Chekhov Gromov Mikhail Petrovich

"THE CHERRY ORCHARD"

"THE CHERRY ORCHARD"

« The Cherry Orchard"- Chekhov's last play; when he held her printed impressions He didn't have long to live, only a few months. The premiere of the comedy at the Moscow Art Theater took place on the author's birthday, January 17, 1904, and with it The Cherry Orchard entered the treasury of world drama. Translated into all the main languages ​​of the world, the play does not leave the repertoire and, according to the information of the international theater yearbook, where the chronicle of performances is kept, has been shown everywhere for many years now.

The Cherry Orchard has become a great and eternal premiere of the world theater; works have been written about the history of its productions. The play is reopened by the Englishman P. Brook, the Italian J. Strehler, and the German P. Stein.

In many countries, the Cherry Orchard is perceived as a national treasure. It was resumed in Tokyo in post-war 1945, in the ruined building of the Yurakuza theater, it was watched by people who survived the atomic fire of Hiroshima, who understood the finale in their own way: “A distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, the sound of a broken string, fading, sad. There is silence…”

Ando Tsuruo's review in the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, perhaps the first theatrical review after the war, said: "Our beloved Chekhov has returned to Japan again."

The comedy was created in 1902-1903 for the Art Theater. At this time, Chekhov was already seriously ill, he worked with unusual slowness, with difficulty. On other days, judging by the letters, he could not write even ten lines: “Yes, and my thoughts are now completely different, not fast-paced ...” Meanwhile, O. L. Knipper hurried him: “I am tormented, why are you putting off writing a play? What happened? He planned everything so wonderfully, it will be such a wonderful play - the highlight of our season, the first season in the new theater! Why doesn't the soul lie? You must, must write it. After all, you love our theater and you know what a terrible grief it will be for us. No, you write.

In the play, Olga Leonardovna was assigned the role of Ranevskaya. Finishing the work, Chekhov wrote to his wife on October 12, 1903: “The play is already finished, finally finished, and will be sent to Moscow tomorrow evening or, at the latest, on the 14th morning. If alterations are needed, then, as it seems to me, very small ones ... how difficult it was for me to write a play!

At times it seemed to Chekhov that he was repeating himself. In a certain sense, it was so: The Cherry Orchard is the work of a lifetime, and not just the penultimate two, overshadowed by fatigue and illness, years.

Ideas (this applies not only to The Cherry Orchard, but, apparently, to all complex stories, novels, plays) arose long before Chekhov took up the pen, were formed for a long time in a continuous stream of observations, among many other images, stories, themes. Notes, remarks, completed phrases appeared in notebooks. As the observations were filtered into memory, a sequence of phrases and periods arose - a text. Dates of creation are noted in the comments. It would be more correct to call them the dates of recording, since behind them is the perspective of time, extended, distant - for years, for many years.

In its origins, The Cherry Orchard goes back to early work, to Fatherlessness, where for the debts of their ancestors they part with the family estates of the Voinitsevs and Platonovs: “Tyu-tu estate! How do you like it? Floated ... Here you have a vaunted commercial trick! And all because they believed Glagolyev ... He promised to buy an estate, but he was not at the auction ... he left for Paris ... Well, a feudal lord? What will you do now? Where will you go? God gave to the ancestors, but took from you… You have nothing left…” (d. IV, yavl. III).

All this was already in Russian literature before Chekhov and would not have seemed new if it were not for the peculiar Chekhovian mood, where carefree despair, a sense of fatal guilt and utter defenselessness against force and deceit are strangely combined: come what may, and quickly to Paris ...

In the story "Belated Flowers", written at the very beginning of the 80s, at about the same time as the first play, with the same motives for the collapse of the old life, home, family, there are plot twists very close to the "Cherry Orchard". A certain Pelzer, a merchant, a rich man, promised, like Lopakhin to Ranevskaya, financial assistance and salvation to the Priklonsky, and in the end, sold the prince's library for nothing: “Who bought it?

I, Boris Pelzer…”

Chekhov was born a year before the abolition of serfdom, he belonged to the first generation of Russian people who could consider themselves free under the law, but did not feel free personally: slavery was in the blood. “What noble writers took from nature for free, raznochintsy buy at the price of youth” - these words from a letter to Suvorin, written on January 7, 1889, are said about a whole generation, but they contain a trace of personal spiritual achievement, personal suffering and hope. In one of his later letters to O. L. Knipper, he noted that his grandfather, Yegor Mikhailovich, was an ardent serf-owner by conviction. This was recalled at the time of work on the last play, and this allows us to imagine what a wide background of memories it was created against.

Egor Mikhailovich later became the manager of the Azov estates of Count Platov, and Chekhov, when he came to him, was entrusted with work; he had to keep a record of the threshed grain: “In childhood, living with my grandfather on the estate of gr. Platov, for whole days from dawn to dawn I had to sit near the steam engine and write down poods and pounds of threshed grain; whistles, hissing and a bass, top-shaped sound that is emitted by a steam engine in the midst of work, the creak of wheels, the lazy gait of oxen, clouds of dust, black, sweaty faces of fifty people - all this was engraved in my memory, like “Our Father” ... The steam engine, when it works, seems alive; his expression is cunning, playful; men and oxen, on the other hand, appear to be machines.”

