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"Think, Anya -- your grandfather, your great-grandfather, all your ancestors owned slaves, living souls. Can you hear their voices? Don't you feel human beings looking at you from every tree in the orchard? To have owned human souls has perverted you all -- your ancestors and you who are alive now, so that your mother, your uncle, and even you don't realize it, but you're living in debt, at the expense of those who were your slaves" (Chekhov, 43). Anton Chekhov's final play, "The Cherry Orchard" premiered at the Moscow Art Theater in January, 1904. Chekhov died the following summer. Yet his last work, and indeed the last years of his life, was inextricably entwined with the failed revolution that swept Russia the year after his death. No literary work, neither contemporary nor retrospective, has captured the zeitgeist of this era in Russian history more perceptively than "The Cherry Orchard." When Chekhov began writing the play at his new home in Yalta in the spring of 1903, he was under mounting pressure from Moscow Art Theater founders Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to produce a new work for the coming season. Earlier that year, Chekhov had vaguely promised them a "vaudeville or comedy," offering little if any detail. (Rayfield, 572). Stanislavsky was not convinced, concerned that the new play would prove to be "something impossible on the weirdness and vulgarity of life. I only fear that instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy" (Rayfield, 580). The seeds of the play had been germinating for some time. In the fall of 1901, Chekhov had first mentioned to Stanislavsky an orchard as the setting for a play, and he suggested the title to his sister Masha the following year, after receiving news that the new owner of the Chekhovs' estate in Melikhovo had chopped down the orchard of cherry trees Anton had planted (Rayfield, 572). By early 1903, Chekhov was firmly established at the MAT as its leading playwright and literary star. He had married the company's lead actress (and, author Rayfield claims, Nemirovich-Danchenko's mistress) Olga Knipper in May, 1901, and had enjoyed considerable success and acclaim with three previous stagings of his work under Stanislavsky's direction. The theater itself had risen out of the repressive doldrums of state-run theater in the spring of 1898, when Nemirovich-Danchenko merged six of the best actors (Knipper among them) from his Moscow Philharmonic School with four players from Stanislavsky's Society for Art and Literature to form the Moscow Art Theater. Thus was born the first theater in Russia relatively free of the tight grip of restrictions Czar Nicholas II's Imperial Theater Committee held the state-run theaters in (Rayfield, 456). The MAT did not escape the watchful eye of the Czar's secret police, however, who reportedly replaced regular theater ushers during performances of Maxim Gorky's plays both before and after Chekhov's death. The formation of the Moscow Art Theater undeniably changed the course of Chekhov's life as a playwright, and with it the course of modern theater. Following the abject failure of "The Seagull" in St. Petersburg in October, 1896, Chekhov vowed never to write for the stage again. Opening night there had "caused a scandal in the auditorium, the worst anyone could then recall in Russian theatre" (Rayfield, 394). Chekhov's sister Masha recounted some years later that when Anton met her at the train station the following morning, he was incensed. "The actors don't know their parts. They understand nothing. The acting is horrible. The play will flop. You shouldn't have come" (Ibid.). A contemporary review dismissed "The Seagull" as "...a boring, drawn-out thing that embitters the listener...This isn't a play. There is nothing theatrical in it...The auditorium expected something great and got a bad, boring piece...Chekhov is not playwright. The sooner he forgets the stage, the better..." (Rayfield, 457). Chekhov walked out of the next performance and into the freezing St. Petersburg night, vowing never to subject himself to that kind of humiliation again (Rayfield, 396). A letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko in the spring of 1898 began to change that, and in so doing, began a process that would lead to a successful re-staging of "The Seagull" in Moscow, followed by "The Three Sisters", and, ultimately, "The Cherry Orchard." "Of contemporary Russian authors I have decided to cultivate only the most talented and still poorly understood," Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to Anton on April 25. "...'The Seagull'...enthralls me and I will stake anything you like that these hidden dramas and tragedies in every character of the play, given a skillful...production without banalities, can enthrall the auditorium, too." Nemirovich-Danchenko concluded rather proudly that, "Our theatre is beginning to arouse the strong indignation of the Imperial theatres. They understand we are making war on routine, clichés, recognized geniuses, and so on..." (Rayfield, 457). Despite his feeling that trying to write for the theater following the St. Petersburg debacle was like "eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach had just been removed," Chekhov paid his first call on the Moscow company during a September rehearsal of "The Seagull", which featured MAT star Olga Knipper as