The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anton Chekhov · a comedy in four acts · fifteen roles · first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre, 17 January 1904 · scored on Chekhov’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Comedy, in places farce, set inside an elegy; country-house drama and social prophecy in one action
Mythos
The lost garden and the expulsion of its heirs; the inheritance sold to the son of the servants; a portent from the sky the play neither explains nor withdraws
Phase
One estate from May to October: an arrival at dawn, an evening in open country, a party on the day of the auction, a departure from the stripped nursery
Presentation
Drama; four acts without scene divisions, fifteen roles, the first and last acts in one room, the auction kept offstage and reported, one sound written into the directions and heard twice
Register
From Gaev’s billiard calls, Yepikhodov’s grandiloquence and Charlotta’s conjuring to Lopakhin’s triumph and Firs’s last mutter
Scale
One household, one estate, five months; a class, a debt, and the Emancipation behind them
Governing Proposition
A landowning family comes home in May to an estate whose cherry orchard is to be sold for its debts; they are shown how to save it, talk of other things, and in August it is sold, to the grandson of their serfs, who will cut it down. The wager of the play is that a way of life ends not by catastrophe but by sale, while those who lose it are occupied with something else, that loss in such a world is ridiculous and terrible at once, and that only a comedy which keeps its decisive event offstage can show both.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Комедия в четырёх действиях”
(a comedy in four acts). So Chekhov named his last play, and its first direction sets it where comedy is least expected: in a room still called the nursery, at dawn, in May, with the cherry trees in blossom outside and a frost on the orchard. The play opens on an arrival into that room and closes on a departure out of it. Between the two the estate is sold for its debts, and the orchard with it. The blossom and the frost are in the room together from the first page, and the play never separates them.
It was written in 1903 and first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904 (Old Style), Chekhov’s birthday, staged by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko; it was printed the same year, and Chekhov died in July. There are four acts and no scene divisions. The first and the last are in the nursery, in May and in October. The second is in open country at evening: an old abandoned chapel, a well, old stones that were once gravestones, telegraph poles, and on the horizon a town that can be seen only in clear weather. The third is the drawing room during a party on 22 August, the day of the auction. The play’s decisive event happens in none of these places.
Fifteen roles hold it, with guests and servants besides. Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya owns the estate. Her daughter Anya is seventeen; her adopted daughter Varya, twenty-four, keeps the house without pay; Gaev is her brother. Lopakhin is a merchant whose father and grandfather were serfs on this estate. Trofimov, the student, was tutor to her son Grisha, who drowned in the river beyond the orchard. Simeonov-Pishchik is a neighbouring landowner, forever borrowing; Charlotta Ivanovna is the governess, Yepikhodov the clerk, Dunyasha the maid, Firs the old footman, eighty-seven, Yasha the young one; a Passer-by, a stationmaster and a post-office clerk complete the list. No one of them is the protagonist, and the woman at the centre does nothing.
Movement II
The estate is in debt and will be auctioned in August. There is a way to save it: cut the orchard into plots for dachas, for the summer people the railway brings. The family talk of other things. Ranevskaya tears up the telegrams that come from Paris, and later answers them. The first act is full of talk, and the one subject that matters is the one on which no one will speak to the point.
Firs remembers that the cherries were once dried and sent off by the cartload, and that there was a method for it. No one now remembers the method. The knowledge of the estate has gone before the estate. Gaev, moved by the bookcase, which is a hundred years old, makes it a speech: “Дорогой, многоуважаемый шкаф!”
(Dear, much-respected bookcase!). The address is ridiculous and it is moving, and the play will not let either quality cancel the other. When feeling rises in him too far, Gaev falls back on billiard calls, as if a ball sent into a pocket could hold it there.
Around the family stand the figures who seem to be there for comedy. Yepikhodov, the clerk, is called “двадцать два несчастья”
(twenty-two misfortunes); his boots squeak, and he carries a revolver he never fires. Pishchik borrows from everyone and will be saved by luck, when the English find clay on his land. Charlotta has no passport and does not know how old she is. Each is the household seen from a distance: its incapacity as farce, its survival by accident, its rootlessness without the sentiment the family spends on its own.