Subsequently, when Chekhov died and peers began to recall their lives and write memoirs, there were indications of direct sources for The Cherry Orchard. M. D. Drossi-Steiger, for example, said: “My mother Olga Mikhailovna Drossi, nee. Kalita, owned an estate in the Mirgorod district of the Poltava province, rich in cherry orchards ... Mother loved Antosha and distinguished him among the guests-gymnasium students. She often talked with Antosha and, among other things, told him about these cherry orchards, and when many years later I read The Cherry Orchard, it seemed to me that the first images of this estate with a cherry orchard were planted in Chekhov by the stories of my mother. Yes, and the serfs of Olga Mikhailovna really seemed to be the prototypes of Firs ... She had a butler, Gerasim, - he called old people young people.

Such memoirs have their value and meaning, although they should not be taken literally.

Life recognizes itself in its literary reflections and likenesses, and sometimes borrows its features from books. L. N. Tolstoy said about Turgenev's women that there were no such women in Russian life, but they appeared when Turgenev brought them out in Rudin, Smoke, and the Noble Nest. So it can be said about The Cherry Orchard: if there were no Firs, there would be no prototypes; Chekhov, of course, remembered his school years (perhaps, the stories of O. M. Kalita), but he also remembered, of course, that it was much later ...

In 1885, N. A. Leikin bought the estate of the Counts Stroganovs. Congratulating him on his purchase, Chekhov wrote to him: “I terribly love everything that in Russia is called an estate. This word has not yet lost its poetic connotation ... "

At that time, he still did not suspect that Leikin, this "bourgeois to the marrow of his bones", needed poetry in the estate no more than Lopakhin needed a garden. “These places,” the shopkeeper will say in the story “Memorial Service”, moderating his daughter's enthusiasm, “these places only take up space ...” Beauty in nature is useless, like descriptions in a book.

Having later visited Leikin in the former count's palace, Chekhov asked: "Why do you, a lonely person, need all this nonsense?" - and heard in response something almost verbatim Lopakhin: “Before, the counts were the owners here, and now I am a boor ...” In fairness, it should be noted that when he saw Chekhov’s estate, Leikin was amazed at the squalor of Melikhov and the complete absence of his owner’s makings of a gentleman and the qualities of a bourgeois .

Telling Suvorin about the places where he spent the spring and summer of 1888 on the Lintvarev estate in Ukraine, Chekhov, of course, did not think of creating a description of nature - he wrote a letter as a letter. The result is a beautiful and complex landscape, in which a lively look and personal tone (“I hired a dacha behind the eyes, at random ... The river is wide, deep, abundant with islands, fish and crayfish, the banks are beautiful, there is a lot of greenery ...”) evoke the echo of involuntary literary reminiscences and continuously change their stylistic coloring: “Nature and life are built according to the very template that is now so outdated and rejected in the editorial offices” (professional journalistic style, newspaper jargon); “not to mention the nightingales who sing day and night ... about the old neglected gardens” (echoes of the old romance and album poems, a preface to the following frankly Turgenev lines), “about the tightly packed, very poetic and sad estates in which souls live beautiful women not to mention the old feudal lackeys, breathing in their last breath” (still Turgenev, but in anticipation of the symbolic motifs and images of The Cherry Orchard); “not far from me there is even such a hackneyed template as a water mill ... with a miller and his daughter, who always sits at the window and, apparently, is waiting for something” (“Mermaid”, Pushkin, Dargomyzhsky); the final lines are especially important: "Everything that I now see and hear, it seems to me, has long been familiar to me from old stories and fairy tales."

The only beauty and poetic description of a garden, flowers, a rye field, spring morning frosts - everything that could not be given in stage directions and that one has to remember and imply - in the story "The Black Monk". The garden here seems to be some especially complex and perfect phenomenon of artistic nature, and not the creation of human hands. This garden is doomed to destruction, like the one that will be bought by Lopakhin. Chekhov found a symbol of death, terrible in its drama: Kovrin tears up his dissertation, and scraps of paper cling and hang on the branches of currants and gooseberries, like paper flowers, false flowers.

The story “In the Native Corner”, written in 1897, is also important - the whole picture of the life of the old estate, living out its life, and the characteristic features of the lord's psychology, distorting the face of the young mistress of the estate with such a terrible grimace, a person so sweet, innocent and at first glance charming . Almost every detail of this story and all its images are symbolic in their own way, but grandfather is a true symbol of a decrepit way of life, in which there is nothing human anymore, only animal ability and passion - food. “At lunch and dinner he ate an awful lot; he was served both today's and yesterday's, and the cold pie left over from Sunday, and human corned beef, and he ate everything greedily, and from every dinner Vera had the impression that when later she saw how sheep were driven or taken from the mill flour, I thought: “Grandpa will eat this.”