Irina. Shortly thereafter, Chekhov wrote to his on-again, off-again love, Lika Mizinova (whom he seemed to delight in tormenting), "Nemirovich and Stanislavsky have a very interesting theatre. Pretty actresses. If I'd have stayed a bit longer, I'd have lost my head" (Rayfield, 465). As Chekhov began wrestling with "The Cherry Orchard" at his new estate in the Crimea, internecine warfare was breaking out in the theater up in Moscow. In early 1903, MAT began to split into two factions: one side, led by fiery actress, Knipper nemesis and later, Gorky's mistress Maria Andreeva, agitated for an ideological shift to accommodate the rising tide of revolutionary dramas lapping about the edges of the Moscow art scene. Others, including Nemirovich-Danchenko and Knipper, fought to maintain MAT's growing reputation for theater of strong literary value. On March 3, a "row erupted" at the theater, with company member Savva Morozov accusing the "capitalist conservatism" of Nemirovich-Danchenko as the certain downfall of the theater and storming out, a tearful Andreeva in tow, and a furious Knipper shouting after them both (Rayfield, 573). Agitprop theater, with Chekhov's friend Maxim Gorky at its forefront, had become an increasingly viable and popular form of activist entertainment as the Russian working class began to squirm under the oppressive if reluctant thumb of Czar Nicholas II in the late 1890s. Thrust into power by the sudden demise of his father, Alexander III in October 1894, Nicholas began his reign not exactly bubbling over with confidence. "What am I going to do?" he wailed to a cousin on the eve of his coronation. "I am not prepared to be a Czar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling" (Verner, 7). Those may have been the most honest words the new Czar ever wrote or spoke, as his reign seems to have been squandered in a constant, fumbling haze of oblivious confusion and reluctant rule that left the Czarina Alexandra and various bureaucratic and military minions scuffling and plotting for the reins of control. Prone to concluding notes to his wife with such revealing sign-offs as, "your own poor little huzzy with no will Nicky," the Czar actively sought out "bureaucratic outsiders and moral outcasts" -- the infamous Rasputin among them -- who could divert his attentions from the tiring business of state (Verner, 40-41; 68). Others in his inner circle were not as coy in their assessments of the Czar's character and leadership abilities. "Unfortunate man!" exclaimed the Czar's Interior Minister's wife, Mde. Sviatopolk-Mirskaia in late 1904. "A type of feeble degenerat[e], it was beaten into his head that he must be firm, and there is nothing worse than a weak person wanting to be firm" (Verner, 113-114). Nicholas' reign was doomed from its beginning. Chekhov's publisher friend Alexei Suvorin was among those who attended the coronation festivities in Moscow a year and a half after Nicholas had assumed power. Viewing stands had been quickly erected in a large athletic field, and to assure filling them, officials promised a half million complementary gifts -- a tin cup and a "coronation sausage" -- plus the chance to win a silver watch, one for each grandstand (Rayfield, 378). In response, more than 700,000 commoners descended upon Moscow, overwhelming the facilities and causing a stampede for the modest gifts. Scaffolding collapsed, killing more than 2000 attendees. "Corpses were being carted all day," Suvorin reported from the aftermath. "...There were lots of children...I haven't seen any gentry. It's just workmen and artisans lying there...what bastards these police officials are, every one of them, and these bureaucrats" (Rayfield, 378-79). Unfazed, the Czar's coronation ball went on as planned that evening. A week later, Chekhov joined Suvorin at the site of the tragedy. "The graves stilled smelled," Suvorin noted in his diary. "A beggar told us the coffins were put on top of each other in three layers. The crosses are about four feet apart." Chekhov, noted Suvorin, said little about it at the time, but upon returning home wrote nothing for two weeks (Rayfield, 379). Callous behavior by the Russian government towards its citizens was certainly nothing new. The Imperial position towards its charges had become increasingly reactionary since the Great Reforms of the 1860s had led to the Counter Reforms of 1889-92 (Verner, 95). Nicholas' father, Alexander III, was the architect of the Counter Reform movement. Alexander was convinced the reforms of the 1860s -- including the emancipation of the serfs -- had "gone too far in that they had outpaced Russia's historical development and artificially injected foreign ideas and theories of government, including...ideals...of individual autonomy." Alexander championed the Counter Reforms as a "necessary corrective" for Russia to regain its true social structure and national destiny (Verner, 98). Nicholas, for his part, dismissed as "senseless dreams" a people's coalition request for a modicum of civil liberties, including a petition for freedom of the press which Chekhov signed, an action which brought him under surveillance for a time by the Czar's secret police. (Verner, 104; Rayfield, 339). Besides squashing the "senseless dreams" of its people, another key component to realizing the Empire's "national destiny" was imperialist expansion into other nations, a cause championed with apparent fervent