Movement III
The second act takes the household out of doors, to the chapel, the well and the gravestones, with the telegraph poles behind and the town faint on the horizon. Charlotta takes a cucumber from her pocket and eats it. The talk wanders. Then a sound is heard in the distance, as of a string breaking, dying away, sad; the direction prescribes it. The talkers stop and wonder what it was: a bird, perhaps, or a bucket fallen in a mine shaft far off. They do not settle it. Firs hears in it the time before the Emancipation of 1861, which he remembers as a misfortune.
Trofimov makes the speech the play could have made for itself: “Вся Россия наш сад”
(All Russia is our orchard). He states the symbol the whole action enacts, and the play does not leave him the last word on it. He is the “вечный студент”
(eternal student) to the others, there is the matter of his galoshes, and he falls down a flight of stairs. The speech can be lifted out of the play, and it is the only thing in the play that can; the man who gives it cannot be, since the household’s laughter at him belongs to the same world as his prophecy.
A Passer-by comes along the road, and Ranevskaya gives him a gold piece, though at home the servants have nothing to eat. The prodigal gesture and the empty kitchen stand in one moment. The evening ends with nothing decided, and the decision is about to be taken elsewhere, by other people, without them.
Movement IV
On 22 August the household gives a party. A band plays, the guests dance, Charlotta does card tricks, and in town the estate is put up for sale. Ranevskaya waits for news. The play could have gone to the auction room; it stays in the drawing room, and the choice is its argument. History does not arrive here as a scene. It arrives while people are dancing, and it is reported.
Lopakhin comes back from town. The orchard is sold, and Lopakhin has bought it: “Я купил!”
(I bought it!). He speaks of his father and grandfather, serfs on this estate, who were not allowed into the kitchen, and now he owns the house they served; the triumph and the grief come in one breath. Ranevskaya weeps, and the band plays on. He loves the place, and he will cut it down, and he cannot stop himself from doing either.
Varya flings down the keys. The sale toward which the play has moved since its first scene is over, and the play has refused at every point the melodrama of ruin that the sale invited. Chekhov insisted that it was “не драма, а комедия, местами даже фарс”
(not a drama but a comedy, in places even a farce), and his theatre played it as tragedy over his objection. The third act holds both: a dance in which a family loses everything, and a man who weeps as he gains it.
Movement V
The last act returns to the nursery, stripped, in October. The family is leaving. Lopakhin and Varya are left alone, and he does not propose; the play does not say whether from cowardice, from class or from simple incapacity. Yepikhodov stays on as Lopakhin’s steward. The farewells are made in the room where the play began with a homecoming.
The house is locked. Firs has been forgotten, and he is locked in. He lies down and says what the play has been showing: “Жизнь-то прошла, словно и не жил”
(life has gone by as if I had never lived). Then a last word, for himself: “недотёпа”
(good-for-nothing). The string is heard again, dying away, and in the orchard an axe begins on the trees.
