Lopakhin is still in the village of GDZ. Minkin Alexander. Tender soul. Lopakhin. eight rubles bottle

Gaev. Sorry, what nonsense!

Lyubov Andreevna. I don’t quite understand you, Ermolai Alekseich.

Lopakhin. You will take the least from the summer residents, twenty-five rubles a year per tithe, and if you announce it now, then, I guarantee anything, you will not have a single free scrap left until the fall, everything will be taken away. In a word, congratulations, you are saved. The location is wonderful, the river is deep. Only, of course, we need to clean it up, clean it up, for example, say, demolish all the old buildings, this house, which is no longer good for anything, cut down the old cherry orchard...

Lyubov Andreevna. Cut it down? My dear, forgive me, you don’t understand anything. If there is anything interesting, even wonderful, in the entire province, it is only our cherry orchard.

Lopakhin. The only remarkable thing about this garden is that it is very large. Cherries are born once every two years, and there’s nowhere to put them, no one buys them.

Gaev. And the Encyclopedic Dictionary mentions this garden.

Lopakhin (looking at his watch). If we don’t come up with anything and come to nothing, then on August 22 both the cherry orchard and the entire estate will be sold at auction. Make up your mind! There is no other way, I swear to you. No and no.

Firs. In the old days, about forty to fifty years ago, cherries were dried, soaked, pickled, jam was made, and it used to be...

Gaev. Shut up, Firs.

Firs. And it happened that dried cherries were sent by cartload to Moscow and Kharkov. There was money! And dried cherries then were soft, juicy, sweet, fragrant... They knew the method then...

Lyubov Andreevna. Where is this method now?

Firs. Forgot. Nobody remembers

Pishchik (to Lyubov Andreevna). What's in Paris? How? Did you eat frogs?

Lyubov Andreevna. Ate crocodiles.

Pishchik. Just think...

Lopakhin. Until now, there were only gentlemen and peasants in the village, but now there are also summer residents. All cities, even the smallest ones, are now surrounded by dachas. And we can say that in twenty years the summer resident will multiply to an extraordinary extent. Now he only drinks tea on the balcony, but it may happen that on his one tithe he will start farming, and then your cherry orchard will become happy, rich, luxurious...

Gaev (indignant). What nonsense!

Varya and Yasha enter.

Varya. Here, mommy, there are two telegrams for you. (He selects a key and unlocks an antique cabinet with a ringing sound.) Here they are.

Lyubov Andreevna. This is from Paris. (Tears up telegrams without reading.) Paris is over...

Gaev. Do you know, Lyuba, how old this cabinet is? A week ago I pulled out the bottom drawer and looked and there were numbers burned into it. The cabinet was made exactly one hundred years ago. What's it like? A? We could celebrate the anniversary. An inanimate object, but still, after all, a bookcase.

Pishchik (surprised). A hundred years... Just think!..

Gaev. Yes... This is a thing... (Having felt the closet.) Dear, respected closet! I greet your existence, which for more than a hundred years has been directed towards the bright ideals of goodness and justice; your silent call to fruitful work has not weakened for a hundred years, maintaining (through tears) in generations of our family vigor, faith in a better future and nurturing in us the ideals of goodness and social self-awareness.

Pause.

Lopakhin. Yes…

Lyubov Andreevna. You are still the same, Lenya.

Gaev (a little confused). From the ball to the right into the corner! I'm cutting it to medium!

Lopakhin (looking at his watch). Well, I have to go.

Yasha (gives Lyubov Andreevna medicine). Maybe you should take some pills now...

Pishchik. There is no need to take medications, dear... they do no harm or good... Give it here... dear. (Takes the pills, pours them into his palm, blows on them,

The purpose of the theater at all times has been and will be:
hold a mirror up to nature,
show valor its true colors
and its truth is baseness,
and every century of history -
his unvarnished appearance.
Shakespeare. Hamlet

