SparkNotes: The Cherry Orchard: Context The Cherry Orchard Table of Contents Plot Overview Anton Pavlevich Chekhov was born on January 17th, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father Pavel was a shopkeeper the town, which was small, provincial, and on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia, and his grandfather was Egor Chekhov, a serf. Serfs were the legal property of the landowners who owned the property on which they resided; it was thus a form of slavery. In 1841, Egor bought freedom for himself and his family at the price of 875 rubles. Russia had been changing ever since the early 18th century, when Tsar Peter the Great carried out a series of reforms with the intent of modernizing Russia in Western Europe's image. European styles in fashion and art were imported, the Western canon was widely read among the nobility, and French was adopted as the language of cultured discourse. A large government bureaucracy was created; the achievement of rank became an obsession of Russian life.

During Chekhov's childhood, in the time of Tsar Alexander II, a second wave of reforms was underway, reforms that further liberalized the country and its economy. The most important of these was the Emancipation Declaration of 1861, which freed the serfs from bondage. These reforms caused great controversy, as they introduced what was, in effect, the beginning of a free-market economy, undermining the power of the nobility, and sometimes even impoverishing them. The situation displayed in The Cherry Orchard, of a wealthy landowning family forced to sell their estate in order to pay their debts, was thus a familiar one in the Russian society of Chekhov's day. Chekhov himself had a relatively quiet childhood. He attended the local Russian grammar school, worked in his father's store and occasionally wrote small pieces for the amusement of his family. Taganrog was not a typical provincial town; it was a multicultural port, with Italians, Greeks, and Turks residing in the wealthier sections of town and Russians such as the Chekhovs living in comparatively poor suburbs. It had a theater, which the young Chekhov would often visit.

When Chekhov was sixteen, Pavel's store failed, and the entire family had to move to Moscow—the entire family, that is, except for Anton. A merchant (and friend of the family) had helped the Chekhovs with a loan, but insisted on keeping Anton with him in the house as a kind of collateral. As soon as he could, he left Taganrog in order to pursue medical studies in Moscow in 1879 at the age of 19. That year, Chekhov began to write comic stories in order to pay his medical school tuition. By the time he was twenty, he was employed by The Spectator magazine as their regular humorist. Over ninety percent of Chekhov's published work appeared in magazines before he was twenty-eight, and, by this age, he had already established himself as a premier writer of short stories. As he developed as a writer, his stories began to take on deeper and more profound themes, as he moved away from his comic roots. To this day, Chekhov's literary reputation primarily rests with his short stories, and Chekhov's early plays, written primarily in his early 20s, are not well-remembered.

It was only in 1896 that he began to turn his attention back to drama; in the eight remaining years before his death, he managed to complete four plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The first performance of The Seagull was nearly laughed off the stage; it was criticized as dull, unimaginative, and lacking any sort of dramatic tension (a critical undercurrent that has survived in Russia to this day). Only gradually did Chekhov's new form of drama, emphasizing characterization, detail and symbolism instead of plot development and incident, gain acceptance. Chekhov was the in-house playwright for the Moscow Arts Theatre, which had been founded by his friend Vladimir Nemirovich-Davchenko. During this time, he fell in love with one of the Theatre's leading actresses, Olga Knipper, and would marry her in 1901. Chekhov wrote his last two plays after he had been diagnosed, in 1898, with tuberculosis.

The Cherry Orchard itself was written over a period of more than two years, from early 1901 to late 1903, during which Chekhov was often in doctor-imposed exile from his wife and friends in Moscow, on the Mediterranean island of Yalta, in order to spare his ailing lungs. The germination of The Cherry Orchard probably came from numerous and diverse sources, over a longer period of time than that for any of Chekhov's other works. Chekhov had known cherry trees from his childhood days in Taganrog, before they were all cleared as a result of Alexander's liberal economic policies which encouraged development of the Russian hinterland. Also, Chekhov had himself planted a cherry orchard on an estate in Melikhovo that he purchased in 1892; he lost the estate a short while later, and the new owner cut down the cherry trees. Much of the intellectual discussion in The Cherry Orchard is distinctly influenced by Chekhov's wide reading in literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences, especially Darwin's Origin of the Species (first published only some forty years earlier) and Marxist and socialist philosophy (though Chekhov himself was not himself a member of any revolutionary movements).