In the same 1897, another story was created, the plot close to "The Cherry Orchard" - "At Friends". Chekhov worked on it while living in the Russian boarding school in Nice, where he was driven by a lung disease. There, in December, he received a letter from M. V. Kiseleva, the owner of Babkin, where the Chekhov family spent three summers in the mid-80s.

“... In Babkino, much is being destroyed, starting with the owners and ending with the buildings; but the children and the trees have grown... Master became an old baby, good-natured and a little bruised. He works a lot, there are no “Rashecheks” at all, he does not enter the household, and when he is invited to look at some kind of mess, he waves it off and says dejectedly: “You know, I don’t go anywhere anymore!” hostess old, toothless, but ... poor! crawled out from under any yoke and fear nothing in the world. Guilty, afraid: drunk, crazy and hysterics. Old age and troubles did not “devour” her - neither apathy, nor despondency, nor pessimism did not overcome her. She darns linen, deeply convinced that she is doing the job, proceeding from the idea that since a wider pi of interest is not given, one must take what is at hand. I guarantee that with every button and ribbon, a piece of her soul is sewn on. This means: I got through to a clearer and deeper understanding of life and its tasks. True, I live by willpower alone, because my material shell is all smashed to smithereens, but I despise it, and I don’t care about it. I AM I will live at least up to 100 years, until the consciousness leaves me that I am needed for something.

At the same time, the owner dreamed that with wiring through Voskresensk railway"Land rises in price in Babkino, let's set up dachas and become Creuses." Fate judged otherwise. Babkino was sold for debts, and the Kiselevs settled in Kaluga, where the former owner of the estate received a seat on the bank's board.

Until the end of the century, notices of auctions and auctions were published in Russian newspapers: ancient estates and estates were slipping away from hands, going under the hammer. For example, the Golitsyn estate with a park and ponds was divided into plots and dachas were rented out, from 200 to 1300 rubles per plot. And this, like the fate of Babkin, is very close to the plot of The Cherry Orchard, where Lopakhin prepares the land for the future community of summer residents ...

World literature knows a great many utopias, but Lopakhin's utopia looks perhaps the most comical among them.

In the story “The Wife”, the last master and the last courtyards and servants live out their lives, the house itself looks like a museum of patriarchal antiquity, stuffed with out-of-fashion, useless now, very durable, precious things made for centuries. How in " Dead souls» Gogol, there are shadows of strong, strong people, masters who worked miracles in their time and with their own hands, incomparable with the engineering structures of the new era.

Chekhov's things speak of people - only in this sense he needed them both in dramaturgy and in prose. In the story “The Wife” there is a kind of forerunner of the “respected closet” - here he also personifies the memory of the past time and of the former people who are no longer there, and gives the engineer Asorin, on whose behalf the story goes, a good reason to compare “the current century and the century past".

“I thought: what a terrible difference between Butyga and me! Butyga, who first of all built solidly and thoroughly and saw the main thing in this, attached some special importance to human longevity, did not think about death and probably had little faith in its possibility; But when I was building my iron and stone bridges that would last for thousands of years, I could not help but think: “This is not durable ... This is useless.” If, over time, some sensible art historian catches the eye of Butyga’s closet and my bridge, he will say: “These are two wonderful people in their own way: Butyga loved people and did not allow the thought that they could die and collapse, and therefore, doing his furniture, he meant an immortal man, but the engineer Asorin did not love either people or life; even in the happiest moments of creativity, he was not disgusted by the thought of death, destruction and finiteness, and therefore, look how insignificant, finite, timid and pitiful these lines are in him ”...

The comedy really reflected the real changes that took place in Russian post-reform life. They began even before the abolition of serfdom, accelerated after its abolition in 1861, and at the turn of the century reached a dramatic edge. But this is just a historical reference, however, completely reliable, but little revealing the essence and secret of the "Cherry Orchard".

There is something deep and exciting in this play, something eternal, like in the plays of Shakespeare. In perfect proportion, traditional motifs and images are combined with artistic novelty, with an unusual interpretation of the stage genre (comedy), with historical symbols of great depth. It is difficult to find a play that would be so connected with the literary background, novels and plays of recent memorable years - with Turgenev's "Noble Nest", with "Forest", "Hot Heart", with Ostrovsky's "Wolves and Sheep" - and at the same time time would be so different from them. The play is written in such a way, with such transparency of literary correlations, that the old novel with all its collisions and disappointments simply could not help but come to mind when looking at Gaev and Ranevskaya, at the old house, at the scenery of the cherry orchard. “Hello, lonely old age, burn out, useless life ...” - this should have been remembered and really remembered, so K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko read and staged The Cherry Orchard more like a traditional Turgenev elegy farewell to the past, than as a play in all respects new, created for the future theater, the future audience.

Shortly after the premiere, on April 10, 1904, Chekhov, in a letter to O. L. Knipper, in an unusually harsh tone for him, remarked: “Why is my play so stubbornly called a drama on posters and in newspaper ads? Nemirovich and Alekseev see positively in my play not what I wrote, and I am ready to give any word that both of them have never read my play carefully.