The frame closes: nursery to nursery, arrival to departure, blossom to axe. The leaving is the measure of what was there. More than a century of stagings has not settled the questions the close leaves standing: whether Lopakhin is the hero of the story or its vandal, whether Ranevskaya is its heart or its folly, whether Trofimov speaks for the future or only for himself, and whether the forgetting of Firs is an accident or a verdict. The play declines to say what the new life will be. It shows the old one ending, at the sound of an axe, with an old servant lying down in a locked house.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites on almost nothing, and the figures who look like ornament are each a function of the argument. Yepikhodov, the clerk of “двадцать два несчастья” (twenty-two misfortunes), with his squeaking boots and a revolver he never fires, is the household’s incapacity made farce, and he stays on as the new owner’s steward. Pishchik, saved when the English find clay on his land, is the gentry economy surviving where it survives, by accident. Charlotta, with no passport and no known age, is rootlessness without sentiment. Firs’s forgotten method for drying cherries is the whole estate in four lines. What could go: part of Trofimov’s long speech in the second act, which states what the play shows, and perhaps the Passer-by, who is a device.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a way of life ends not by catastrophe but by sale, while those who lose it talk of other things, and the man who buys it, grandson of serfs who were not allowed into the kitchen, loves what he destroys and cannot stop himself destroying it. “Я купил!” (I bought it!) is triumph and grief in one breath. Beside it the play shows freedom felt as loss by the freed, in Firs, who remembers the Emancipation of 1861 as a misfortune; and a life unlived, noticed only at its end. Held off the top because Trofimov’s social prophecy is voiced more than disclosed, and the play declines, by design, to say what the new life will be.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Chekhov keeps the voice low, and the height comes by indirection. The ceiling: the breaking string in the second act, heard over a conversation that stops to wonder whether it was a bird or a bucket fallen in a mine shaft; Lopakhin’s speech over the purchase while Ranevskaya weeps; and the close, where Firs, forgotten and locked in, lies down, the string sounds again, and an axe is heard on the trees. Lesser heights: the dawn of the first act, blossom and frost together; Gaev’s address to the bookcase, ridiculous and moving at once. Frequency is held below the top by design: long stretches are comedy of embarrassment, and the play refuses to rise where melodrama would.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orchard is built, not evoked. It is never fully seen, only through windows or as the ground beyond the stage, yet the whole action turns on it, and its arc runs from blossom in May to the axe in October: the lost garden, the heirs expelled, the inheritance sold to the son of the servants. The breaking string is a portent the play neither explains nor withdraws. The old gravestones of the second act and the drowned son lay death under the pastoral. Ranevskaya stays a particular woman, tearing up telegrams from Paris and then answering them. Held a step down because Trofimov states the symbol outright, and the pattern of the lost garden stays implicit under the realist surface rather than structural throughout.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the well-made play, Ostrovsky’s merchant comedy and Ibsen’s drama of revelation and confrontation. The swerve: the central event offstage; a protagonist who does nothing; a hero of the sale who is also its bereaved; dialogue in which people answer what was not said; farce, Charlotta’s conjuring and Yepikhodov’s broken cue, set inside an elegy; and Chekhov’s insistence on comedy against his own theatre. The stake was real: the Moscow Art Theatre played it as tragedy, and he objected. Held below the top because the greater break, at the greater cost, was The Seagull, whose failure at the Alexandrinsky in 1896 is the stake of the method; this play carries the method to its end rather than inventing it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Put the auction onstage and the play becomes a melodrama of ruin; keep it off, with the party dancing in the third act while the bidding goes on in town, and the form says what the play knows, that history arrives while people are occupied with something else. The symmetrical frame, nursery to nursery, arrival to departure, blossom to frost, makes leaving the measure of what was there. The mixed genre is not a tone but a way of knowing: loss in this world is ridiculous and terrible together, and a single register could not hold both. Dialogue that misses its target is the instrument of the disclosure. Held just off the top by Trofimov’s speeches, which lift out without the structure noticing.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, not promise: more than a century of production that has not settled the play. Its first theatre staged an elegy over its author’s insistence on comedy; Soviet stagings made Lopakhin and Trofimov the future; and the stagings since have not agreed on what it is. The questions stay open in the text: whether Lopakhin is the hero or the vandal, and whether his failure to propose to Varya is cowardice, class or simple incapacity; whether Ranevskaya is the play’s heart or its folly; whether Trofimov is a prophet or the “вечный студент” (eternal student) the others call him; whether the forgetting of Firs is accident or verdict. Held below the top because the text is short, and its open questions, though deep, are few.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Russian and European drama at the turn of the century. The force: with the three plays before it, a reorganisation of what drama could do, by action through indirection, an ensemble without a protagonist, subtext and pause carrying what speech withholds, and tragicomedy as a native register. This play is that method at its most complete and most widely performed. Held below the top because the force is shared with The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, and the first rupture was The Seagull’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shaw subtitled Heartbreak House (1919) a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes and named Chekhov in its preface, and the ensemble acting of the Moscow Art Theatre, with Stanislavsky’s system, grew in part from staging him.