Chekhov had initially intended his last play to be a comedy, a vaudeville in fact, and though he may have given up that last idea he still subtitles his play A Comedy in Four Acts. Unfortunately for Chekhov, the most common reaction to the play was typified by his wife: "by the fourth act I burst out sobbing". Stanislavsky, the play's director, decided to interpret the play as a drama, against Chekhov's wishes. The debate over whether the play is in fact a comedy or a drama still goes on to this day. The initial reception of the play ranged from the indifference of Maxim Gorky, who thought the play's story to be completely insignificant, to the loathing of Ivan Bunin, who attacked the play for being unrealistic in its depiction of both the central aristocratic family and the outrageously oversized cherry orchard. But it was also praised as one of Chekhov's best works, and possibly his best play. The Russian Symbolist poets saw the play as a narrative poem mourning the loss of beauty in the world, and thus saw Chekhov as a kindred spirit.

The Bolsheviks would interpret the play as a harbinger of the 1917 revolution, because of Trofimov's speeches (many of which were censored by the Tsarist regime for the 1904 perfomance). Many noticed and applauded its new formal innovations in terms of the use of the empty stage, lost dialogue and its mixing of comic and tragic elements. But many saw the play as undeniably tragic, focusing on Ranevsky's downfall as the important element of the story. Chekhov's critical reception outside of Russia was mixed, partly due to translation problems and the play's unique "Russian-ness", which Chekhov himself foresaw as being impossible for any foreign audience to overcome. Many foreign readers and viewers faulted the play for being unheroic, negative, and devoid of plot. But no less a figure than George Bernard Shaw said that "hearing Chekhov's plays make me want to tear up my own", and Chekhov's drama has gained increasing acceptance and praise over the course of the last century.

Chekhov managed to attend The Cherry Orchard's opening night gala at the Moscow Arts Theatre on January 17th, 1904, his forty-fourth birthday. The night was also intended to celebrate his 25th year in literature; but the sight of the ill, dying Chekhov, now in the last stages of his disease, was not a cause for celebration. He remained in Moscow for the last few months of his life, finally succumbing to tuberculosis on July 1st of that same year, a few days after the The Cherry Orchard's first publication. More Help Anton Chekhov ANTON CHEKHOV This article was originally published in Plays by Anton Tchekoff. Trans. Marian Fell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912. pp. 3-10. Purchase Plays by Chekhov ANTON CHEKHOV was born in the old Black Sea port of Taganrog on January 17 [Old Style], 1860. His grandfather had been a serf; his father married a merchant's daughter and settled in Taganrog, where, during Anton's boyhood, he carried on a small and unsuccessful trade in provisions.

The young Chekhov was soon impressed into the services of the large, poverty-stricken family, and he spoke regretfully in after years of his hard-worked childhood. But he was obedient and good-natured, and worked cheerfully in his father's shop, closely observing the idlers that assembled there, and gathering the drollest stories, which he would afterward whisper in class to his laughing schoolfellows. Many were the punishments which he incurred by this habit, which was incorrigible. His grandfather had now become manager of an estate near Taganrog, in the wild steppe country of the Don Cossacks, and here the boy spent his summers, fishing in the river, and roving about the countryside as brown as a gypsy, sowing the seeds of that love for nature which he retained all his life. His evenings he liked best to spend in the kitchen of the master's house among the work people and peasants who gathered there, taking part in their games, and setting them all laughing by his witty and telling observations. When Chekhov was about fourteen, his father moved the family to Moscow, leaving Anton in Taganrog, and now, relieved of work in the shop, his progress at school became remarkable.

