I’ve never as far as skimmed a line of Chekhov until this 1904 play. For an avid reader of drama and prose, it’s a strange affair having so long avoided this innovating figure of contemporary Russian literature. Come the occasion and I felt as anxious as an intoxicated blizzard intent on desecrating its own motherland.
Many place Chekhov up there with such echelons of world playwrights as Shakespeare and Moliere (whom I regard at the peak). Then something like Faust (Goethe’s), though a unique phenomenon and not theatre in senso stricto, would otherwise contend for the most epic drama ever composed by man.
Though rarely does expectation align with reality.
I can’t definitively claim Chekhov’s theatre as the very next best thing since the cotton gin, and certainly not based on this one comedy alone. But it sure as hell innovates no less than Shaw or Ibsen, those other theatrical visionaries close in spirit and time.
These latter names all write in a manner more realistically human compared to the allegorical, archetypical paradigms of the earlier playwrights. But the particularities vary across each respective type of realism.
Shaw and Ibsen’s plays about nothing (as I’ve seen them ironically labeled) actually emphasize a severe social message. I don’t know what message Chekhov emphasizes, but I sense a strong affinity for the microeconomics and the art of unreliable, noisy dialogue.
Chekhov wants to highlight the irrational inherent to human communication, without giving away any possible traces of hyperbole, in contrast to, say, Nikolai Gogol (also a realist).
Most of the cast is a bunch of hypocrites confabulating and projecting pensive powerful philosophical pathos, that is, mostly talking refined gibberish simultaneously hilarious and melancholy to themselves and over each other.
Chekhov labels the Cherry Orchard a comedy. For my part, tragicomedy is the fitter term, though Russian theatre might employ an altogether different barometer towards such matters. But no matter.
As for the cast particulars. Gaev deploys some of the wittiest romanticism regretfully met with the nieces' annoying pleas of suppression.
The eternal student of ambiguous age Trofimov talks a swift penetrating talk but walks a questionably lame walk.
Лопахин is the мужик of the bunch, or so he wishes to project. Фирс is the old, expiring, mumbling lackey who’s seen it all and stays inextricably put.
And Ranevskaya, makes what, the femme fatale? No … not the femme fatale. A victim more than anything. But what do we really know save for the bits of disconnected dialogue?
So I can’t claim any of the above as even remotely plausible. I’m not the most penetrating reader nor judge come psychological subtleties and oblique motives. I certainly have an easier time with Shaw whose dialogues feel more consequential and clear of noisy disarray.
But come aesthetic matters in their wholesomeness, towards which my intuition is better suited anyway, and I’ve more than enjoyed what I read.
Questions, comments? Connect.