Prologue

OPHELIA. It's short, my prince.
HAMLET. Like a woman's love.
Shakespeare. Hamlet

What was the first thing Papa Carlo bought for his wooden son? More precisely: not the first, but the only one (for Papa Carlo did not buy Pinocchio anything else). A book!
The poor old fool sold his only jacket for this gift. He acted like a Man. Because a person became a real person only when the book became most important.
Why did Pinocchio sell his only book? Just to go to the theater once.
Stick your curious nose into a dusty piece of old canvas, into a dusty old play - a stunningly interesting world opens up there... Theatre.
“The purpose of theater at all times” – but who says that? An actor in London four hundred years ago or Hamlet in Elsinore one thousand two hundred years ago?
And how does he want to show Claudius (a high-ranking lowlife) his true face? What kind of mirror does he put under his nose? Hecuba! - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides...
This is the goal of classical education, which included (until 1917) Latin and Greek. Dead languages ​​carried living culture.
Shakespeare (through the mouth of Hamlet) says: “The purpose of the theater is to show the age its unvarnished appearance, its real face.”
Show the century? – What if the age doesn’t understand? What if you are blind? What if he looks, but doesn’t understand that he sees himself? They won't listen! they see and don’t know! Covered with bribes of tow(Derzhavin).
Show baseness its true colors? But baseness refuses to recognize itself. Moreover, in ceremonial portraits she is depicted as the Greatest Valor.
...And every century of history - his unvarnished appearance. When we stage Hamlet, we must, therefore, show the 21st century, and not the 17th century (Shakespeare’s) and not the 9th century (Hamlet’s). The theater is not a museum; costumes are not important. Boyars in fur coats? No, they are in armored Mercedes. And Hamlet shows Claudius his unvarnished appearance, not Hecuba and not Baptista. He uses ancient texts like an X-ray machine, like a laser - it burns right through.
And X-rays already existed then (and always).
KING. I wish you nothing but the best. You wouldn't doubt it if you saw our thoughts.
HAMLET. I see a cherub who sees them.
Tom Sawyer does not study the Bible for the sake of Faith (he believes in dead cats, in ghosts). This provincial boy in wild slaveholding America thinks in terms of chivalric times. He has stories of dukes and kings on his lips...
Benvenuto Cellini, Henry of Navarre, Duke of Northumberland, Guilford Dudley, Louis XVI, Casanova, Robin Hood, Captain Kidd - ask the twelve-year-old boy next door: which of them does he know (and not only by name, but life events, exploits, famous phrases). And Tom Sawyer, in his historical and geographical wilderness, knows them all: some are examples to follow, others are objects of contempt. But they are all guidelines.
People do not always need a common language to understand each other. Yum-yum - clear without translation. What about emotional experiences? A painful choice: what to do? The basis for understanding is a common book, common heroes.
Huck understands Tom as they discuss what to eat and where to run. But the liberation of the Negro Jim... Tom uses the experience of dukes and kings, but Ge doesn’t understand what is happening and why complicate things.
Tom, having read a lot of nonsense, what are you doing? He frees a slave, a black man. Moreover, in a country where it was considered a shame, not a feat. Tom is aware of his crime, but does it. What is pushing him?
Of course, Tom Sawyer plays. But what he plays - that’s what’s infinitely important. Free the prisoner!
The moral law is within us, not outside. Book concepts about honor and nobility (concepts read, learned from books) were stronger and more important for Tom than those among whom he grew up. He acts like Don Quixote, endlessly complicates the simplest situations, trying himself on great models, obeying not profit or customs, but the movements of the soul. Crazy. Nearby (on the bookshelf) is another madman. Hamlet tries on Hecuba, who died thousands of years ago. Here is the connection of times: Hecuba (1200 BC) - Hamlet (9th century) - Shakespeare (1600) - and we, holding our breath in the 21st century - thirty-three centuries!
For understanding, general concepts are needed - that is, general book. People die, but she remains. She is a carrier of concepts.
The Bible worked. But now many people do not have a common book. What is it today? Pushkin? In Russia, it exists only as a name, as a school name “there is a green oak near the Lukomorye” - that is, as eniki-beniki.
To understand, you need not just a common (formally) language, but also the same understanding of common words.
These notes (including those on power, theater and time) stand, as if on the foundation, on the texts of Pushkin, Shakespeare... And there is hope that the reader knows these texts (that is, the fate of the heroes), and the fate of the authors, and the fate of the texts , and why the Politburo was written with a big one, and God - with a small one.

