by ERROL
DURBACH
Department of Theatre,
Film & Creative Writing
It is entirely possible, of course, to regard
Chekhov's
Cherry
Orchard as a national symbol of the bankrupt
state - rather like Hamlet's mournful political
vision
of Denmark as a garden that has run to seed.
The idea of a "Paradise garden" is one
of the many pervasive
images that link the drama of Chekhov to a late
Nineteenth
Century vision of a lost or uprooted world - once
a landscape of
absolute value, and now an Eden from which the
protagonists
have been irrevocably driven. Trapped in the world
outside
Paradise, mired in what Ibsen calls the "chasm" of
failure and
mortality and human fallibility, the protagonists
of these plays
continue to long for that lost Edenic world. In
the intensity of
their Romantic yearning, they attempt once again
to achieve the
impossible: to re-enter the forbidden or devastated
garden in order
to redeem themselves from degradation and disappointment.
This Romantic/Tragic theme is most clearly apparent
in Chekhov's Vishnevyi
Sad (The
Cherry Orchard) where the concepts
of "garden" and "orchard" become
interchangeable. It is entirely possible, of
course, to regard Chekhov's Cherry
Orchard as a
national symbol
of the bankrupt state - rather like Hamlet's
mournful political
vision of Denmark as a garden that has run to seed.
But the
social-realist context of The
Cherry Orchard cannot
displace
Chekhov's primary creation of the garden as an
echo-chamber of
all the protagonists' yearning after time that
remains unrecoverable
- like the lost childhood, hinted at in the nursery-setting
of Act One. Madame Ranevskaya's discourse is suffused
with Romantic
nostalgia (what Richard Gilman calls "feeling
frozen in time") for
a world no longer recoverable from the flow of
change and the
unfolding of consequence. But she remains adamant
in her refusal
to acknowledge alteration, and desperate to revert
to a Paradisal
state in which the personal attributes of innocence
and spiritual
purity prevail as if in some impossible realm
of perfection before
the Fall: "Oh, my childhood, my innocent
childhood! I used to
sleep in this nursery; I used to look on to the
orchard from here,
and I woke up happy every morning. In those days
the orchard
was just as it is now, nothing has changed. [Laughs
happily.] All,
all white! Oh, my orchard! After the dark, stormy
autumn and the
cold winter, you are young and joyous again;
the angels have not
forsaken you! If only this burden could be taken
from me, if only
I could forget my past!" (347-48)
Like Madame Ranevskaya , all the protagonists
in Chekhov's plays passively collaborate in the
processes of entropy and meaninglessness that sweep
them away. Desperately longing |
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for a
vanished Paradise of meaning and significance,
where life's tragic enigma will find an answer,
and where the soul will recover its satisfaction,
they are powerless against the harsh realities
of the world
that demands decisions and choice. Olga, in The
Three Sisters, longs for Moscow as a garden
of the mythic imagination, a world of eternal summer
light, where the trees are always in bloom - just
as Irina longs for a Moscow of the wish-dream,
a projection of all her romantic longings into
an realm of infinite possibility. All of Chekhov's
women, like Madame Bovary, express a similar homesickness
for an unknown country, or for a world out of time
where the past may be redeemed and the pain of
the present assuaged. It is perfectly clear why
Madame Ranevskaya cannot cope with The
Cherry Orchard crisis, or why she cannot
make the simple and obvious decision to repair
her losses by chopping down the trees and building
summer cottages. One does not take an axe to the
Garden of Eden. One does not devastate the last
remaining location of pure and absolute value -
her dream of the lost purity of a life now wasted,
and the deathless kingdom of eternal hope. It is
irrelevant that her symbolism is inappropriate:
that the cherry trees are barren, or that the white-blossomed
orchard with the singing starlings is subject to
natural process, or that the meaning of the orchard
is specific to the yearning of the beholder. (Trofimov's
political symbolism of the orchard as a microcosm
of the Russian State is vastly different!) The
mythic gardens in Chekhov are loci of emotional
energy, Kingdoms never to be entered or possessed,
a mirage on the edge of experience carefully protected
against reality. Just as Madame Ranevskaya could
solve the problem of the orchard pragmatically
by wielding the axe, so Olga and Irina could quite
easily hop on the train to Moscow. It's not that
one doesn't do that sort of thing. It's that one
can't.
The
Paradise garden in the drama of Chekhov is a
Romantic mirage in a post-Romantic world - a dream
of existential significance that defies reality
so long as one can keep it at bay. But the garden
is powerless against those forces of modernity
that can no longer accommodate that late Nineteenth
Century myth of transcendence to the iron-hard
world
of the Twentieth. Chekhov was the last of his generation
to record this clash; and his image of Modern
Tragedy
was that of the indifferent forces of History
- radical political change, the rapid momentum
of
progress, and the merciless passage of time -
sweeping away the lovely but impractical dream
of The Cherry
Orchard. The Gods of his tragic universe are
the combined forces of arbitrary Change and Luck
in
league with a paralyzing Romantic yearning that
cannot sustain its myths and make them viable
any longer. What remains for Madame Ranevskaya
when
reality smashes through her defenses? The curtain
falls on the thudding of axes chopping down her
Paradisal garden; and what we take out of the
theatre is the poignant tonality of a snapping
string -
a cosmic sorrow for all those who must go on
living without the consolations of the Romantic
wish-dream.
His image of
Modern Tragedy was that of the indifferent forces
of History - radical political change, the rapid
momentum of progress, and the merciless passage
of time - sweeping away the lovely but impractical
dream of The
Cherry Orchard.
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