The
Cherry Orchard, a Russian Encyclopedia of Alienation
Writing at the turn of the twentieth
century, when the Russian cultural milieu was replete with Marxist ideas, Anton
Chekhov stayed surprisingly aside from any visible influence of Marxism. The
only Marx he dealt with in life was his publisher Adolf Marx, and his own
circle included mainly liberal (Alexander Kuprin), liberal-conservative (Ivan
Bunin, the future 1933 Nobel Prize laureate in literature) and
ultra-conservative (Leo Tolstoy) intellectuals, but strikingly few Marxists (one
of them was Maxim Gorky, the future “father” of socialist realism). Yet after
the Bolshevik Revolution, Chekhov’s works – unlike, for example, those of Bunin
or Dostoyevsky – were immediately incorporated into the canon of Soviet
literature. Lenin, in particular, admired Chekhov’s works and often quoted him,
as also did Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment from
October 1917 to 1929. What made Chekhov’s ouvre so appealing to the Bolsheviks?
One of Lunacharsky’s articles on Chekhov can provide an answer:
Chekhov… was perfectly aware that he
expresses a certain public opinion, felt himself – through his eyes, through
his pen – tightly connected with his times, and in this sense was a social man…
He takes social ulcers from his own soul and amazingly beautifully and
truthfully depicts them, and he is harmonious and marvellous in his
truthfulness.[1]
What
Lunacharsky, a Marxist, appreciates in Chekhov is the latter’s ability to
express social conflict stemming from the fact that one’s selfhood is an
expression of particular material and social relations. In other words, Bolshevik
ideologists recognized Chekhov’s method as innately Marxist, while his mastery
of style made his social criticism more subtle and persuasive than most works
of openly Marxist writers. In this response, I argue that alienation – one of
the key concepts of Marxism – occupies a prominent place in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, to the degree that
it can be dubbed an encyclopedia of alienation in late imperial Russia.
Alienation is, in
fact, a major force driving plotlines of many of Anton Chekhov’s works. One of his most famous short stories entitled
“Man in a Shell” is a narrative of a Belikov who spent his whole life trying “to
withdraw into a shell like a hermit crab;” a whole life’s effort of
misrecognition of one’s self as derivative of social relations he is trying to
escape. Of course, the moment he achieves this ideal is the moment of death;
and, in a gesture of authorial irony, it is the only time Chekhov shows Belikov
as feeling positive emotions:
Now when he was lying in his coffin
his expression was mild, pleasant, even cheerful, as though he were glad that
he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again. Yes he had
attained his ideal!
The Cherry Orchard deals with more
diverse, subtle and scary aspects of alienation. Its characters perform a whole
range of forms of misrecognition, disrespect, and humiliation of others and,
more importantly, of themselves. Ranevskaya and her family, Gaev, Varya and
Anya, are confronted with the highest stakes: the loss of their high social
positions which they take for granted by the right of inheritance. This loss is
symbolized and materialized in the looming and, in Act 3, finally occuring sale
of their estate with its cherry orchard. For Ranevskaya, the separation from the
cherry orchard is a separation from her past: “My dead, my gentle, beautiful
orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye!” (Act 4) In fact, as a
long-term resident of France, who had fled there to forget about the loss of
her husband and son, Ranevskaya is already alienated from her past and from the
social relations that created her as a noble woman of late imperial Russia. Yet
the very materiality of the orchard, its ability to produce “material limits,
presuppositions and conditions independent of [people’s] will”[2]
recreates these social relations of her past once she is back to her estate.
Her past is not gone as long as this material artefact exists, which is emphasized
in the character of her old servant Fiers. Fiers, who epitomizes the past
social relations between “the peasants” and “the masters” of the
pre-Emancipation era, is derivative of the estate, orchard and social relations
provoked by them to such a degree that at the very end of the play he is
physically unable to separate himself from the orchard. In the last flash of
consciousness he recognizes this inseparability of his life from the life of
the (now doomed) orchard: “Life's gone on as if I'd never lived” (Act 4).
