Landmarks in Russian literature

by Maurice Baring

Lopachin: If we do not think of a way out of the matter and come to some plan, on the 22nd of August the cherry orchard and the whole property will be sold by auction. Make up your minds; there is no other way out, I promise you.

But it is no good his saying anything. They merely reply, “What nonsense!” They regard the matter of splitting up their old home into villas as a sheer impossibility. And this is the whole subject of the play. The merchant continues during the second act to insist on the only practical solution of their difficulties, and they likewise persist in saying this solution is madness, that it is absolutely impossible. They cannot bring themselves to think of their old home being turned into a collection of villas; they keep on saying that something will turn up, an old aunt will die and leave them a legacy, or something of that kind will happen.

In the third act, the day of the auction has arrived, there is a dance going on in the house. The impression is one of almost intolerable human sadness, because we know that nothing has turned up, we know that the whole estate will be sold. The whole picture is one of the ending of a world. At the dance there are only the people in the village, the stationmaster, the post-office officials, and so forth. The servant they have brought from abroad gives notice. An old servant, who belongs to the house, and is in the last stage of senile decay, wanders about murmuring of old times and past brilliance. The guests dance quadrilles through all the rooms. Leonidas has gone to the auction, and Madame Ranievskaia sits waiting in hopeless suspense for the news of the result. At last he comes back, pale and tired, and too depressed to speak. The merchant also comes triumphantly into the room; he is slightly intoxicated, and with a triumphant voice he announces that he has bought the cherry garden.

In the last act, we see them leave their house for ever, all the furniture has been packed up, all the things which for them are so full of little associations; the pictures are off the walls, the bare trees of the cherry garden—for it is now autumn—are already being cut down, and they are starting to begin a new life and to leave their old home for ever. The old house, so charming, so full of old-world dignity and simplicity, will be pulled down, and make place for neat, surburban little villas to be inhabited by the new class which has arisen in Russia. Formerly there were only gentlemen and peasants, now there is the self-made man, who, being infinitely more practical, pushes out the useless and unpractical gentleman to make way for himself. The pathos and naturalness of this last act are extraordinary. Every incident that we know so well in these moments of departure is noted and rendered. The old servant, who belongs to the house, is supposed to be in the hospital, and is not there to say good-bye to them; but when they are all gone, he appears and closes the shutters, saying, “It is all closed, they are gone, they forgot me; it doesn’t matter, I will sit here. Leonidas Andreevitch probably forgot his cloak, and only went in his light overcoat, I wasn’t there to see.” And he lies motionless in the darkened, shuttered room, while from outside comes the sound of the felling of the cherry orchard.

Of course, it is quite impossible in a short analysis to give any idea of the real nature of this play, which is a tissue of small details, every one of which tells. Every character in it is living; Leonidas, the brother, who makes foolish speeches and is constantly regretting them afterwards; the plain and practical merchant; the good-natured neighbour who borrows money and ultimately pays it back; the governess; the clerk in the estate office; the servants, the young student who is in love with the daughter,—we learn to know all these people as well as we know our own friends and relations, and they reveal themselves as people do in real life by means of a lifelike representation of the conversation of human beings. The play is historical and symbolical, because it shows us why the landed gentry in Russia has ceased to have any importance, and how these amiable, unpractical, casual people must necessarily go under, when they are faced with a strong energetic class of rich, self-made men who are the sons of peasants. Technically the play is extraordinarily interesting; there is no conflict of wills in it, nothing which one could properly call action or drama, and yet it never ceases to be interesting; and the reason of this is that the conversation, the casual remarks of the characters, which seem to be about nothing, and to be put there anyhow, have always a definite purpose. Every casual remark serves to build up the architectonic edifice which is the play. The structure is built, so to speak, in air; it is a thing of atmosphere, but it is built nevertheless with extreme care, and the result when interpreted, as it is interpreted at Moscow by the actors of the artistic theatre, is a stage triumph.

The three other most important plays of Tchekov are Ivanoff, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vania,—the latter play has been well translated into German.

Three Sisters is the most melancholy of all Tchekov’s plays. It represents the intense monotony of provincial life, the grey life which is suddenly relieved by a passing flash, and then rendered doubly grey by the disappearance of that flash. The action takes place in a provincial town. A regiment of artillery is in garrison there. One of the three sisters, Masha, has married a schoolmaster; the two others, Irina and Olga, are living in the house of their brother, who is a budding professor. Their father is dead. Olga teaches in a provincial school all day, and gives private lessons in the evening. Irina is employed in the telegraph office. They have both only one dream and longing, and that is to get away from the provincial corner in which they live, and to settle in Moscow. They only stay on Masha’s account. Masha’s husband is a kind and well-meaning, but excessively tedious schoolmaster, who is continually reciting Latin tags. When Masha married him she was only eighteen, and thought he was the cleverest man in the world. She subsequently discovered that he was the kindest, but not the cleverest man in the world. The only thing which relieves the tedium of this provincial life is the garrison.

When the play begins, we hear that a new commander has been appointed to the battery, a man of forty called Vershinin. He is married, has two children, but his wife is half crazy. The remaining officers in the battery are Baron Tuzenbach, a lieutenant; Soleny, a major; and two other lieutenants. Tuzenbach is in love with Irina, and wishes to marry her; she is willing to marry him, but she is not in the least in love with him, and tells him so. Masha falls passionately in love with Vershinin. The major, Soleny, is jealous of Tuzenbach. Then suddenly while these things are going on, the battery is transferred from the town to the other end of Russia. On the morning it leaves the town, Soleny challenges the Baron to a duel, and kills him. The play ends with the three sisters being left alone. Vershinin says a passionate good-bye to Masha, who is in floods of tears, and does not disguise her grief from her husband. He, in the most pathetic way conceivable, tries to console her, while the cheerful music of the band is heard gradually getting fainter and fainter in the distance. Irina has been told of the death of the Baron, and the sad thing about this is that she does not really care. The three sisters are left to go on working, to continue their humdrum existence in the little provincial town, to teach the children in the school; the only thing which brought some relief to their monotonous existence, and to one of the sisters the passion of her life, is taken away from them, and the departure is made manifest to them by the strains of the cheerful military band.

I have never seen anything on the stage so poignantly melancholy as this last scene. In this play, as well as in others, Tchekov, by the way he presents you certain fragments of people’s lives, manages to open a window on the whole of their life. In this play of Three Sisters we get four glimpses. A birthday party in the first act; an ordinary evening in the second act; in the third act a night of excitement owing to a fire in the town, and it is on this night that the love affair of Vershinin and Masha culminates in a crisis; and in the fourth act the departure of the regiment. Yet these four fragments give us an insight, and open a window on to the whole life of these people, and, in fact, on to the lives of many thousand people who have led this life in Russia.

Tchekov’s plays are as interesting to read as the work of any first-rate novelist. But in reading them, it is impossible to guess how effective they are on the stage, the delicate succession of subtle shades and half-tones, of hints, of which they are composed, the evocation of certain moods and feelings which it is impossible to define,—all this one would think would disappear in the glare of the footlights, but the result is exactly the reverse. Tchekov’s plays are a thousand times more interesting to see on the stage than they are to read. A thousand effects which the reader does not suspect make themselves felt on the boards. The reason of this is that Tchekov’s plays realise Goethe’s definition of what plays should be. “Everything in a play,” Goethe said, “should be symbolical, and should lead to something else.” By symbolical, of course, he meant morally symbolical,—he did not mean that the play should be full of enigmatic puzzles, but that every event in it should have a meaning and cast a shadow larger than itself.