🌸 The Cherry Orchard: summary and themes

What you’ll learn

1. The Room That Is Still Called the NurseryFollow the plot from the two o'clock arrival in May to the locked house in October, and name what each of the five main characters is defending.A woman comes home from Paris to an estate that is already advertised for auction. A merchant tells her exactly how to save it, three times, and she never says no. On 22 August the orchard is sold to him, and by October the family have scattered — leaving one person behind in the house.
2. Whose Orchard Is ItExplain what the Emancipation of 1861 and the arrival of the dacha have to do with a family losing a garden.Firs was born a serf and calls his freedom the misfortune. Lopakhin is a serf's grandson buying the land his family were owned on. Trofimov gives the speech the censor wanted cut. Behind all three is forty years of Russian history arriving on one estate at once.
3. He Kept Calling It a ComedyState the case for reading the play as a comedy, using Chekhov's own letters, and say what changes if you accept it.Chekhov subtitled it a comedy, told an actress it was in parts a farce, and wrote the merchant for his director as "the central one of the play". Stanislavski told him it was a tragedy and staged it that way. Both readings are still running, and the play keeps refusing to settle it.
4. 17 January 1904Account for what happened on the first night and in the six months after it, and why the production's own director judged it a failure.The theatre scheduled the première on the night of Chekhov's literary jubilee because it expected the acting to be under-rehearsed. He stood through the ceremony coughing, wrote that the ovation astonished him, and was dead within six months. Stanislavski's own verdict: a mediocre success.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, translated by Julius West, in Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series (Project Gutenberg ebook 7986) — the play itself. Every plot detail, stage direction and quoted line above is checked against this text: the nursery at two in the morning, Lopakhin's twenty-five thousand roubles and the 22 August auction, Firs on the dried cherries and on the Emancipation, Trofimov's Act Two tirade, Charlotta's speech about her passport, the bidding against Deriganov, the failed proposal and the broken thermometer, and the two soundings of the breaking string — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7986
• Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, with a biographical sketch, translated by Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg ebook 6408) — the letter to Maria Lilina of 15 September 1903 ("not a drama, but a comedy, in parts a farce"); the letter to Stanislavski of 30 October 1903 quoted in full in the widget above; the letter to F. D. Batyushkov of 19 January 1904 on the ovation; and, in the biographical sketch, the 1876 Taganrog auction and the creditor Selivanov, the play's composition during the Christmas illness of 1902, its completion in October 1903, the première of 17 January 1904 held as a twenty-fifth literary anniversary, and Chekhov's death on 2 July 1904 and burial at Novodevichy — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6408
• Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, translated by J. J. Robbins — chapters 43 and 44 are the source for the title-stress anecdote in his own words, the decision to schedule the première on the jubilee as insurance against an under-rehearsed production, Chekhov standing pale and coughing through the ceremony after Act Three, the professor who opened his address like Gayev addressing the bookcase, the rat-trap remark, Chekhov's sideways protest at the production's sound effects, the cutting of the end of Act Two, and the judgement that the performance "enjoyed but a mediocre success" — https://archive.org/details/mylifeinart00stanrich
• Geoffrey Borny, Interpreting Chekhov (ANU Press, open access), chapter 7, "The Cherry Orchard: Complete Synthesis of Vision and Form" — Stanislavski's reply that the play "is not a comedy, nor a farce as you have written, this is a tragedy, whatever escape towards a better life you open up in the last act", written a month after Chekhov's letter to Lilina; the censors' insistence on cutting Trofimov's Act Two speech and their stated objection to its attack on the intelligentsia; and the reading that connects the breaking string to Yepikhodov's guitar — https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p24651/html/ch07.html
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Emancipation Manifesto" — the manifesto of 3 March 1861 (19 February, Old Style), issued by Alexander II with seventeen accompanying acts, freeing roughly twenty-three million serfs, and the forty-nine years of redemption payments that followed — https://www.britannica.com/event/Emancipation-Manifesto
• Oliver M. Sayler, The Russian Theatre (Brentano's, 1922), and Alexander Bakshy, The Path of the Modern Russian Stage (1918) — the sources of the two Moscow Art Theatre photographs used above, including Stanislavski in costume as Gayev
• A note on dates and translations. Russia used the Julian calendar until 1918, and Chekhov's letters, the première and his death are all dated Old Style here: 17 January 1904 was 30 January in Western Europe, and 2 July 1904 was 15 July. Translations differ in ways worth knowing: West gives Varya's age as twenty-seven where the Russian has twenty-four, and has Lopakhin guess at "a bucket fallen down a well" where the Russian and later translators have a bucket come loose in a mine shaft. Gayev's bank salary is six thousand roubles a year when he states it himself in Act Two, and appears as sixty thousand in West's Act Four; the lower figure is the one used above.

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