Many times in different letters and conversations with different people Chekhov stubbornly repeated: "The Cherry Orchard" is a comedy, "in places even a farce."

And just as stubbornly, The Cherry Orchard was understood and staged as a drama. Stanislavsky, after the first reading of the play, did not agree with Chekhov: “This is not a comedy ... This is a tragedy, whatever the outcome a better life You didn’t open in the last act ... I cried like a woman, I wanted to, but I couldn’t restrain myself. And already after Chekhov's death, probably in 1907, Stanislavsky repeated once again that he sees in The Cherry Orchard a heavy drama of Russian life.

Some contemporaries would like to see on the stage not even a drama, but a tragedy.

O. L. Knipper wrote to Chekhov on April 2, 1904: “Kugel said yesterday that the play is wonderful, everyone plays wonderfully, but not what is needed.” And two days later: “He finds that we are playing vaudeville, but we should be playing tragedy, and did not understand Chekhov. Here, sir."

“So Kugel praised the play? Chekhov was surprised in his reply letter. - We should give him 1/4 pound of tea and a pound of sugar ... "

Suvorin dedicated a page of his Little Letters (New Time, April 29) to the premiere of The Cherry Orchard: “Every day is the same, today as yesterday. They say they enjoy nature, pour out their feelings, repeat their favorite words, drink, eat, dance - dance, so to speak, on a volcano, pump themselves up with cognac when a thunderstorm broke out ... The intelligentsia makes good speeches, invites to new life, but she herself does not have good galoshes ... something important is being destroyed, perhaps due to historical necessity, but nevertheless this is a tragedy of Russian life, and not a comedy and not fun.

Suvorin blamed the directors of the play, the theater, and not the author; meanwhile, Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy, and he demanded that it be staged and played that way; the directors did everything they could, but you can't argue with the author. Perhaps the genre of The Cherry Orchard is not a problem of form, but of a worldview.

The directors were perplexed. Nemirovich-Danchenko telegraphed to Yalta on April 2, 1904: “Since I have been doing theater, I don’t remember that the public reacted to the slightest detail of drama, genre, psychology like today. The general tone of the performance is magnificent in its calmness, distinctness, and talent. The success in terms of general admiration is huge and more than any of your plays. What in this success will be attributed to the author, what to the theater - I will not make out yet. The name of the author was…”

The leading critics of those years, J. Aikhenwald, for example, looked for unworn stylistic turns to evaluate The Cherry Orchard: between the heroes of the comedy “there is some kind of wireless connection, and during pauses, some inaudible words seem to fly across the stage on light wings. These people are connected with each other by a common mood. Capturing the unconventionality of the stage collisions and images of The Cherry Orchard, they wrote that Chekhov is more and more “moving away from the true drama as a clash of opposing mental warehouses and social interests ... erased, as if looking from afar ... the social type is obscured”, which only Chekhov could show in Yermolai Lopakhin not just a fist, but to give him "ennobling features of reflection and moral anxiety."

And there was certainty in that: bad hosts. “The former bares were half generals…”

“The collapsed system of the nobility, and some not yet fully expressed muckraking of the Ermolaev Lopakhins, who came to replace him, and the shameless procession of an insolent tramp, and the arrogant lackey, which smells of patchouli and herring - all this, significant and insignificant, clear and unsaid , with labels and without labels, hastily picked up in life and hastily demolished and folded into a play, as if into an auction room, ”wrote Yu. Belyaev (“New Time”, April 3, 1904).

Holy truth! Only: in life - yes, hastily, but on stage - no.

Admired, interpreting in his own way, Vsevolod Meyerhold: “Your play is abstract, like a Tchaikovsky symphony. And the director must first of all catch it with his ear. In the third act, against the background of stupid "stomping" - this is the "stomping" you need to hear - Horror enters unnoticed by people.

The Cherry Orchard has been sold. They dance. "Sold". They dance. And so on to the end ... Fun, in which the sounds of death are heard. There is something Maeterlinckian, terrible in this act. I compared only because I am powerless to say more precisely. You are incomparable in your great creativity. When you read plays by foreign authors, you stand apart with your originality. And in drama, the West will have to learn from you.”

Hoped for a new, revolutionary, M. Gorky: “You threw out a mischievous thing, Anton Pavlovich. They gave beautiful lyrics, and then suddenly they clanged with all their might with an ax on the rhizomes: to hell with the old life! Now, I'm sure your next play will be revolutionary."

The experience of modern director's interpretations and all kinds of theatrical experiments eloquently testifies that not everything is clear for us either, that a brilliant creation is inexhaustible, that the stage embodiment of The Cherry Orchard is an eternal task, like the production of Hamlet, for example, and that new generations of directors, actors and the audience will search for their keys to this play, so perfect, mysterious and deep.

The creator of the play in 1904 hardly had a chance to survive the triumph. And there were serious disappointments.

