The Cherry Orchard

1 "The Cherry Orchard" ("Вишнёвый сад"), subtitled "A Comedy in Four Acts," was Chekhov’s last completed play. He worked on it through 1903 while already seriously ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him within the year, and it premiered on 17 January 1904 (Old Style; 30 January, New Style) at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. The date was chosen deliberately: it was Chekhov’s own name-day (the feast of his patron saint in the Orthodox calendar), and the theater used the occasion to stage an elaborate onstage tribute to him between acts, an ordeal by most contemporary accounts – Chekhov, already gravely unwell and by then largely resident in Yalta for his health, found the ceremony exhausting rather than gratifying, and is reported to have been displeased that Stanislavski’s production leaned toward pathos and tragedy where he himself insisted, against his director, that he had written a comedy, even a farce in places. Chekhov died a little over five months later, on 15 July 1904 (New Style; 2 July, Old Style), in Badenweiler, Germany, where he had gone for a rest cure – close to the end of his life, but a matter of months, not the weeks sometimes loosely claimed, and this headnote gives the corrected interval with the same confidence as the premiere date itself, since both are well and independently documented in standard Chekhov biography and theater history. The play’s tension between Chekhov’s own comic intention and its subsequent history of being staged, translated, and read as a tragedy of loss is itself one of the most discussed features of its reception, and this headnote does not attempt to resolve it, only to flag it for a reader encountering the play for the first time.

2 Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya returns to her family estate after five years in Paris, where she fled following the drowning of her young son Grisha in the estate’s river and her subsequent entanglement with a lover who has since exploited and abandoned her. She arrives with her seventeen-year-old daughter Anya and finds the household in financial ruin: the estate, including its famous and much-loved cherry orchard, is mortgaged past its value and set to be auctioned for debt in August. Yermolai Lopakhin, a wealthy merchant whose own father and grandfather were serfs on this very estate, proposes a practical way out – subdivide the orchard and the land along the river into leased plots for summer cottages – and repeats the plan with mounting urgency across the first three acts. Ranevskaya and her brother Gayev, a sentimental, ineffectual man given to mimed billiards shots and grandiose, empty declarations (including a speech addressed at length to the family’s antique cupboard), cannot bring themselves to accept the plan or to act on any of their own vaguer schemes (a rich marriage for Anya, a loan against a distant aunt’s promised money, a position at a bank), and the orchard’s fate remains unresolved through a houseful of visiting neighbors, servants, and hangers-on, including the eternal student Pyotr Trofimov – Grisha’s former tutor, now Anya’s idealistic companion, given to speeches about labor, atonement for the sins of serfdom, and being "above love" – and Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter Varya, who runs the household frugally and is universally expected, and never quite manages, to marry Lopakhin. The estate is auctioned in Act Three, during a ball the family throws with money it does not have; Lopakhin returns from the sale, at first reluctant to admit what has happened, then breaks into an exultant, half-disbelieving account of having bought the estate himself, the descendant of its former serfs now its owner. Act Four finds the family dispersing: Ranevskaya returns to Paris and the same man who ruined her, Gayev takes the bank position, Anya leaves eager for a new life, Trofimov departs still preaching progress while unable to find his own galoshes, and the long-expected marriage between Lopakhin and Varya once again fails to happen, dissolved in a stilted, inconclusive conversation about the weather. The family departs; the sound of an axe already striking the cherry trees is heard as they go. In the play’s final, wordless minutes, the household discovers that Firs, the eighty-seven-year-old valet who refused his own freedom at the 1861 Emancipation and has served the family his whole life, has been forgotten and left behind, locked inside the empty house; he appears alone, finds the door locked, lies down on a sofa to rest, and the play closes with the same distant, mournful sound of a snapped string heard once before at the end of Act Two, now paired with the axe, as Firs lies motionless.

3 Text" form used throughout the rest of the play; normalized to match, including the two "Voice" stage cues at-853 and-857 (e.g. "Anya’s voice:"), which follow the lowercase "voice" convention already established earlier in the play (1921,). The rest of the translation follows this corpus’s standard practice of rendering Chekhov’s stage directions, honorifics, and period vocabulary closely rather than modernizing it; see the glossary sidecar for notes on the verst and desyatina units of distance and land area (including one place,, where a desyatina figure late in the text is rendered as "acres" rather than this translation’s usual transliterated "desyatina"), the 1861 Emancipation reference, billiards terminology, and period cultural touchstones (the Brockhaus-Efron-type "Encyclopedic Dictionary," Buckle, Caligula, Nietzsche). The play’s title symbol and the Okhmelia/Hamlet-Ophelia pun at/473 are covered in the allusions sidecar.