We are lost, what should we do?
The demon leads us into the field, apparently
And it circles around...
...Even if not the foundation, but the texts of the great ones stick out like landmarks - from the snow, from the swamp, into the darkness, into the storm, into the fog - and guide you.
Why a stupid book about old plays that everyone knows, about performances that don’t exist?
Why have Hamlet been staged in Australia, Germany, Russia, France, Japan (this is in alphabetical order) for more than four hundred years? An old English play about a prince, who for some reason was also Danish. Why has the whole world been staging “The Cherry Orchard” for more than a hundred years?
We look at old plays like in a mirror - we see ourselves and our age.

Part I
Tender soul

Dedicated to two geniuses of the Russian theater
In memory of Anatoly Efros, who staged The Cherry Orchard at Taganka in 1975
In memory of Vladimir Vysotsky, who played Lopakhin
FIRS. They knew the way back then.
RANEVSKAYA. Where is this method now?
FIRS. Forgot. Nobody remembers.
Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard

Characters

RANEVSKAYA LYUBOV ANDREEVNA, landowner.
ANYA, her daughter, 17 years old.
VARYA, her adopted daughter, 24 years old.
GAEV LEONID ANDREEVICH, brother of Ranevskaya.
LOPAKHIN ERMOLAY ALEXEEVICH, merchant.
TROFIMOV PETER SERGEEVICH, student.
SIMEONOV-PISHCHIK BORIS BORISOVICH, landowner.
CHARLOTTE IVANOVNA, governess.
EPIKHODOV SEMEN PANTELEEVICH, clerk.
DUNYASHA, maid.
FIRS, footman, old man 87 years old.
YASHA, young footman.

Size matters

Theatrical liberties

In addition to the huge space, which no one noticed, the Cherry Orchard has two secrets. They haven't been solved yet.
...For those who have forgotten the plot. First year of the twentieth century. The noblewoman Ranevskaya returns from Paris to her estate. Her brother and her two daughters, Anya and Varya (adopted), live here. The entire estate is being sold at auction for debts. A family friend, the merchant Lopakhin, seemed to be trying to teach the owners how to get out of debt, but they did not listen to him. Then Lopakhin, unexpectedly for everyone, bought it himself. And Petya Trofimov is a thirty-year-old eternal student, beggar, homeless, Anin’s boyfriend. Petya considers it his duty to cut the truth straight into everyone’s eyes. He asserts himself so much... The cherry orchard is sold, everyone is leaving in all directions; Finally they kill the elderly Firs. Not with baseball bats, of course, but with nails; they board up doors and shutters; crammed into an empty house, he will simply die of hunger.
What are the secrets in the old play? Over a hundred years, thousands of theaters staged it; everything has long been dismantled to pieces.
And yet there are secrets! – have no doubt, reader, evidence will be presented.
Secrets!.. What are real secrets? For example, was Ranevskaya Lopakhin’s mistress? Or how old is she?..
Such life truth(which is discussed by gossip girls on benches) is entirely in the hands of the director and actors. In scientific terms it is called interpretation. But most often it is rudeness, greasiness, vulgarity, antics, or that simplicity that is worse than theft.
Here the landowner Ranevskaya was left alone with the eternal student.
RANEVSKAYA. I can scream now... I can do something stupid. Save me, Petya.
She prays for emotional sympathy, for consolation. But without changing a word - only with facial expressions, intonation, body movements - it is easy to show that she is asking to quench her lust. It is enough for the actress to lift her skirt or simply pull Petya towards her.
Theater is a rough, old, public art, in Russian it is a disgrace.
Adventures of the body are much more spectacular than mental work, and they are a million times easier to play.