Before the production and long before publication, the theater critic H. E. Efros, as soon as the manuscript reached the theater, outlined the content of the play in the News of the Day newspaper, with great distortions. “Suddenly now I’m reading,” Chekhov wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko, “that Ranevskaya lives with Anya abroad, lives with a Frenchman, that the 3rd act is taking place somewhere in a hotel, that Lopakhin is a kulak, a son of a bitch, and so on. and so on. What could I think?

He returned to this offense many times in his letters.

“I have the feeling that I was drunk and doused with slops” (O. L. Knipper, October 25, 1903).

“Efros continues to remind himself. Whatever provincial newspaper we open, everywhere there is a hotel, everywhere Chaev ”(October 28).

Another story turned out to be even harder. According to an agreement concluded in 1899, Chekhov had the right only to the first publication of each new work, and the reprinting belonged exclusively to Marx's publishing house. Chekhov promised and gave "The Cherry Orchard" to M. Gorky in the collection "Knowledge". But the book was delayed by censors (not because of Chekhov's play), while Marx was in a hurry with his separate publication, wanting to get his benefit as soon as possible. On June 5, 1904, on the cover of the Niva magazine, a message appeared about the "just" published edition of The Cherry Orchard at a cost of 40 kopecks. This greatly harmed the interests of "Knowledge"; their collection went on sale only a few days earlier. The seriously ill Chekhov, who spent his last days in Moscow, was forced to explain himself in letters to A.F. Marx, M. Gorky, and K.P. Pyatnitsky.

Three days before leaving for Berlin, on May 31, he asked Marx: “I sent you the proofs and now I earnestly ask you not to release my play until I finish it; I would like to add another characterization of the characters. And I have an agreement with the book trade "Knowledge" - not to release plays until a certain date.

On the day of departure, a telegram was sent to Pyatnitsky, who was in charge of the practical activities of Knowledge: “Marx refused. Consult a sworn attorney. Chekhov.

Between dramaturgy and Chekhov's prose, one does not feel such a sharp boundary that separates these areas of creativity from other writers. In our minds, Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, for example, are primarily great prose writers, novelists, and not playwrights. Chekhov, while working on prose, felt like a playwright living in the images of his characters: “I always have to speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I add subjectivity, the images will blur, and the story will not be the same. compact…”

There was no unanimity among contemporaries regarding Chekhov's work: they guessed that his plays were renewing the stage and, perhaps, were a new word in the history of the world theater, but the majority still believed that Chekhov was primarily a storyteller and that his plays would greatly benefit if he remade them into stories. This is what Leo Tolstoy thought: “I don’t understand Chekhov’s plays, whom I rank highly as a novelist ... why did he need to portray on stage how three young ladies are bored?

The point is not that when reading Chekhov's plays and stories, there is a clear, albeit somewhat indefinite feeling of the unity of style and creative handwriting, but that Chekhov often - and, of course, consciously - varied and repeated in his plays the theme of the symbolic city, in which the characters live and talk about with such sadness and bitterness, the theme of labor, which will justify the emptiness and worthlessness of life, the theme of life itself, which will be beautiful in two or three hundred years ... Chekhov's stories, novels, plays are really connected by the unity of the author's intention, the theme and constitute a complete and integral artistic world.

The Cherry Orchard takes place on the Ranevskaya estate. But "the road to Gaev's estate is visible", and "far away on the horizon a large city is not clearly marked, which is visible only in very good, clear weather."

On the stage are great-grandfather things, personifying the patriarchal solid antiquity - “your silent call for fruitful work has not weakened for a hundred years, supporting (through tears) in the generations of our kind cheerfulness, faith in a better future and educating in us the ideals of goodness and social self-consciousness. As for the characters, the same Gaev, for example, who turned to the closet with this inspired speech, life has long scattered them around the world - in Russian and European capitals, some to serve in the province, some to Siberia, some where. They gathered here involuntarily, in some kind of mystical - of course, completely vain - hope to save the old garden, the old family estate, and their past, which now seems so beautiful to them, and themselves.

Meanwhile, the event that caused them to come together takes place behind the stage, and on the stage itself there is, in fact, no “action” in the traditional sense of the word: they are waiting. In essence, the play should be played as a continuous four-act pause, a great pause between the past and the future, filled with grumblings, exclamations, complaints, impulses, but most importantly - silence and longing. The play is difficult both for the actors and for the audience: there is almost nothing to play first - everything rests on semitones, everything - through restrained sobs, in a half whisper or in an undertone, without strong impulses, without bright gestures, only Varya will jingle the keys, or Lopakhin will touch the table with his foot, or the samovar hums and Firs grumbles about something of his own, of no use to anyone, incomprehensible to anyone; the second has to follow facial expressions, intonations and pauses, for that psychological subtext of the game, which is far from important for everyone and which is remembered only by those who caught the “pre-Efremov” Moscow Art Theater on stage - Dobronravov, Tarasova, Livanov.