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A hundred and twenty-two years since the premiere. The text survives whole, and nothing is charged on form. Presence is as wide as the span allows: staged continuously since 1904, in Russian and in translation into most of the world’s theatre languages, a fixture of national and repertory theatres, taught as a founding text of modern drama, filmed and adapted. Its surface is tied to a moment, the estate after the Emancipation, a debt auction, dachas for the railway’s summer people, and it has outlived those conditions entirely: it is staged now for what they pressed upon. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown, and a century and a quarter is not the span of the oldest works on the desk, which this figure does not reach.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on the original as far as it can be carried; the sound of the Russian line is neither credited nor charged. The command of the medium is exact: fifteen voices with their own idiolects, Gaev’s billiard jargon, Pishchik returning again and again to his daughter Dashenka, Yepikhodov’s half-educated grandiloquence, Lopakhin’s merchant speech that knows its peasant root, Firs’s mumbling, each placed so that no two scenes sound alike. The motif web is fine and unobtrusive: the keys Varya flings down after the sale, the gold piece given to the Passer-by when the servants have nothing to eat, the string, the axe, the forgotten recipe. The string is written into the directions, not left to a director. Charged: Trofimov’s set speeches, stated more than dramatised, and the Passer-by, a device a shade too visible.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Charlotta eating a cucumber from her pocket in the second act, and Ranevskaya’s grief for the son who drowned in the river beyond the orchard; or Yepikhodov’s squeaking boots and Firs locked in at the end. One law governs both: everyone talks past the thing that is happening, and time and money move regardless. The farce and the elegy are not alternations of tone; they are the same physics seen at different distances. The range is wide, comedy of manners, social prophecy, a portent from the sky, a servant’s death, and it holds. Charged a little: the Passer-by and the string are the two points where the play steps outside its realist law, and although the string is debated, given natural causes and left unresolved, the seam can be felt.
Score: 9.1 / 10
A single play, one estate, five months, a household; within that bound the orders are many, and held. Consciousness: Ranevskaya’s guilt, love and helplessness, Lopakhin’s divided self. The family: a mother, two daughters, one adopted and an unpaid housekeeper, a brother, a drowned son. Labour and class: the serfs’ grandson as buyer, the old servant who mourns his freedom, the young servant who despises his country. The economy: the debt, the auction, the dacha plots, the railway. History: the Emancipation behind, the upheaval Trofimov foretells ahead. The natural order of blossom, frost and season, and the sacred faintly, in Varya’s piety and the abandoned chapel. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form: all of it passes through one room and its neighbourhood, and the form was chosen.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Unconcealment, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.1. A form that keeps its decisive event offstage and so says what the play knows, that history arrives while people are occupied with something else; a text whole and staged continuously since 1904 in most of the world’s theatre languages; a disclosure about loss by sale that holds; fifteen idiolects placed so that no two scenes sound alike; and one law that governs the farce and the elegy together.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: class, economy, history, family and nature are each load-bearing in the action, and all of them pass through one household and its neighbourhood, the bound of the chosen form. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.7, where the heights come by indirection and are kept few by design, with long stretches of comedy of embarrassment between them. The music of the Russian line is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Anton Chekhov’s Вишнёвый сад (Vishnyovy sad), called by its author “комедия в четырёх действиях” (a comedy in four acts): written in 1903, first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904 (Old Style), staged by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and first printed in 1904, the year of Chekhov’s death. It is scored as the single play, a text for performance, in the form of the standard collected editions; productions are evidence of its life, and none of them is the work. Every score is judged on the play in Chekhov’s Russian, which is not in hand. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Laurence Senelick’s close, annotated version is the one best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Constance Garnett’s for comparison and Michael Frayn’s as a version made for the stage. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged or credited to the play. The Russian is known here in phrases, not as a whole text heard aloud, so the music of its line is neither credited nor charged; idiolect and the shape of speech, which survive into any close version, are judged. Names follow the usual English forms. References are by act. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running time, the length of the text, the censor’s part in the first printing, the source and date of Chekhov’s words on comedy and farce, Firs’s exact words for the Emancipation and the omens he links to it, and the names of particular later productions and of dramatists said to have learned from the play, are not given.