Alienation, a
loss of a part of oneself, invites empathy on behalf of the audience, but
Chekhov manipulates the play’s dialogue in such a way that Ranevskaya and her
family never obtain the monopoly on the audience’s attention. In the course of
the play we learn – in a language which at times is surprisingly close to
Marxist – that the cherry orchard is more than simply an object of natural
landscape. It is a social phenomenon, and as such is itself the product of
alienated labor of serfs belonging to Ranevskaya’s family. The key episode is
Trofimov’s monologue beginning with “All Russia is our orchard” (Act 2), in
which he brings anthropomorphic metaphors to convince Anya that the orchard is
anything but an aesthetic object:
Think, Anya, your grandfather, your
great-grandfather, and all your ancestors were serf-owners, they owned living
souls; and now, doesn't something human look at you from every cherry in the
orchard, every leaf and every stalk? Don't you hear voices . . . ? Oh, it's
awful, your orchard is terrible; and when in the evening or at night you walk
through the orchard, then the old bark on the trees sheds a dim light and the
old cherry-trees seem to be dreaming of all that was a hundred, two hundred
years ago, and are oppressed by their heavy visions.
Trofimov
experiences (or at least claims to experience) a reaction of disgust to the
understanding of the social complexity of the cherry orchard (“it’s awful, your
orchard is terrible”).[3]
Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory suggests why it might happen: disgust, if not
felt orally, can be a reaction to an object perceived, in fact, as attractive:
“disgust may be aroused by a very attractive sex object, if there is both a
strong wish for and fear of sexual contact” (“Contempt–Disgust for Objects
Which Are Not Taken into the Mouth,” Vol. 2, p. 357). Trofimov feels disgust
because the orchard is so appealing, and its appeal stands on the way to what
he claims is a better future: “For it's so clear that in order to begin to live
in the present we must first redeem the past.”
As with
Ranevskaya, Chekhov manipulates the dialogue in such a way that the audience
would not feel empathy for Trofimov (his dialogue with Ranevskaya in Act 3).
Yet the complex social nature of the cherry orchard is revealed through another
principle character, the merchant Lopakhin. In the very beginning of the play
we learn of his complex relationship with the Ranevsky [sic] family:
My father was the serf of your
grandfather and your own father, but you--you more than anybody else--did so
much for me once upon a time that I've forgotten everything and love you as if
you belonged to my family . . . and even more.
The cherry orchard is, in other words,
actually the creation of the Lopakhins; its current ownership by Ranevskaya is made
possible only by the specific social relationship between the masters and the
serfs in the pre-Emancipation Russia in which the former had a full possession
of the latters’ products of labor. These relations of exploitation were
culturally disguised in the language of parents’ (masters’) care about children
(serfs), not unlike that of the American slavery.[4]
When Lopakhin addresses Ranevskaya as part of his family, “or even more,” he
reproduces this dominant language. When he persistently tries to convince her
to keep her estate by leasing off land for villas, and even promises to “raise
a loan of 50,000 roubles at once,” so that “your cherry orchard will be happy,
rich, splendid,” Lopakhin works against his commercial interests, but also against
his social interests by maintaining the old, rooted in the pre-Emancipation era
system of socio-economic relations of inequality. In the language of Marx and
Engels’s Theses on Feuerbach, the cherry
orchard prevents him from discovering that “the secret of the holy family” (his
current relationship with Ranevskaya) lies in structures of exploitation of
“the earthly family” (the inequality of power which they both inherited from
their parents); the orchard thus is an obstacle to “criticize in
theory and revolutionize in practice” this relationship.[5]
Lopakhin misrecognizes these structures of inequality as obligation, and Varya
exploits this misrecognition by trying – quite openly – to marry herself off to
Lopakhin. Lopakhin’s open expression of triumph in Act 3 might seem like a
drastic contrast with his gentle and caring behaviour in Acts 1 and 2, but his
purchase of Ranevskaya’s estate opens the road to the elimination of the
orchard, this reified inequality. Until the orchard is cut down, its magic is
still around: in Act 4, Lopakhin temporarily cedes to Ranevskaya’s suggestion
that he propose to Varya. His comment “I don't feel as if I could ever propose
to her without you” suggests that his affection for Varya stems from the same
power relationship that is the source of his feeling of obligation to
Ranevskaya. Yet “[a]xes cutting the trees are heard in the distance,” and the
proposal never takes place.[6]
The feeling of
alienation in The Cherry Orchard is
additionally reinforced on the level of its composition: everybody is talking,
but nobody is listening:
LUBOV. And Varya is just as she used to be, just like a nun.