For some, everything is in the past, like for Firs, for others - in the future, like for Trofimov and Anya. Ranevskaya, and her lackey Yasha, have all their thoughts in France, and not in Russia (“Vive la France!”), Therefore, they have, in essence, nothing to do on stage - just languish and wait. There are no usual conflicts - love, infidelity; there are no comic troubles, just as there are no tragic twists of fate. Sometimes they laugh and immediately stop - not funny, or cry about something irrevocable. And life flows on as usual, and everyone feels that it is flowing, that the garden will be sold, that Ranevskaya will leave, Petya and Anya will leave, Firs will die. Life flows and passes - with all the memories of the past and dreams of the future, with anxiety and strong nervous anxiety that fills the present, that is, the time of the stage action of The Cherry Orchard - anxiety is so tense that it becomes difficult on stage and in the hall breathe.

Although in this play there is not a single person, not a single scene or conflict that would in any way diverge from reality or, moreover, contradict it, The Cherry Orchard is a poetic fiction: in a certain sense it is fabulous, full of hidden meanings, complex personifications and symbols, a world that preserves the secrets of the elapsed time, the departed pores. This is a dramatic myth, and perhaps the best genre definition for it would be the following: mythological comedy.

The house and the garden are inhabited by memories and shadows. In addition to acting - so to speak, "real" - persons, there are invisibly present on the stage those who planted and nursed these trees and these people - Gaevs and Ranevskys, so defenseless, inactive and unviable. All these faces, looking at Petya Trofimov and Anya “from every leaf, from every branch in the garden”, must somehow exist on the stage; and besides them - those who burned their lives here (“my husband died from champagne ...”), and those who were born here and, having lived for a short time, died like the son of Ranevskaya, whom Petya had to raise and teach mind-reason (“The boy died, drowned ... For what? For what, my friend? ..””).

Perhaps a certain excess of reality in the production of K. S. Stanislavsky - bright green leaves, too large flowers, too loud cricket in pauses, etc. - confused Chekhov because, as a result, the spirituality of The Cherry Orchard suffered, where in every little thing on the stage, in the furniture, in the branches and flowers that Trofimov speaks of, should have felt the breath of the past, its not museum or mausoleum authenticity, but rather solidity, faith in immortality and its boundless, like the homegrown serf carpenter Gleb Butyga, confidence in the new life that replaces it.

According to an old, now almost century-old tradition, Chekhov's plays are staged with emphatically real scenery, with all the details of the old Russian life, with icons in the red corner, with evening tea in the living room or on the veranda, where the samovar is boiling, where nannies, like Arina, huddle Rodionovna. Behind the windows of old houses, behind the fences of great-grandfather's estates, restless gentlemen dressed in the fashion of the last century in frock coats, uniforms and dresses that modern actors no longer know how to wear live. A. Blok especially appreciated this, as he said, "nutrition" of Chekhov's plays, stage comfort, solidity of antiques, as if conscious of their dignity: "dear, respected closet ..."

And Stanislavsky further strengthened this materiality and reality, compensating for what seemed to be a lack of action: there were shots (“the flask with ether burst”), and the knock of an ax on wood, and the sound of a broken string, “fading, sad”; the rains and trees rustled in the wind, in the pauses the crickets chirped audibly.

In Chekhov's plays, if you read and reread them carefully and slowly, there is always something that is accessible to the ear, but eludes the eye, something more than stage action. This “something” is very similar to the languor of the spirit, to a peculiar unusual mood, which, perhaps, cannot be called anything other than Chekhov’s: there is nothing like it in the world dramaturgy before “Uncle Vanya”, “The Seagull”, “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” " did not have. It is easier to catch in remarks and between the lines - therefore, it is better to read than to look: on the stage, for the sake of the main tones, shades are involuntarily sacrificed, and even in very good productions, as a rule, there are much more losses than successes. Critics understood this in their own way, advising Chekhov not to write plays, but stories (they also advised the opposite, and later, in our time, almost all stories and stories of mature years were filmed or staged).

Looking and listening, you begin to gradually understand that Chekhov's plays, so homely, so cozy, are played out in a vast world that surrounds this comfort and makes itself felt with the voices of birds, the rustle of leaves, the calls of cranes. The characters live in their role, in their make-up, in some dramatic old-fashioned way, not noticing that an endless world stretches around with its forests, distant roads, stars, with countless lives expiring or coming. Here everyone - both on stage and in the auditorium - has their own worries and troubles, but the cranes will fly by in the Three Sisters, and Masha will tell them after: “To live and not know why cranes fly, why children are born, why stars in the sky". These words have nothing to do with the action, but it is they, among many other hints and all sorts of implied meanings, that create the “longing” that M. Gorky wrote about after listening to The Cherry Orchard. Astrov in "Uncle Vanya" will be left alone with Elena Andreevna: it would seem that a love scene should begin, which professional actors can play, which goes well even at an average level - and it will really start, but will be immediately interrupted: Astrov will unfold the map of the county where there is so little forest left.

Before Chekhov, there was nothing like this in the theater, the scene does not go according to the rules, it is really difficult to perform it: the actress silently, idly listens to a lengthy monologue, depicting interest and attention to Astrov and his card. She has no other stage task, there is nothing to play, everything rests on her mood, on trust in the audience.