* * *
How old is the heroine? The play doesn’t say, but usually Ranevskaya is played “from fifty.” It happens that the role is played by a famous actress in her seventies (she saw Stanislavsky as a child!). The Grand Old Woman is led onto the stage arm in arm. The audience greets the living (half-living) legend with applause.
The famous Lithuanian director Nyakrosius gave this role to Maksakova. Her Ranevskaya is approaching sixty (in the West this is what women over eighty look like). But Nyakrosius came up with not only an age for Ranevskaya, but also a diagnosis.
She can barely walk, barely speak, and most importantly, she doesn’t remember anything. And the viewer immediately understands: aha! Russian lady Ranevskaya suffered a stroke in Paris (in our opinion, a stroke). The ingenious find brilliantly justifies many of the lines in the first act.
LOPAKHIN. Lyubov Andreevna lived abroad for five years. Will she recognize me?
Strange. Has Lopakhin really changed so much in five years? Why does he doubt whether he will “find out”? But if Ranevskaya has a stroke, then it’s understandable.
The first words of Anya and Ranevskaya were also justified.
ANYA. Do you, mom, remember which room this is?
RANEVSKAYA(joyfully, through tears) . Children's!
It's a stupid question. Ranevskaya was born and lived all her life in this house, grew up in this nursery, then her daughter Anya grew up here, then her son Grisha, who drowned at the age of seven.
But if Ranevskaya is mad, then the daughter’s question is justified, and the answer found with difficulty, with tears, and the patient’s joy that she was able to remember.
If only the play had ended here - bravo, Nyakrosius! But in ten minutes Gaev will speak about his sister with indecent frankness.
GAEV. She's vicious. This is felt in her slightest movement.
Sorry, in all the movements of Ranevskaya-Maksakova we see paralysis, not depravity.
Yes, of course, the director has the right to any interpretation. But you can't turn too sharply. The play, having lost its logic, collapses like a train derailed.
And it becomes uninteresting to watch. Nonsense is boring.
Peculiarities of interpretation may be related to age, gender, the orientation of the director, and even nationality.
The world-famous German director Peter Stein staged “Three Sisters” and was a resounding success. Muscovites watched with curiosity as the guard of the zemstvo council, Ferapont, brought papers to the master’s house (office) for signature. It’s winter, so the old man comes in wearing earflaps, a sheepskin coat, and felt boots. There is snow on my hat and shoulders. Foreign tourists are delighted - Russia! But the German does not know that the watchman cannot enter the master’s house in a hat and sheepskin coat, that the old man would be undressed and taken off his shoes at the distant approaches (in the hallway, in the servants’ room). He does not know that a Russian, an Orthodox Christian, automatically takes off his hat when entering a room, even if not to a master, but to a hut. But Stein wanted to show icy Russia (the eternal nightmare of Europe). If “Three Sisters” had been staged in a German circus, the snow-covered Ferapont would have ridden into the master’s office on a bear. In a rich circus - on a polar bear.
Chekhov is not a symbolist, not a decadent. It has subtext, but there are no substitutions.
When Varya says to Trofimov:
VARYA. Petya, here they are, your galoshes.(With tears.) And how dirty and old they are... -
There is, of course, a subtext: “I’m so tired of you! How unhappy I am!” But the substitutions are of the flirtatious type: “You can take your galoshes, and if you want, you can take me too- this is not the case. And it cannot be. And if they play like this (which is not excluded), then Varya’s image will be destroyed. And for what? – for the sake of a few teenagers cackling in the last row?
There is a limit to interpretations. You can’t argue against direct meanings, direct indications of the text. Here in “Three Sisters” Andrei’s wife worries:
NATASHA. It seems to me that Bobik is unwell. Bobik's nose is cold.
You can, of course, give her a lap dog named Bobik. But if the play clearly states that Bobik is the child of Andrei and Natasha, then:
a) Bobik is not a dog;
b) Natasha is not a man in disguise; not a transvestite.
...So how old is Ranevskaya? The play doesn't say, but the answer is simple. Chekhov wrote the role for Olga Knipper, his wife, and tailored it to her characteristics and talent. He knew all her habits, knew her as a woman and as an actress, and sewed her exactly to measure so that she would fit snugly. He finished the play in the fall of 1903. Olga Knipper was 35 years old. This means that Ranevskaya is the same; She got married early (at 18 she already gave birth to Anya, her daughter’s age is indicated as 17). She is, as her brother says, vicious. Lopakhin, waiting, is worried like a man.
Chekhov really wanted both the play and his wife to be a success. Adult children age their parents. The younger Anya looks, the better for Olga Knipper. The playwright struggled to assign roles by mail.
CHEKHOV – NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO
September 2, 1903. Yalta
I'll call the play a comedy. Olga will take the role of the mother, but I don’t presume to decide who will play the 17-year-old daughter, a girl, young and thin.
CHEKHOV to OLGA KNIPPER
October 14, 1903. Yalta
You will play Lyubov Andreevna. Anya should play definitely young actress.
CHEKHOV – NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO
November 2, 1903. Yalta
Anyone can play Anya, even a completely unknown actress, as long as she is young, looks like a girl, and speaks in a young, ringing voice.
It didn't work out. Stanislavsky gave Anya to his wife, Marya Petrovna, who was thirty-seven at that time. Stage Anya became two years older than her mother. And Chekhov insisted in subsequent letters: Anya doesn’t care who she is, as long as she’s young. The corset and makeup don't help. The voice and plasticity at thirty-seven are not the same as at seventeen.
Ranevskaya is pretty and exciting. Lopakhin hastily explains to her:
LOPAKHIN. You are still just as gorgeous. Your brother says about me that I’m a boor, I’m a fist, but that doesn’t really matter to me. I only wish that you would still believe me, that your amazing, touching eyes would look at me as before. Merciful God! My father was a serf to your grandfather and father, but you once did so much for me that I forgot everything and love you like my own... more than my own.
Such a passionate explanation, and even in the presence of her brother and servants. How would Lopakhin behave if they were alone? There was something between them. What does it mean “I forgot everything and love you more than my own”? “Forgot everything” sounds like “forgave everything.” What did he forgive? Serfdom? or treason? After all, she lived in Paris with her lover, everyone knows this, even Anya.
Ranevskaya is a young, passionate woman. And Lopakhin’s remark “will she recognize me?” – not her stroke, but his fear: how will she look at him? is there any hope for renewing the exciting relationship?
Or is he aiming to grab the estate?

