Abstract
‘The next play I write will definitely be funny, very funny, at least in concept,’ Chekhov stated to his wife (7 Mar 1901), once Three Sisters had opened. This concept, as the author sketched it to Stanislavsky, would incorporate a footman mad about fishing (a part written for Artyom, the original Chebutykin), a garrulous, one-armed billiard player (to be enacted by Vishnevsky), and a situation in which the landowner is continually borrowing money from the footman. He also envisaged a branch of flowering cherry thrust through a window of the manor house.
Symbolism is the inadvertant rainbow on the waterfall of reality. Andrey Bely, ‘Theatre & Modern Drama’ (1908)
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References
Varya is another variant of the driven housekeeper-type Chekhov had described in his plans for a collaborative play with Suvorin. Earlier avatars include Yuliya in The Wood Demon, Sonya in Uncle Vanya and Natasha in Three Sisters.
A. R. Kugel, Russkie dramaturgi (Moscow: Mir, 1934), p. 120.
Jean-Louis Barrault, ‘Pourquoi La Cerisaie?’, Cahiers de la Compagnie Barrault-Renaud 6 (July 1954), pp. 87–97.
Henri Bergson, Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (New York, Macmillan, 1911), pp. 88–89.
M. Nevedomsky, ‘Simvolizm v posledney drame A. P. Chekhova,’ Mir bozhy 8, 2 (1904), pp. 18–19.
Kugel, op. cit., p. 125.
Ivan Bunin, O Chekhove (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1955), p. 216.
Andrey Bely, ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, ed. and tr. L. Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 92.
Ibid.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Perepiska (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 45;
and ‘Teatr (k istorii tekhnike),’ in Teatr: kniga o novom teatre (St. Petersburg: Shivpovnik, 1908), pp. 143–45.
Eva Le Gallienne, At 33 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1934), p. 224.
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© 1985 Laurence Senelick
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Senelick, L. (1985). The Cherry Orchard. In: Anton Chekhov. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17981-7_8
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