At seventeen he wrote a long tragedy, which was afterward destroyed, and he already showed flashes of the wit that was soon to blaze into genius. He graduated from the high school at Taganrog with every honour, entered the University of Moscow as a student of medicine, and threw himself headlong into a double life of student and author, in the attempt to help his strugging family. His first story appeared in a Moscow paper in 1880, and after some difficulty he secured a position connected with several of the smaller periodicals, for which, during his student years, he poured forth a succession of short stories and sketches of Russian life with incredible rapidity. He wrote, he tells us, during every spare minute, in crowded rooms where there was "no light and less air," and never spent more than a day on any one story. He also wrote at this time a very stirring blood-and-thunder play which was suppressed by the censor, and the fate of which is not known. His audience demanded laughter above all things, and, with his deep sense of the ridiculous, Chekhov asked nothing better.

His stories, though often based on themes profoundly tragic, are penetrated by the light and subtle satire that has won him his reputation as a great humourist. But though there was always a smile on his lips, it was a tender one, and his sympathy with suffering often brought his laughter near to tears. This delicate and original genius was at first subjected to harsh criticism, which Chekhov felt keenly, and Trigorin's description in " The Sea-Gull " of the trials of a young author is a cry from Chekhov's own soul. A passionate enemy of all lies and oppression, he already foreshadows in these early writings the protest against conventions and rules, which he afterward put into Treplieff's reply to Sorin in "The Sea-Gull": "Let us have new forms, or else nothing at all." In 1884 he took his degree as doctor of medicine, and decided to practice, although his writing had by now taken on a professional character. He always gave his calling a high place, and the doctors in his works are drawn with affection and understanding. If any one spoke slightly of doctors in his presence, he would exclaim: "Stop!

You don't know what country doctors do for the people!" Chekhov fully realized later the influence which his profession had exercised on his literary work, and sometimes regretted the too vivid insight it gave him, but, on the other hand, he was able to write: "Only a doctor can know what value my knowledge of science has been to me," and "It seems to me that as a doctor I have described the sicknesses of the soul correctly." For instance, Trigorin's analysis in "The Sea-Gull" of the state of mind of an author has well been called "artistic diagnosis." The young doctor-writer is described at this time as modest and grave, with flashes of brilliant gaiety. A son of the people, there was in his face an expression that recalled the simple-hearted village lad; his eyes were blue, his glance full of intelligence and kindness, and his manners unaffected and simple. He was an untiring worker, and between his patients and his desk he led a life of ceaseless activity. His restless mind was dominated by a passion of energy and he thought continually and vividly.

Often, while jesting and talking, he would seem suddenly to plunge into himself, and his look would grow fixed and deep, as if he were contemplating something important and strange. Then he would ask some unexpected question, which showed how far his mind had roamed. Success was now rapidly overtaking the young author; his first collection of stories appeared in 1887, another one in the same year had immediate success, and both went through many editions; but, at the same time, the shadows that darkened his later works began to creep over his light-hearted humour. His impressionable mind began to take on the grey tinge of his time, but much of his sadness may also be attributed to his ever-increasing ill health. Weary and with an obstinate cough, he went south in 1888, took a little cottage on the banks of a little river "abounding in fish and crabs," and surrendered himself to his touching love for nature, happy in his passion for fishing, in the quiet of the country, and in the music and gaiety of the peasants.

"One would gladly sell one's soul," he writes, "for the pleasure of seeing the warm evening sky, and the streams and pools reflecting the darkly mournful sunset." He described visits to his country neighbors and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, "we ate every half hour, and laughed to the verge of colic." His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks of heart trouble, and the sensitive artist's nature appears in a remark which he made after one of them. "I walked quickly across the terrace on which the guests were assembled," he said, "with one idea in my mind, how awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of strangers." It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful spirits were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a fascination, tempted him to write "Ivanoff," and also a dramatic sketch in one act entitled "The Swan Song," though he often declared that he had no ambition to become a dramatist.

"The Novel," he wrote, "is a lawful wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent mistress." He has put his opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of Treplieff, in "The Sea-Gull," and he often refers to it in his letters as "an evil disease of the towns" and "the gallows on which dramatists are hanged." He wrote "Ivanoff" at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be a hero, but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the "immortal commonplaces of life," with his heart and soul aching in the grip of circumstances, one of the many "useless people" of Russia for whose sorrow Chekhov felt such overwhelming pity.

