niscent of the 'nest of gentry' melodramas that had been in fashion since Turgenev's time. The main characters, the Ranevskys, are forced by debt to sell their prized possession and inheritance (the orchard) to a merchant called Lopakhin, who plans to clear the land and build dachas on it for the new middle classes of Moscow. Stanislavsky, in the first production, played it as a sentimental tragedy: his actors cried when they first heard the script. No one was prepared to puncture the mystique of 'the good old days' on the estate - a mystique that had grown into a national myth. Journals such as Bygone Years (Starye gody) and Town and Country (Stolitsa i usad'ba) catered to this cult with their dreamy pictures and nostalgic memoirs about the old gentry way of life. The political agenda of these journals was the preservation of the landowners' estates, not just as a piece of property, an economic system or ancestral home, but as the last remaining outposts of a civilization that was threatened with extinction by the social revolution of the towns. 'Our country nests', Count Pavel Sheremetev told the Moscow zemstvo, 'are carrying the ancient torch of culture and enlightenment. God grant them success, if only they are spared the senseless movement to destroy them, supposedly in the interests of social justice.'117 Had Chekhov's play been written after 1905, when the first agrarian revolution swept through Russia and thousands of those country nests were set alight or ransacked by the peasants, it might have been conceived in this nostalgic way. But Chekhov was insistent that the play should be performed as a comedy, not a sentimental tragedy; and in this conception the play could not have been written later than it was, even if Chekhov had lived for another twenty years. After the 1905 Revolution the passing of the old world was no longer a subject of comedy.
Chekhov called his play a 'piece of vaudeville'.118 Throughout The Cherry Orchard he is subtly ironic and iconoclastic in his treatment of the gentry's 'cultivated ways'. He is sending up the mystique of the 'good old days' on the estate. We are meant to laugh at the cliched sentimental speeches of Madame Ranevskaya when she waxes lyrical on the former beauty of the old estate or her happy childhood there: a world she had abandoned long ago for France. Her overblown expressions of sadness and nostalgia are belied by the speed with which she recovers and then forgets her grief. This is not a tragedy: it is a
satire of the old-world gentry and the cult of rural Russia which grew up around it. What are we to think of Pishchik, for example, the landowner who sings the praises of the 'gentry on the land' and yet at the first opportunity sells his land to some English businessmen who want it for its special clay (no doubt to be used for the manufacturing of lavatories in Stoke-on-Trent)? What are we to make of the Ranev-skys who set such store by the old paternal ways? Their ancient butler Feers looks back nostalgically to the days of serfdom ('when the peasants belonged to the gentry and the gentry belonged to the peasants'). But he is left behind on the estate when its owners all pack up and go away. Chekhov himself felt nothing but contempt for such hypocrisy. He wrote The Cherry Orchard while staying on the estate of Maria Yakunchikova near Moscow. 'A more disgracefully idle, absurd and tasteless life would be hard to find', he wrote. 'These people live exclusively for pleasure.'119 The merchant Lopakhin, on the other hand, was intended by Chekhov as the hero of the play. He is portrayed as an honest businessman, industrious and modest, kind and generous, with a real nobility of spirit underneath his peasant-like exterior. Although he stands to gain from buying the estate (where his father was a serf), Lopakhin does everything he can to persuade the Ranevskys to develop it themselves, offering to lend them money to help them (and no doubt giving money to them all the time). Here was the first merchant hero to be represented on the Russian stage. From the start Chekhov had the part in mind for Stanislavsky himself, who was of course the son of a merchant family from peasant stock. But mindful of this parallel, Stanislavsky took the role of the feckless noble Gaev, leaving Lopakhin to be played by Leonidov as the usual merchant stereotype - fat and badly dressed (in checkered trousers), speaking boorishly in a loud voice and 'flailing with his arms'.120 As Meyerhold concluded, the effect was to deprive Chekhov's play of its hero: 'when the curtain falls one senses no such presence and one retains only an impression of "types"'.121
