person

Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya

Ranevskaya

also: Lyubov Andreyevna, Lyuba, Madame Ranevskaya

The play's central figure, a landowner returning to her ancestral estate after five years in Paris; unable to face selling the cherry orchard or accepting Lopakhin's plan to subdivide it, generous to the point of self-ruin (giving a gold coin to a passerby while her own household goes hungry), and still bound to the lover in Paris who exploited and abandoned her. Her young son Grisha's drowning in the estate's river years earlier haunts her return.

Reading notes

The Cherry Orchard §124 Yellow in the corner! Double into the middle!
Billiards terminology recurs as a verbal tic throughout the play, mainly Gayev's (he mimes shots and murmurs calls even mid-conversation: \S125, \S180, \S285, \S339, \S371, \S441, \S750, \S822, \S842), but Ranevskaya echoes it here on first entering the nursery, remembering the room from childhood. The calls name pocket and shot types from Russian carom/pocket billiards (a period parlor game played on a large table without pockets in some variants, with pockets in others; the text implies the pocket form) -- "in the corner," "into the middle [pocket]," "cut," "cannon," "double" -- and function less as literal gameplay than as a running index of Gayev's inability to focus on the family's real crisis, most pointedly at \S842, where his last words before leaving the house forever are another half-finished billiards call.

Mentioned in 1 work (143 mentions)

The Cherry Orchard Plays · 143 mentions