Petya and the wolf

In The Cherry Orchard, we repeat, there are two mysteries that have not yet been solved.
First secret- Why did Petya Trofimov decisively and completely change his opinion about Lopakhin?
Here is their dialogue (in the second act):
LOPAKHIN. Let me ask you, how do you understand me?
TROFIMOV. I, Ermolai Alekseich, understand this: you are a rich man, you will soon be a millionaire. Just as in terms of metabolism you need a predatory beast that eats everything that gets in its way, so you are needed. (Everyone laughs.)
This is very rude. It looks like rudeness. And even in the presence of ladies. In the presence of Ranevskaya, whom Lopakhin idolizes. Moreover, this transition from “you” to “you” to demonstrate outright contempt. And he didn’t just call it a predator and a beast, but also added information about metabolism, tightening up the gastrointestinal tract.
A predatory beast - that is, a forest orderly. Okay, I didn’t say “worm” or “dung beetle,” which are also needed for metabolism.
And three months later (in the last act, in the finale):
TROFIMOV(Lopakhin) . You have thin, gentle fingers, like an artist, you have a thin, gentle soul...
This “you” is completely different, admiring.
Both times Trofimov is absolutely sincere. Petya is not a hypocrite, he speaks out directly and is proud of his directness.
One might suspect that he was flattering the millionaire for some purpose. But Petya doesn’t ask for money. Lopakhin, hearing about the gentle soul, immediately melted; offers money and even imposes. Petya refuses decisively and stubbornly.
LOPAKHIN. Take money from me for the trip. I'm offering you a loan because I can. Why rub your nose? I'm a man... simply. (Takes out wallet.)
TROFIMOV. Give me at least two hundred thousand, I won’t take it.
“Beast of Prey” is not a compliment, it’s very offensive and no one can like it. Even a banker, even a bandit. For brutality and predation are not considered positive qualities even now, much less a hundred years ago.
“Beast of Prey” completely excludes the “tender soul.”
Has Lopakhin changed? No, we don't see that. His character does not change at all from beginning to end.
This means that Petya’s view has changed. How radical - 180 degrees!
And Chekhov? Maybe the author changed his mind about the character? Did the heroes follow the author?
Chekhov's view of Lopakhin cannot change. For Lopakhin exists in Chekhov’s brain. That is, Chekhov knows everything about him. Knows from the very beginning. Knows before it starts.
And Petya gets to know Lopakhin gradually, but along the way he can get lost and be deceived.
And we?
A clear example of the difference between knowledge of the author, the viewer and the character:
Othello doesn't know that Iago is a scoundrel and a slanderer. Othello will understand this with horror only in the finale, when it is too late (he has already strangled his wife). If he had known from the very beginning, there would have been no trust, no betrayal, there would have been no play.
Shakespeare knows about Iago everything before the beginning.
The viewer recognizes the essence of Iago is very quickly - as quickly as Shakespeare wants.
The author needs a reaction from both the characters and the audience: oh, that’s it! Oh, that's what he is! It happens that they deliberately draw a terrible villain, and in the end - lo and behold - he is everyone’s benefactor.