zeal by Nicholas' wife, Alexandra. With the Czarina admonishing her reluctant husband to be "firm, strong, assertive and to let others know with whom they [are] dealing," and with the ambitious Minister of Finance Sergei Witte and the reviled Minister of Internal Affairs V. K. Pleve plotting its course, an ill-prepared Russia in late 1903 squared off with an "insolent" Japan over the conquest of Manchuria and Korea. The showdown exploded suddenly into war with Japan's surprise attack on Russia's Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur on January 27, 1904, setting into motion a chain of events that would lead to Revolution the following year (Verner, 104). Temporarily swept up in a wave of national jingoism and militaristic fervor, the Russian public had hardly been in the mood to embrace "The Cherry Orchard" at its premiere at the Moscow Art Theater ten days earlier. The New Times dismissed not only the play, but the playwright as well. "Chekhov is not just a weak playwright, but an almost weird one, rather banal and monotonous" (Rayfield, 590). Terminally ill by this time, Chekhov shocked the company when he appeared at the theater on opening night after his protracted, self-imposed "exile" in Yalta. A stunned Stanislavsky said later it was like seeing "a living corpse." (Rayfield, 587). Serious health problems had plagued Chekhov since early adulthood; his latent tuberculosis worsened considerably after his arduous expedition to the Island of Sakhalin in 1890. While having dinner with Suvorin in March, 1897, Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage from which he never fully recovered (Rayfield, 422). Reluctantly submitting to a thorough physical examination shortly before his 1901 marriage, Chekhov's lungs were diagnosed with "irreversible necrosis, and his gut was badly affected" (Rayfield, 533). In addition, Chekhov's physician found severe pulmonary damage and chronic colitis, for which koumiss, fermented mare's milk, was prescribed. Nevertheless, perhaps caught up himself in the war fever sweeping his country, perhaps once again to escape what he perceived as the failure of his play, Chekhov announced he was leaving that summer for the Manchurian front to become a combination physician/war correspondent. None who saw him that night took him seriously. By May, Chekhov was back in Yalta being attended to by Olga with a combination of morphine, opium and heroin. On June 26, from the Badenweiler health resort in her native Germany, where Olga had taken Chekhov in a last-ditch effort to save him, she wrote her sister-in-law Masha, "The doctor says that because his lungs are in such a bad way, his heart is doing double the work it should, and his heart is by no means strong" (Rayfield, 594). Early on the morning of July 15, 1904, that heart gave out. German medical etiquette at the time dictated that "a doctor at a colleague's deathbed, when all hope was gone, should offer champagne" (Rayfield, 595). A bottle was brought in. "Anton sat up and loudly proclaimed, 'Ich sterbe' ('I am dying'). He drank, murmured, 'I haven't had champagne for a long time,' lay down on his left side...and died" (Rayfield, 596). Later that same day in St. Petersburg, revolutionary terrorists assassinated the despised Imperial Minister of Internal Affairs Pleve with a homemade bomb lobbed through the open window of his passing carriage. The American press had been following both the domestic unrest in Russia and the burgeoning Russo-Japanese war with growing concern. "Day of Reckoning At Last Arrives", proclaimed the July 29, 1904 headline of the Chicago News (Western calendars at the time being thirteen days ahead of the Russians). An editorial inside suggested the bomb hurler be tracked down and signed with the ever-needy Chicago Cubs (Thompson & Hart, 21). The United States at the turn of the 20th Century was a young buck just beginning to flex its muscles upon the world stage. Propelled into the Presidency by his 1898 Rough Rider victories in Cuba, Theodore Roosevelt had watched with interest the growing intensity of the revolutionary movement in Russia, covertly supporting the insurgents in their actions against the Czar, a "preposterous little creature" he found personally disgusting and reprehensible (Thompson & Hart, 55). Revolutionary leaders, led by Maxim Gorky, looked to America as a shining symbol of hope, freedom, and financial backing. Much like Ho Chi Minh a half-century later, Gorky would come to America seeking sustenance from its promise, and leave embittered by its provincial sensibilities. The rapid slide in American sympathies from the guerrillas to the Czar was down a slippery slope of public relations and political realities Gorky, et al, simply were not prepared to handle, or even fully comprehend. Japan's surprise attack upon the Russians at Port Arthur, and subsequent upper hand in the resultant war was the point at which the worm of American support and opinion began to turn. Prior to this attack in January, 1904, Americans had supported the revolutionaries in their fight against Czar Nicholas. Indeed, newspapers across the country were quick to condone, if not outright gloat over, Minister Pleve's violent exit. In New York, the Sun, Press, and Post combined to condemn Pleve as a "monster, beast, Svengali and bloody-handed brute." Down South, the Florida Times-Union noted the assassination should serve to show Americans outside