gayev's typically fatalistic acceptance of the separation of Nature and man:

(quietly, as if reciting): Oh, Nature, glorious Nature! You shine with your eternal light, so beautiful and yet so impervious to our fate.

Anya and Varya as usual beg him not to talk so pompously, and Trofimov emphasises the escapism of Gayev's vision with 'You'd better double off the red back into the middle pocket'. Gayev relapses into his other refrain, 'I'll be silent. I'll be silent'. There follows a pensive silence, broken only by the subdued muttering of Firs. Suddenly, out of the dark vastness of Nature itself comes a cry of melancholy—as in "The Steppe"; there it was a bird calling for understanding, here it is the sound of a breaking string from the technological world these nursery people have ignored.

The reactions are typical and significant. Lopakhin explains the sound rationally and practically—it comes from the mine. Gayev continues his thoughts about Nature, and thinks it was some bird, perhaps a heron. Trofimov converts this into a bird presaging ominous and great events, the owl. Ranevskaya is frightened and almost immediately gives more money away, as though buying off something incomprehensible. Varya is also frightened, but worries about her mistress' improvidence. Firs dreams of the golden days before the great 'troubles'. Gayev shakes and wants to escape from implacable Nature to his billiard room, just as Trofimov had suggested. So the sound of the breaking string, like the cherry orchard which began this conversation of evasion, distinguishes the alternatives of action in a world where 'everything's muddled'. Afterwards the landowners, as always, escape, Lopakhin turns to the practical question of the cherry orchard, and Trofimov stays with Anya to talk of revolution.

The second sound of the breaking string also takes place in the silences around the muttering Firs; and is directly stimulated by the contradictions, the hope and suffering (of Anya/Trofimov against Ranevskaya/Gayev; more personally of Lopakhin against Varya), which dramatise the question of the cherry orchard. The sad sound of the axe punctuates Firs' statement of the tragedy of human potential:

Life's over as though I'd never lived.… You've got no strength left, you old fool. Nothing's left, nothing.

As this last, decayed man falls motionless, the sound of the breaking string coming out of the wide sky again speaks the elegy of man separated from value. The betrayed potential of the cherry orchard people is evident in this isolated old servant in the abandoned nursery where he is the only object of nostalgia left. The shepherd's pipe calling to the youthful Anya and Varya in the enclosed nursery of Act 1, which is an ambivalent call of potential and stagnation, is not answered. But the ambivalence is clarified. The true value of the nursery is now clear; for nostalgia there is emptiness, for naive youth there is abandoned old age. And outside, in the final moment of the play, there is the sound of Lopakhin's axe. Real value, real time, like Lopakhin's more successful actions, lie beyond the nursery, and that is the dramatic point of the play.…

[At] the social level The Cherry Orchard clarifies the potential responses of stagnation, revolution and scientific evolution to the contradictions of the modernising autocracy; at the personal level, it dramatises the struggle of a man of artistic and scientific sensitivity to squeeze the serf mentality of Russia and of his childhood out of his soul. The struggle for development was both Russia's and Chekhov's own.

John Tulloch, in his Chekhov: A Structuralist Study, The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1980, 225 p.