He saw nothing in their lives that could not be explained and pardoned, and he returns to his ill-fated, "useless people" again and again, not to preach any doctrine of pessimism, but simply because he thought that the world was the better for a certain fragile beauty of their natures and their touching faith in the ultimate salvation of humanity. Both the writing and staging of "Ivanoff" gave Chekhov great difficulty. The characters all being of almost equal importance, he found it hard to get enough good actors to take the parts, but it finally appeared in Moscow in 1889, a decided failure! The author had touched sharply several sensitive spots of Russian life, and the play was also marred by faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics were divided in condemning a certain novelty in it and in praising its freshness and originality. The character of Ivanoff was not understood, and the weakness of the man blinded many to the lifelike portrait. Chekhov himself was far from pleased with what he called his "literary abortion," and rewrote it before it was produced again in St. Petersburg.

Here it was received with the wildest applause, and the morning after its performance the papers burst into unanimous praise. The author was enthusiastically fêted, but the burden of his growing fame was beginning to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this time that he longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or lying in the hay. His next play to appear was a farce entitled " The Boor ," which he wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was followed by "The Demon," a failure, rewritten ten years later as "Uncle Vanya." All Russia now combined in urging Chekhov to write some important work, and this, too, was the writer's dream; but his only long story is "The Steppe," which is, after all, but a series of sketches, exquisitely drawn, and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread. Chekhov's delicate and elusive descriptive power did not lend itself to painting on a large canvas, and his strange little tragi-comedies of Russian life, his "Tedious Tales," as he called them, were always to remain his masterpieces.

In 1890 Chekhov made a journey to the island of Saghalien, after which his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with which he had long been threatened, finally declared itself. His illness exiled him to the Crimea, and he spent his last ten years there, making frequent trips to Moscow to superintend the production of his four important plays, written during this period of his life. "The Sea-Gull" appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St. Petersburg, won instant success as soon as it was given on the stage of the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. In Trigorin the author gives us one of the rare glimpses of his own mind, for Chekhov seldom put his own personality into the pictures of the life in which he took such immense interest. In "The Sea-Gull" we see clearly the increase of Chekhov's power of analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, "The Three Sisters," gloomiest of all his dramas.

" The Three Sisters ," produced in 1901, depends, even more than most of Chekhov's plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost essential to its appreciation that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded is a thousand times more intense when it comes to us across the foot-lights. In it Chekhov probes the depths of human life with so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so piercing, that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it seems wellnigh intolerable. "Unvle Vanya" followed "The Three Sisters," and the poignant truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was afterward published. "The Cherry Orchard" appeared in 1904 and was Chekhov's last play.

At its production, just before his death, the author was fêted as one of Russia's greatest dramatists. Here it is not only country life that Chekhov shows us, but Russian life and character in general, in which the old order is giving place to the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading the vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry orchard. A new epoch is beginning, and at its dawn the singer of old, dim Russia was silenced. In the year that saw the production of "The Cherry Orchard," Chekhov, the favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi declared to be comparable as a writer of stories only to Maupassant, died suddenly in a little village of the Black Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks before in the hope of recovering his lost health.

Chekhov, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly trivial conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere of the Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the mists that hang over a lake at dawn, and, like those mists, made visible to us by the light of an approaching day. Search eBay! for Anton Chekhov collectibles FURTHER STUDIES: Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) - A biography of the Russian dramatist. Anton Chekhov: Fragments of Recollections - An article by Maxim Gorky in which he describes various encounters with Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: Monologues - An index of monologues by the Russian dramatist. Anton Chekhov Quotes - A collection of quotations from his plays. Anton Chekhov Short Stories - A collection of short stories by Chekhov. The Boor - Complete text of the one-act play by Anton Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard - An analysis of the play. The Seagull - A synopsis and analysis of the play.