And I knew Dunyasha. [Kisses her.]
GAEV. The train was two hours late. There now; how's that for
punctuality?
CHARLOTTA. My dog eats nuts too.
In the absence of
human contact, things come to replace people as objects of affection. In the
episode in which Lopakhin offers a realistic and pragmatic way out of the
bankruptcy, Ranevskaya instead kisses cupboard and speaks to her table, and
Gaev, having replied in two phrases, addresses a 100-year old cupboard with a
lengthier and kinder speech than anything he ever tells to Lopakhin or anybody
else in the house (“My dear and honoured case!..”). The Cherry Orchard might be interpreted as a melancholic play in
the sense that the dominant feeling of its protagonists is the feeling of loss,
which they – successfully or not – are trying to conceal or cope with. Yet
their kaleidoscope on the scene represents too fast a change of faces and
voices and does not give us, their audience, enough time to develop empathy
with any of them. We just have no
time to develop melancholy. Raymond Williams suggested, as an interpretation of
this method, that Chekhov wrote “about a generation whose whole energy is
consumed in the very process of becoming conscious of their own inadequacy and
impotence… Virtually everyone wants change; virtually no-one believes it is
possible.”[7]
In so saying, Williams loses the perspective of the social conflict that was
ripping late imperial Russian society apart – something that the Bolsheviks, who
appreciated Chekhov’s works for his skill to reveal this conflict, knew too
well. More importantly, Williams also seems too preoccupied with the analysis
of the textual aspect of Chekhov’s
plays. Yet the very end of The Cherry
Orchard suggests something very different than social “inadequacy and
impotence.” As spectators of The Cherry
Orchard, in its final scene we are
literally left without characters. Everybody is gone with the exception of
Fiers who has become an unalienable part of the estate; and Fiers is dying or
already dead. The main character of the play – the cherry orchard, which like
Edgar Poe’s purloined letter, has animated the entire sequence of events,
conflicts and interactions in The Cherry
Orchard, is gone, too. With it (and with Fiers) are gone social structures
and relations of pre-Emancipation Russia. A more radical change is hard to
imagine.
[1] A. V. Lunacharsky, “What
can A. P. Chekhov be for us?” originally published in: Pechat’ i revolutsiia, 4 (1924): 19–34, quoted from http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-1/cem-mozet-byt-a-p-cehov-dla-nas.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, A Critique of the German Ideology, Part I, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.
[3] This particular phrase is a
result of censorship: the original one read as an open political statement, and
Chekhov had to remove it (in the Russian editions it was restored after 1917):
"To own human beings has affected every one of you--those who lived before
and those who live now. Your mother, your uncle, and you don't notice that you
are living off the labours of others--in fact, the very people you won't even
let in the front door."
[4] “The essence of slave-owner
paternalism was to treat slaves as children who needed constant guidance
because they could not manage on their own. Pomeshchiki [Russian nobles], too,
often spoke of their serfs as children..” Peter
Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Harvard
University Press, 2009), 156. Fiers has a lot of parallels
with similar characters of loyal slaves who stayed with their parents after the
Emancipation, such as Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
[6] Historically, Russian
merchants typically sought marriages within their own rank to consolidate
capitals.
[7] Raymond Williams, Drama From Ibsen To Brecht (The Hogarth
Press, 1993), 106–107.
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