the South that "lynchings, while regrettable, were sometimes necessary" (Thompson & Hart, 22). Concurrently, the left-leaning World's Work ridiculed the Czar in late 1904 as "unmanly," a "pathetic little creature" forced to "peer up to see the eyes of a woman" (Ibid., 26). Pro-Revolutionary fervor peaked in America following the "Bloody Sunday" massacre in St. Petersburg in January, 1905. With more than 120,000 workers on strike throughout Russia, thousands amassed outside the Imperial Palace in what was described in two accounts at least as an organized, orderly workers' march (Thompson & Hart, 26). "The thousands of workers who had marched to the Winter Palace on January 9 had come not to present demands or to overthrow the government, but simply to make their views known and to explain their miserable conditions" (Verner, 162). As the gathering swelled near the palace gates, outnumbered troops panicked and began firing unprovoked and indiscriminately into the crowd. According to "moderate estimates" at the time, approximately five hundred were killed and three thousand wounded, many trampled and/or suffocated by the fleeing mob. American reaction was swift, and passionate. "Like the victims of the Boston Massacre, the martyred workmen of St. Petersburg have not died in vain," extolled Outlook magazine. In Cincinnati, two women were hospitalized after being injured in a stampede for newspapers detailing the slaughter. The New York Times reported that performances of the melodrama "Siberia" were halted by chants from the audience of "death to the Czar!" "until the building rocked" (Thompson & Hart, 30). The Czar's own reaction was typically not as swift, and not as passionate. Wryly observing that "reality had briefly, if painfully, intruded upon the Czar's idyllic Sunday routine," Verner quotes Nicholas lamenting in his private diary, "God, how painful and distressing" the incident was, then continuing, "Mama came from town straight from the [church] service...I went for a walk with Misha. Mama stayed overnight" (Verner, 153). In his first public announcement a full ten days after the incident, Nicholas magnanimously proclaimed that, "I believe in the honorable feelings of the working people and in their unshakeable devotion to Me, and therefore I forgive them their guilt." Privately, the Czar found the whole ordeal "tiring"; "from all this my head became completely weak" (Verner, 164). American sympathies for the Russian revolutionaries were now at an all-time high, and interest in the writings and personalities of their leaders, especially Maxim Gorky, surged. Fund-raising personal appearance tours were arranged, with "classes" held in St. Petersburg cafés to educate the cause celebes in all things American, such as "sports, songs and customs." Instructions were given in table manners and dress, and how to make small talk at parties. Only superstar revolutionary Gorky was allowed to object to these "trivial and demeaning" preparations. "Daring any banker to criticize his peasant blouse and boots," Gorky proclaimed he was hitting American shores as is, "unmanicured nails" and all. "Gorky could wear anything he pleased and still be the top attraction," Thompson & Hart note. "His drawing power [was] worth all the others combined" (123). While this revolutionary zeal was coursing through American society, a curious shift of alliance was quietly gathering momentum in Washington's political and diplomatic inner circles. Having initially hailed the Japanese attack at Port Arthur as "a friend who was serving our purposes in the Orient," Roosevelt by the spring of 1905 had become concerned that Japan was not fighting merely to contain Russian expansion, but rather with imperialist designs of its own. "He feared that if the Czar's government collapsed, Japan could not be prevented from conquering all of Manchuria and perhaps the remainder of China" (Thompson & Hart, 54). In a classic example of politicians making strange bedfellows, Roosevelt initiated a shift in public opinion away from the revolutionaries and in favor of the Czar, a man who personally disgusted him, a man whom he believed "had acquired when a boy certain habits which were not discovered until they undoubtedly weakened him physically and morally" (Thompson & Hart, 55). Nevertheless, Roosevelt brokered a peace agreement between the two nations in June, 1905 that ceded southern Manchuria, Korea and the island of Sakhalin to the Japanese (Thompson & Hart, 55-57, 61). Although some complained -- "President Roosevelt has done better for the Russian government than it deserved," lamented the Hartford Courant -- American interest in the struggle of the Russian worker was rapidly waning by the end of 1905. The personal appearance tours, no matter how well-rehearsed, flopped. The Chicago News smirked that it was easy to spot a revolutionary in a crowd: "The moment you set eyes upon him, you know...his hair stands on end, his eyes are wild, and his dress is in disorder" (Thompson & Hart, 122). Imperial Russia's derailing of Gorky's much anticipated, much publicized tour of the United States in the spring of 1906 was a work of public relations genius. After all, "revolutionaries of lesser fame were being ignored in the United States, but it was difficult to imagine a similar response to Maxim Gorky" (Thompson & Hart, 126). Tipped that Gorky's mistress, Moscow Art Theater actress and Olga Knipper arch-rival