Anton Chekhov полностью

How terrifying are the moments when Fate soundlessly sneaks up on the weaklings. Everywhere there is the alarming leitmotiv of thunder, everywhere the impend­ing storm-cloud of terror. And yet, it would seem there's good reason to be terrified: after all, there's talk of selling the estate. But terrible are the masks behind which the terror lurks, eyes goggling in the apertures.⁸

Act Two with its open-air setting demonstrates this con­currence of reality and super-reality. Chekhov's people are seldom at ease in the open. The more egoistic they are, like Arkadina and Serebryakov, the sooner they head for the safe haven of a house or, like Natasha, renovate nature to suit their taste. The last act of Three Sisters literally strands its protagonists in an uncongenial vacancy, with halloos echoing across the expanse.

By removing the characters in The Cherry Orchard from the memory-laden atmosphere of the nursery (where children should feel at home), Chekhov strips them of their defenses. In Act Two the characters meet on a road, one of those indeterminate locations, halfway between the station and the house, but symbolically, halfway between past and future, birth and death, being and nothingness. Something here impels them to deliver characteristic monologues: Charlotta complains of her lack of identity, Yepikhodov declares his suicidal urges, Ranevskaya describes her 'sinful' past, Gayev addresses the sunset, Trofimov speechifies on what's wrong with society, Lopakhin paints his hopes for Russia. As if hypnotised by the sound of their voices reverberating in the wilderness, they deliver up quintessences of themselves.

At this point comes the portentous moment of the snapped string:

Everyone sits down, absorbed in thought. The only sound is FIRS, softly muttering. Suddenly, a distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, the sound of a snapped string, dying away mournfully. lyubov andreevna: What's that?

lopakhin: I don't know. Somewhere far off in a mineshaft a bucket dropped. But somewhere very far off.

gayev: Or perhaps it was some kind of bird . . . such as a heron.

trofimov: Or an owl.

lyubov andreevnashivers. Unpleasant anyway. Pause.

The moment is punctuated by those pauses that evoke the gaps in existence that Bely claimed were horrifying and that Beckett was to characterise as the transitional zone in which being made itself heard. Chekhov's characters again recall Maeterlinck's, faintly trying to surmise the nature of the potent force that hovers just outside the picture. The thought-filled pause, then the uncanny sound, and the ensuing pause conjure up what is beyond.

But even then, Chekhov does not forgo a realistic pretext for the inexplicable. Shortly before the moment, Yepikhodov crosses upstage, strumming his guitar. Might not the snapped string be one broken by the faltering bookkeeper? At the play's end, before we hear the sound plangently dying away, we are told by Lopakhin that he has left Yepikhodov on the grounds as a caretaker. Chekhov always overlays any symbolic inference with a patina of irreproachable reality.

The spell of the snapped string is broken by a tramp, chanting snatches of social protest poetry about the home­less poor. This allusion to their own essential rootlessness gives the characters a landfall for their formless fears, transferring the glimpse into the abyss to a more familiar plane.

The party scene in Act Three is the locus classicus of Chekhov's intermingling of subliminal symbol and surface reality. Bely saw it as 'a crystallisation of Chekhov's devices':

In the foreground room a domestic drama is taking place; while, at the back, candle-lit, the masks of terror are dancing rapturously; there's the postal clerk waltzing with some girl - or is he a scarecrow? Perhaps he is a mask fastened to a walking-stick or a uniform hung on a clothes-tree. What about the stationmaster? Where are they from, what are they for? It is all an incarnation of fatal chaos. There they dance and simper as the domestic calamity comes to pass.⁹

The scene struck the imagination of the young director Meyerhold, who wrote to Chekhov (8 May 1904) that 'the play is abstract like a symphony by Tchaikovsky ... in (the party scene) there is something Maeterlinckian, terrifying,' and he later referred to 'this nightmarish dance of puppets in a farce' in 'Chekhov's new mystical drama'.¹⁰