Letter to Maxim Gorky - Letter dated July 29, 1902, in which Chekhov critiques Gorky's play THE LOWER DEPTHS. Anton Chekhov - Biography and Profile By Wade Bradford Updated January 28, 2016. Born in 1860, Anton Chekhov grew up in the Russian town of Taganrog. He spent much of his childhood quietly sitting in his father's fledgling grocery store. He watched the customers and listened to the their gossip, their hopes, and their complaints. Early on, he learned to observe the everyday lives of humans. His ability to listen would become one of his most valuable skills as a storyteller. Chekhov's Youth His father, Paul Chekhov, grew up in an impoverished family. Anton's grandfather was actually a serf in Czarist Russia , but through hard work and thriftiness, he purchased his family's freedom. Young Anton's father became a self-employed grocer, but the business never prospered and eventually fell apart. Monetary woes dominated Chekhov's childhood. As a result, financial conflicts are prominent in his plays and fiction.

Despite economic hardship, Chekhov was a talented student. In 1879, he left Taganrog to attend medical school in Moscow. continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know At this time, he felt the pressure of being the head of the household. His father was no longer earning a living. Chekhov needed a way to make money without abandoning school. Writing stories provided a solution. He began writing humorous stories for local newspapers and journals. At first the stories paid very little. However, Chekhov was a quick and prolific humorist. By the time he was in his forth year of medical school, he had caught the attention of several editors. By 1883, his stories were earning him not only money but notoriety. Chekhov's Literary Purpose As a writer, Chekhov did not subscribe to a particular religion or political affiliation. He wanted to satirize not preach. At the time, artists and scholars debated the purpose of literature. Some felt that literature should offer "life instructions." Others felt that art should simply exist to please. For the most part, Chekhov agreed with the latter view.

"The artist must be, not the judge of his characters and of what they say, but merely a dispassionate observer." -- Anton Chekhov Chekhov the Playwright Because of his fondness for dialogue, Chekhov felt drawn to the theatre. His early plays such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon artistically dissatisfied him. In 1895 he began working on a rather original theatrical project: The Seagull . It was a play that defied many of the traditional elements of common stage productions. It lacked plot and it focused on many interesting yet emotionally static characters. In 1896 The Seagull received a disastrous response on opening night. The audience actually booed during the first act. Fortunately, innovative directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danechenko believed in Chekhov's work. Their new approach to drama invigorated audiences. The Moscow Art Theatre restaged The Seagull and created a triumphant crowd-pleaser.

Soon after, the Moscow Art Theatre, led by Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danechenko, produced the rest of Chekhov's masterpieces: Uncle Vanya (1899) The Cherry Orchard (1904) Chekhov's Love Life The Russian storyteller played with themes of romance and marriage, but throughout most of his life he did not take love seriously. He had occasional affairs, but he did not fall in love until he met Olga Knipper, an up-and-coming Russian actress. They were very discreetly married in 1901. Olga not only starred in Chekhov's plays, she also deeply understood them. More than anyone in Chekhov's circle, she interpreted the subtle meanings within the plays. For example, Stanislavski thought The Cherry Orchard was a "tragedy of Russian life." Olga instead knew that Chekhov intended it to be a "gay comedy," one that almost touched upon farce. Olga and Chekhov were kindred spirits, though they did not spend much time together. Their letters indicate that they were very affectionate to one another.

Sadly, their marriage would not last very long, due to Chekhov's failing health. Chekhov's Final Days At the age of 24, Chekhov began showing signs of tuberculosis. He tried to ignore this condition; however by his early 30s his health had deterorated beyond denial. When The Cherry Orchard opened in 1904, tuberculosis had ravaged his lungs. His body was visibly weakened. Most of his friends and family knew the end was near. Opening night of The Cherry Orchard became a tribute filled with speeches and heartfelt thanks. It was their was of saying goodbye to Russia's greatest playwright. On July 14th, 1904, Chekhov stayed up late working on yet another short story. After going to bed, he suddenly awoke and summoned a doctor. The physician could do nothing for him but offer a glass of champagne. Reportedly, his final words were, "It's a long time since I drank champagne." Then, after drinking the beverage, he died Chekhov's Legacy During and after his lifetime, Anton Chekhov was adored throughout Russia. Aside from his beloved stories and plays, he is also remembered as a humanitarian and a philanthropist.