Maria Andreeva would be accompanying him to the pure and Puritanical shores of the USA, Russian intelligence went to work. Photos of the "abandoned" Mde. Gorky and their two sons were sent ahead to New York newspapers, timed to arrive with Gorky's steamship. Reporters taking the launch to meet the Gorky ship when he arrived in New York harbor were still unaware, and assumed Gorky and Ms. Andreeva were husband and wife, bombarding them with questions about their impressions of America. Gorky responded that he had always dreamed of coming to America because "things are so bright and lovely here, and people can pursue their happiness freely." On the docks, a band played Sousa's "Hands Across The Sea" as "young men hoisted Gorky to their shoulders and bore him to a Hudson River ferry" (Thompson & Hart, 127-28). The next morning, the headline of the New York World proclaimed, "GORKY BRINGS ACTRESS HERE AS 'MME GORKY'!" Within hours, Gorky and Andreeva were evicted from their suite at the Belleclaire Hotel. Denied lodging at two other "family" establishments, the pair finally registered under false names just in time to dress for a fund-raising dinner-dance at the Grand Central Palace that evening. A "clamor" greeted their entrance into the ballroom. "Some stood on chairs to get a better look, only to be knocked to the floor...one woman's gown was 'ripped in a manner that caused her to be taken immediately from the hall'" (Thompson & Hart, 133). Finally, the New York Times reported, "order was restored, the broken chairs were removed, and dancing begun" (Ibid.) When Gorky and Andreeva returned to their hotel that night, they found their luggage stacked in the lobby. The moral outrage spread with amazing speed. Under the heading, "LATEST INSULT TO AMERICAN DECENCY, the Pittsburgh Sun railed, "Do you respect the virtue of your mother? Do you prize the chastity of your wife? Forty million men live in these United States and every one of them will answer 'yes' to these questions. And what is more, every man will mean what he says...upon the American Home depends the future of the American Nation...today the country is aroused because of the insult that has been offered to the purity of its women, to the sanctity of its homes, by Maxim Gorky, the novelist and agitator" (Thompson & Hart, 134). United States Commissioner of Immigration T. Watchorn began deportation proceedings against Andreeva, citing Section Two of the 1903 Immigration Act, which stated that "women could not be brought to the United States for immoral purposes" (Thompson & Hart, 136). The New York Commercial Advertiser observed that "the whole affair of Gorkyism went smash, as if an American Vesuvius had blown its head off on Manhattan Island. There was fire, smoke, ashes and lava everywhere, and a universal scattering for shelter." Mark Twain added a simple, sad postscript: "He didn't understand our bigotry" (Thompson & Hart, 135). Hounded into seclusion at a sympathizer's estate on Long Island, Gorky and Andreeva sailed for Russia shortly thereafter, never to return to the United States. Two years earlier, Gorky was at the opening night performance of "The Cherry Orchard" at the Moscow Art Theater and had been as shocked as anyone by Chekhov's emaciated appearance. Clearing the dressing room, the two friends sat alone and talked. Surrounded by gifts he found useless, Chekhov lamented that what he really wanted was a new mousetrap. Later, the Czar's police raided the theater for holding an "unauthorized public gathering," a common action wherever Gorky might be present (Rayfield, 587). An "elegy for a lost world, estate, and class," as Rayfield astutely notes, "The Cherry Orchard" foretold the events of both 1905 with a prescient clarity most living at the time simply could not see. Death in "The Cherry Orchard," Rayfield continues, "in an ending that heralds Samuel Beckett, is banal: a senile servant is forgotten in a locked house" (580). The writer Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky appreciated the "same incongruity" between Chekhov's imagination and his fate that is shown in the owners of the doomed cherry orchard. "Chekhov could hardly walk, noises came from his chest," Garin-Mikhailovsky remembered. "But he seemed not to notice. He was interested in anything but illness...why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?" (Rayfield, 581). Chekhov's remains were locked up in a refrigerated train car marked, "For Oysters" and shipped back to Russia from Germany for burial. Gorky was at the funeral with Chekhov's sister Masha, and widow Olga. He wrote of that day, "I am so depressed by this funeral...as if I was smeared by sticky, foul-smelling filth...People climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, 'Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they're crying...' [Russian opera singer] Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: 'And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them" (Rayfield, 599). Works Cited Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1977. Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997. Thompson, Arthur W. and Robert A. Hart. The Uncertain Crusade: America and the Russian Revolution of 1905. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970. Verner, Andrew M. The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Copyright © 2001 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