Among the many complex problems that arise with any reference to The Cherry Orchard - some of them appeared so long ago and are solved so long that at times they seem insoluble - there is one, at first glance not too difficult: is this comedy, so reliable in general and, it seems, in all its details and details, how historical and real is The Cherry Orchard?

Bunin wrote in his book about Chekhov that he had “very little idea of ​​the nobles, landowners, noble estates, their gardens,” but even now almost everyone is captivated by the imaginary beauty of his Cherry Orchard, which, unlike “much truly beautiful” that Chekhov gave to Russian literature is devoid of any historical authenticity and plausibility:

“I grew up in an “impoverished” noble nest. It was a remote steppe estate, but with a large garden, only not cherry, of course, because, contrary to Chekhov, there were no gardens anywhere in Russia entirely cherry; in the landowner's gardens there were only parts gardens, sometimes even very spacious, where cherries grew, and these parts could not be anywhere, again contrary to Chekhov, just near of the master's house, and there was and is nothing miraculous in the cherry trees, which are not at all beautiful ... clumsy, with small foliage, with small flowers at the time of flowering ... it is quite unbelievable, besides, that Lopakhin ordered to cut down these profitable trees with such stupid impatience, without giving their former owner even to leave the house ... "

Relatively plausible person in the whole play was, in Bunin's opinion, only Firs - "only because the type of the old master's servant had already been written a hundred times before Chekhov ...".

It is surprising that Bunin wrote this page already in exile, in his late, advanced years, knowing full well about all the uprooted gardens, groves, forests, demolished estates and temples; he knew that in the latest Russian history, which was unfolding before his eyes, exactly what he considered impossible, “incredible” was happening daily, and if there was anything truly plausible in Chekhov’s last comedy, it was Lopakhin’s impatience, with how they chopped cherries ...

This thirst for absolute truth in life is also amazing - to the plan of the estate, to the place where cherries could and could not stand, this orthodox realism. Bunin was a serious and highly experienced writer, he knew from his own experience how necessary poetic fiction is in literature and how common it is in it. For example, about his own story, fanned with such provincial Russian thoughtfulness, so impeccably truthful, he recalled: I wrote “Light Breath” in the village ... in March 1916: Sytin’s “Russian Word” asked me to give something for the Easter issue. How could you not give? Russian Word paid me two rubles per line in those years. But what to do? What to invent? And then I suddenly remembered that one winter I wandered quite by accident into a small cemetery in Capri and stumbled upon a grave cross with a photographic portrait on a convex porcelain medallion of some young girl with unusually lively, joyful eyes. I immediately made this girl mentally Russian, Olya Meshcherskaya, and, dipping my pen in the inkwell, began to invent a story with that delightful speed that happened in some of the happiest moments of my writing.

In its origins, "Light Breath" has nothing to do with either the "truth of life" (the grave in the Capri cemetery is, of course, a completely different story), or Russia itself (Capri is an island within the territorial boundaries of Italy).

In the Grasse Diary by G. N. Kuznetsova there are eloquent lines about disagreements with I. A. Bunin about the “truth of life” and the poetic nature of the story, which did not seem to the writer’s interlocutor to be true in that intimately feminine sense of the word, which constituted it salt, nor, moreover, poetic:

“We were talking about Easy Breath.

I said that in this charming story I was always struck by the place where Olya Meshcherskaya cheerfully, to no purpose, announces to the headmistress of the gymnasium that she is already a woman. I tried to imagine any high school girl, myself included, and couldn't imagine any of them being able to say that. I. A. began to explain that he was always attracted by the image of a woman brought to the limit of her “uterine essence”. - “Only we call it uterine, and I called it there easy breathing... It is strange that this story was liked more than "Grammar of Love", but the latter is much better ... "

It can be objected that all this - and the cemetery in Capri, similar to the Russian cemetery is as small as the Italian Russian winter, and the inspiring fee, and even the “wombness” in the end do not mean anything and do not decide: anyway, it is very similar life, and the story still remains beautiful, poetically touching and alive ...

Everything is like this: “whatever you say, but such incidents happen in the world,” and the story is interesting in its own way and really good; as Tolstoy noted, in literature you can invent anything you like, only psychological inventions are contraindicated for it.

But the psychology of art, when it is not an invention, is much more multifaceted and complex than it seems to us, connoisseurs and specialists.

The Cherry Orchard is probably the most thoughtful and balanced of all Chekhov's plays. There could be no question of a romantic burst of inspiration, of "happy minutes" ...

Bunin's judgments about The Cherry Orchard lead to the fundamental principles of the history of literature and poetics: art and life, object and word, symbol, metaphor, true story.

