person
Firs
An eighty-seven-year-old valet who refused his freedom at the 1861 Emancipation and stayed on with the family; called "недотёпа" (rendered in this translation as "fumbler" in the play's bookend uses of the epithet, and as "duffer" elsewhere in the merged text), he is left behind, forgotten, locked inside the empty house at the play's close, lying down as the sound of the axe is heard.
Reading notes
- The Cherry Orchard §120 Eh, you fumbler
"Недотёпа" (nedotyopa) -- roughly "a bungler, a hopeless fool who never quite manages anything" -- is Firs's recurring epithet, used of Yasha here, of Trofimov by Ranevskaya at \S578, by Firs of Yasha again at \S594, and, in the play's last line, by Firs of himself at \S862.
- The Cherry Orchard §399 when the emancipation came
"Воля вышла" -- literally "freedom came out/was issued" -- refers to the Emancipation Reform of 1861, Tsar Alexander II's edict freeing Russia's serfs. Firs's account of refusing his own freedom and staying on with "the masters" is one of the play's central images of the old order's dissolution, echoed by Lopakhin's own family history (his father and grandfather were serfs on this same estate, \S147) and revisited at \S452 ("Before the liberation"), where Firs recalls the same portents -- an owl's screech, a humming samovar -- he now half-remembers hearing again before Ranevskaya's return.
- The Cherry Orchard §452 Before the liberation
"Перед волей," using the same word (воля, "freedom/liberation") as the 1861 Emancipation reference at \S399; see that note for the fuller context.
- The Cherry Orchard §592 sealing wax
Firs recalls the previous generation's master treating every ailment with sealing wax (сургуч) -- ordinary wax used to seal letters and documents -- and credits his own twenty-odd years of taking it daily with keeping him alive; offered without comment as a piece of pre-modern folk medicine, part of the play's portrait of Firs as a relic of an entirely vanished household order.