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Chekhov’s orchard

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

A caravan, a cavalcade, is arriving on a May morning in this far-off Russian estate. Some of the servants are awake to meet it; they stayed up all night and the train was pitiably delayed. And a few of the menials from nearby, they converge on the house. It’s an old place — large and stately. Perhaps in not so good repair. The house has not been occupied these last few years. All the fine names have gone from the neighbourhood. The place has been shut up, boarded over, half-closed.

Of course, the peasants have lived on in their huts and hovels; they couldn’t go anywhere. Not everything has changed. But the few servants kept on in the estate by the requirements of good form have suffered and gone without. Now they eat badly, if at all. For the mistress, Lyubov, Madame Ranevsky, the owner of the estate, has lost all her money. She married a man and he died, and she followed another man — some call him a wretch and a scoundrel — to Paris, after the drowning of her little son not long before.

Now Madame Ranevsky returns. The servants — especially the old ones — think their private thoughts about her morality. But a fair few of them of them make haste to fall at her feet.

The oldest of all of them is Firs. He has been there since before the mistress’s grandfather was baptised. He remembers the fine old days; he recalls the emancipating of the serfs by Alexander. And he considers the latter a mistake, a great mistake.

Returning to the place where she grew up, Madame Ranevsky has a train behind her. She has her own daughter; she has an adopted daughter, a little older; and she has accompanying them all the governess, Charlotta. The latter is a woman who believes, we later hear, that she was born a bastard; that she was the child of unwed circus performers. And we are told, too, that on the train the governess was performing magic tricks — tricks she later repeats at a party in the old house.

But if tricks are needed here, they are not needed at parties. They are required to save the estate. There are debts to be honoured and paid. Madame Ranevsky returns to face her debts; there are so many of them. She has her vague hopes — the vague hopes of a rich woman who has never had to work for anything, who is so useless with money as to permit her servants to starve while launching coins out of her purse in moments of frustration or confusion. The kind of woman to pay a beggar in gold rather than silver because his appearance frightened her delicate daughter and she wanted him to leave double quick.

Her world is full of vague and ignorant hopes. Perhaps a middle-distant relative, old and rich, could be prevailed upon to send some money to save the house and its orchard? That old relation does not like the family, certainly; but that is no barrier. She would still do her duty to send only a few tens of thousands of roubles in aid. And might that not defray the worst of the creditors? Is it possible all might yet be saved?

Madame Ranevsky is delusional; she’s in denial; and it is reasonable, then, to imagine her prey to the worst idlers and spongers in the region. Pishtchik, a temporarily embarrassed landowner, endlessly asking to borrow some money from everyone, is one of them. He is not badly intentioned, really; he is just a sponge, too old to be behaving so impudently.

Some of these wasters and idlers, in theory, are trying to help Madame Ranevsky. The perpetual student Trofimov claims to want to assist her; to want, indeed, to help all mankind. He is pushing thirty, but he is still to take his degree; he was her late boy’s tutor. She keeps him around once he arrives, in his tattered, penniless way, perhaps in homage to her son’s memory — although she also despises him. The tutor reminds her too much of her boy, maybe; and she hates his maladjustment, the way he is still a boy at heart and has not grown up, as her boy never got to grow up. Perhaps his appearance — the threadbare clothes and starveling body, the lank and thinning hair, the lined, new-ancient face — simply frightens her. It is frightening when those younger than us begin to look old.

And other people cluster around Madame Ranevsky, never letting her breathe for an instant.

One of them is Lopahin. A savvy, business-minded man, the child and grandson of peasantry, he has ideas. Thoughts he got poring over his account books. He wants the estate to be cut up and rented or otherwise sold. For its cherry orchard to be cut down, for the place to be divided into holiday villas and smallholdings. Villa life and out-of-towners holidaying. That is the future.

The railways already mean the end of the rural world of the past. That cherry orchard once, many decades ago, was used to produce the finest jams and pickles — jams that were sent to Moscow, where they were much esteemed. But the recipe has been lost to time, as all things are finally and truly lost. Those days are never returning.

Subdivide the place, Lopahin says. If you do it you can make money enough and to spare. Of course, you will have to submit the orchard to the axe. But that’s progress. That’s progress! You cannot fight it, Madame Ranevsky, only submit.