True, Bunin did not like and poorly understood Chekhov's drama - not only The Cherry Orchard, but, as he said, all the plays in general. And not only Bunin, but many other of his contemporaries disliked and did not understand - Leo Tolstoy once said to Chekhov: "You know, I can't stand Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse." And these words of his, so unexpectedly connecting the names of Chekhov and Shakespeare, who did not have exactly what was not found in Chekhov's plays - all the same credibility These words were, in a certain sense, prophetic. A new era was beginning in the history of the world theater: the old was disliked for the reason that it was old, far from modern needs and concerns, and time for new it has not yet matured, it has not yet established itself either in the public consciousness or in the tastes of people who loved literature and the theater, who with naive confidence were looking for the truth of life on the stage. The world theater opened a new chapter in its history, changing its curtain, scenery, hall. It was not an intermission, but rather a break, a kind of "hour of the equinox" - in fact, its onset was noted by Leo Tolstoy, speaking with equal hostility about Chekhov and Shakespeare.

Objecting to Bunin, one can turn, for example, to old encyclopedic reference books and dictionaries, to old books on gardening. Perhaps it can be documented that cherry orchards still existed in estates and around manor houses. But this “real commentary” does not, in essence, refute or explain anything: the old manor houses and estates in Russia have long since disappeared, and there are no gardens that once surrounded and overshadowed them; and The Cherry Orchard is still being staged - both on the Russian stage, and in England, and in Japan, where the Ranevskys, Lopakhins, Gaevs, Simeonovs-Pishchikovs, not only today, but also in former times, could not have been, and, of course, , never happened.

Now, turning to the main thing, we can say that the garden in this play is not a scenery on which blossoming cherries are more or less reliably depicted (in Bunin's opinion, in the Moscow Art Theater it looked completely unreliable, even clumsy due to too large and lush flowers, which real cherries do not have), but a stage image; it would be better to say that it is symbolic garden, but here the real difficulties lie in wait for us due to the ambiguity and indefiniteness of the term “symbol”.

It is quite common, for example, to erroneously combine the concepts of "symbol" and "symbolism", and it is not so easy to explain that these are completely different things. Since a symbol means symbolism, and realism is “details”, “objects”, “living pictures”, “living images”, this is the same life truth, about which Bunin wrote, that credibility, which, due to our naivety, we also demand from art ...

There are special works devoted to the symbol in literature (and in art in general), but verbosity, illustrativeness, or even the trivial meaninglessness of ideas about the symbol, which can be reduced to some example, say, to a coat of arms, where ribbons denote something, ears of corn - so-and-so, etc.

Some of the serious definitions of a symbol are based on unfamiliar or ambiguous terms, which, in turn, need to be interpreted and defined in some way: “A symbol is an image taken in the aspect of its symbolism, and ... a sign endowed with all the organicity of a myth and the inexhaustible ambiguity of an image "(" Literary Encyclopedia"). There is no way to briefly and somehow clearly say that in this phrase - "The Cherry Orchard" - from the myth, that from the sign and image. But it is quite clear that The Cherry Orchard is phrase, given by the author as the title of the play. One may wonder about the meaning - or, more precisely, about the semantic boundaries - of this phrase; obviously, the boundaries here are not too wide, the possible ("allowed") values ​​are far from infinite. Perhaps the "author's will" in literature, in this art that uses only words, is expressed in the fact that phrases are protected from incorrect ("forbidden") interpretations and meanings, regardless of what real gardens we have seen (or not seen) in life, on whether there were entirely cherry orchards in Russia or not.

What does it symbolize, what does it mean - a garden, a cherry orchard? Labor and time. The measure of human labor, the measure of human life. We say: this tree is thirty years old - therefore, our father planted it; this tree is a hundred years old - and they should think about great-grandfathers; this tree is two hundred years old, three hundred, five hundred, eight hundred years old, “this tree saw Peter I” - and we think about our ancestors. And also the land on which these trees grow, and taking care of them so that they are not broken during times of unrest and reconstruction. We need the continuity of generations that replace each other.

In Russia, there were not entirely cherry orchards - this is not naivety, but a style of thinking, a habit of realism. In Russian art, there were no longer old and there were no new symbols, they were weaned to the point of complete immunity to them.

Chekhov opposed the idea of ​​the flow of time to the absolute present time; the present is relative, it is valued only against the backdrop of the past and in the perspective of the future.

In our memory and life experience, there may not be any real ideas and images associated with a garden, especially a cherry orchard; the author of this book, for example, saw old cherries in the Chekhov region and Ukraine, where, as in the poems of Taras Shevchenko, "the garden of the cherry billy of the hut", he also saw flowering cherry shoots - two or three dozen trees - near the walls of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. But besides any real recollections, most often fleeting and poor, in the very combination of these sounds there is something necessary for hearing, something urgent for the human soul, even if it is an unkind and callous soul. Not picturesque, not old-fashioned poetry, but some kind of overshadowing spirituality and purity, the opposite of vanity and evil. Explaining to Stanislavsky that there should not be a “cherry”, but a “cherry” garden on the stage, Chekhov, perhaps, just warned against unnecessary concretizations, from “bytovism”, which so prevented Bunin from understanding the play, and not him alone ...

“…is it possible that human beings are not looking at you from every cherry in the garden, from each leaf, from each trunk, are you really not hearing voices…”