While living in the country, he often attended to the medical needs of the local peasants. Also, he was renowned for sponsoring local writers and medical students. His literary work has been embraced throughout the world. While many playwrights create intense, life-or-death scenarios, Chekhov's plays offer everyday conversations. Readers cherish his extraordinary insight into the lives of the ordinary. References Malcolm, Janet, Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey, Granta Publications, 2004 edition. Miles, Patrick (ed), Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Anton Chekhov - Biography - IMDb Anton Chekhov Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trivia (2) | Personal Quotes (9) Overview (4) Antosha Chekhonte Mini Bio (1) Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea.

His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years. While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion.

It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov , he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888. In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners.

His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera. Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova , became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea.

There he was visited by writers Leo Tolstoy , Maxim Gorky , Ivan Bunin , and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Shelokhonov Spouse (1) Anton Chekhov - Modernism Lab Essays Anton Chekhov by Pericles Lewis In the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), tragedy and comedy are inextricably intertwined. Although his major plays are suffused with an air of anxiety and pessimism akin to those of Henrik Ibsen , he insisted on calling The Seagull (1895) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) comedies. He gave Uncle Vanya (1896) the non-committal subtitle “Scenes from Country Life,” and called Three Sisters (1900) a “drama.” Yet none of these plays is either conventionally comic or tragic. In particular, the central aspect of Aristotelian tragedy, the climactic action entailing reversal or recognition, seems absent from Chekhov’s plays. In general, his Russian gentry are in decline, but the decline is gradual and irreversible.

They undergo various minor illuminations in the course of the plays but never a blinding recognition that could lead to a change of fortune. Chekhov, a doctor and the grandson of a serf, became famous as a story-writer before his first successes as a playwright. Doctors come and go in his plays, sometimes expressing wisdom and more often resignation. Generally seen by his compatriots as a naturalist, he was later interpreted by the Soviets as a chronicler of the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the aristocracy, and the imminence of revolution (he died in 1904, the year before the first Russian Revolution). However, this interpretation depended on an avoidance of Chekhov’s dramatic innovations, which changed the nature of plot and its relationship to character. The plot of Ibsen's first major play, The Seagull , is fairly conventional; Chekhov’s symbolism and self-conscious reflection on the nature of drama are the main features that distinguish this work from that of earlier realist and naturalist playwrights. In the last decade of his life, however, Chekhov wrote three masterpieces that increasingly resembled the symbolist drama of his fictional playwright Konstantin Treplev.

One of the characters in The Seagull complains about a play within the play that "nothing happens”— a complaint that has been repeated by critics of Chekhov’s later plays. In them, he turns away from conventions like the love plot, the climactic final gunshot, even the main character; instead Chekhov explores “the drama of the undramatic.” [1] Like life itself, Chekhov’s plots generally lack resolution. The loaded pistol of his famous aphorism provides an example. In Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the pistols go off, and if the first one wounds Lovborg in an unexpected way, the second provides a suitably dramatic climax. By contrast, in The Seagull, Konstantin attempts suicide between the first and second acts, and then finally succeeds in killing himself in the last scene. In Uncle Vanya, written a year later, Vanya wants to kill his brother-in-law Professor Serebriakov, a charlatan who has consumed all the money the family estate can produce.

As Vanya complains, “For twenty-five years he’s been regurgitating other people’s ideas about realism, naturalism, all that bullshit.” At the end of the third act, Vanya, infuriated with the Professor, shoots at him twice, but misses. The shots do not result in any climactic action. Nothing changes. As Vanya observes in the fourth act, “Funny, isn’t it? I try to kill someone, nobody calls the police, nobody arrests me. Which means you all think I’m crazy.” Vanya thinks of killing himself with a vial of Dr. Astrov’s morphine, but Sonya convinces him to give the morphine back. The Professor and his second wife return to Moscow, and everything on the estate returns to normal, except that the characters are more disillusioned than ever. In his last work, The Cherry Orchard, a minor character boasts in the second act, “I always carry a loaded pistol.” He brandishes the weapon too. Yet, as Chekhov announced proudly, “There’s not a single pistol-shot in the whole play.” [2] Chekhov’s plays move away from the focus on a central heroic figure.

Instead of heroes or villains, the later plays tend to feature ensemble casts of characters who are neither particularly good nor particularly bad. In Three Sisters, the sisters are indeed heroines, but their actions are not typically heroic. Mainly, they endure. Throughout the play, the sisters dream of escaping their country estate and going to Moscow. Irina begs to be allowed to go at the end of the second and third acts. Gradually, however, their brother gambles away the family fortune, and at the end of the play the oldest, Olga, realizes: “of course, I’ll never get to Moscow….” As Richard Gilman has observed, the sisters’ waiting to go to Moscow resembles the Vladimir and Estragon’s waiting in Samuel Beckett ’s Waiting for Godot (1952), written half a century later. Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable(1953), would end with the line “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Chekhov sounds the same theme of endurance.

At the end of Uncle Vanya, Sonya recognizes that nothing in her life or her uncle’s will change and says: “You and I, Uncle Vanya, we have to go on living. The days will be slow, and the nights will be long, but we’ll take whatever fate sends us.” At the end of Three Sisters, Masha says “we have to go on living.” Like the realists and naturalists (and unlike his character Konstantin), Chekhov claims to represent the world as it is, without moral judgments. Most of the climactic action in his works takes place offstage, often before the beginning of the play. What takes center stage is conversation. Not exactly, as Irina puts it in The Seagull, “one long speech,” however; in Chekhov’s plays there are many short speeches and many long silences, only occasionally punctuated by a longer monologue. Characters who do make lengthy speeches, about the environment, or the problem of work, or the future of Russia, usually retract or ironize them. Chekhov’s characters often talk past each other, as if they are not hearing one another.

Some, like the old butler Firs, in The Cherry Orchard, are in fact deaf. Chekhov defended the dialogue in his plays on realistic grounds: “Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed.” [3] Here, Chekhov claimed to be exposing the drama of everyday life, and he does so, but at the same time the effect of non-sequitur in his speeches prefigures the later absurdist plays of Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco. Throughout Chekhov’s plays, any sort of resolution, comic or tragic, is deferred; he often presents courtships that go nowhere, instead of a conventional love plot. In The Cherry Orchard, the characters expect the successful businessman Lopakhin, the son and grandson of serfs, to propose to Varya, the adopted daughter of impoverished aristocrats. Yet, every time he is left alone with her he seems uneasy.

By the end of the play, the family estate is sold to Lopakhin, and Chekhov seems to leave two possibilities open: a comic resolution in which Lopakhin marries Varya and the estate stays in the family, or a tragic one, in which the estate is destroyed for the sake of real estate development (a theme from Ibsen’s Master Builder). Yet, Chekhov resists every opportunity to dramatize this ending. Lopakhin meets with Varya, but instead of proposing he comments on the weather. Uncle Gayev plans to make a speech about the significance of the occasion, but the others dissuade him from speaking. In the final scene, while axes are heard chopping down the orchard offstage, the comic figure Firs reappears; elderly and ill, he has been left behind by the family, who thought he had been taken to an old age home. He has been locked in the house, which is soon to be demolished. So, he lies down on the stage and waits—for someone to come back, or simply for death to come get him. The scene can be played tragically, but it works better as farce.

This is one reason why Chekhov insisted on calling the play a comedy. The Cherry Orchard does not resolve itself in marriage, like a conventional comedy, but it deploys farce to come to terms with the modern failure of resolution. For this reason, Chekhov complained about the lugubrious naturalistic staging of his plays at Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, even though these performances made Chekhov famous. Although Chekhov’s representation of passing time, boredom, and silence can be justified in realist or naturalist terms, his plays continually gesture beyond the naturalistic theater, portending the disruption of naturalism in the twentieth century. [4] ↑ Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 1974), p. 120. ↑ Quoted in James McFarlane, “Intimate Theatre: Maeterlinck to Strindberg,” Modernism 1890-1930, p. 519. ↑ Ilia Gurlyand, “Reminiscences of A. P.

Chekhov,” quoted in Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 203. ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 184-187.

Question: What kind of orchard did Chekhov write a play about?
Answer: Cherry