* * *
Lopakhin is a merchant, nouveau riche (a rich man in the first generation). He kept pretending to be a family friend, throwing things up little by little...
RANEVSKAYA. Ermolai Alekseich, lend me more!
LOPAKHIN. I'm listening.
...and then - Petya was right - the predator took over, seized the moment and grabbed it; everyone was dumbfounded.
RANEVSKAYA. Who bought it?
LOPAKHIN. I bought! Hey musicians, play, I want to listen to you! Come and watch how Ermolai Lopakhin takes an ax to the cherry orchard and how the trees fall to the ground! We will set up dachas, and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see a new life here! Music, play clearly! Let everything be as I wish! I can pay for everything! My cherry orchard! My!
Correctly, Gaev says disgustingly about Lopakhin: “Boor.” (It’s strange that Efros, for the role of a boorish merchant, took the Poet - Vysotsky - a rude man with the subtlest, ringing soul.)
Lopakhin innocently admits:
LOPAKHIN(to the maid Dunyasha) . I read the book and didn’t understand anything. I read and fell asleep...(to Gaev and Ranevskaya) . My dad was a man, an idiot, he didn’t understand anything... In essence, I’m the same idiot and idiot. I didn't learn anything.
Often a rich man speaks about books with contempt and contempt. He flaunts: “I read it and didn’t understand” - it sounds like this: they say, it’s all nonsense.
Lopakhin is a predator! At first, of course, he pretended to care, empathized, and then he revealed himself - he grabbed it and swaggered in a frenzy: come, they say, to see how I grab an ax through the cherry orchard.
Subtle soul? And Varya (Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter)? He was a generally recognized groom, he showed hope and - he deceived, did not marry, and before that, it is possible that he took advantage - there she is, crying... Subtle soul? No - an animal, a predator, a male.
Maybe there was something good in him, but then instinct, the greed, took over. Look how he yells: “My cherry orchard! My!"

Don’t despair, my dears, there is a way out!


Dedicated to two geniuses of the Russian theater.
In memory Anatoly Efros,
who staged “The Cherry Orchard” at Taganka in 1975.
In memory Vladimir Vysotsky, who played Lopakhin.

FIRS. They knew the way back then.
RANEVSKAYA. Where is this method now?
FIRS. Forgot. Nobody remembers.

Characters

Ranevskaya Lyubov Andreevna, landowner.
Anya, her daughter, 17 years old.
Varya, her adopted daughter, 24 years old.
Gaev Leonid Andreevich, brother of Ranevskaya.
Lopakhin Ermolai Alekseevich, merchant.
Trofimov Petr Sergeevich, student.
Simeonov-Pishchik, landowner.
Charlotte Ivanovna, governess.
Epikhodov Semyon, clerk.
Dunyasha, maid.
Firs, footman, old man 87 years old.
Yasha, a young footman.


SIZE HAS THE MEANING


“The Cherry Orchard” is an old play, it is 102 years old. And no one knows what it’s about.
Some remember that the estate of the noblewoman Ranevskaya is being sold for debts, and the merchant Lopakhin teaches how to get out - you need to cut the land into plots and rent them out for dachas.
How big is the estate?
I ask my friends, I ask the actors playing “The Cherry Orchard” and the directors who staged the play. There is only one answer - “I don’t know.”
- It’s clear that you don’t know. But guess what.
The person asked grunts, hums, then hesitantly:
- Two hectares, perhaps?
- No. Ranevskaya's estate is more than one thousand one hundred hectares.
- Can't be! Where did you get this from?

- It's written in the play. LOPAKHIN.

If the cherry orchard and the land along the river are divided into dacha plots and rented out as dachas, then you will have at least 25 thousand a year in income. You will take from summer residents at least 25 rubles a year per tithe. I guarantee you anything - you won’t have a single free scrap left until the fall, everything will be sorted out.
This means a thousand dessiatines. And a tithe is 1.1 hectares.
In addition to the garden and “land along the river,” they also have hundreds of acres of forest.
It would seem that what a problem if the directors are mistaken a thousand times.
But this is not just arithmetic. There is a transition from quantity to quality.
It's such a vast space that you can't see the edge. More precisely: everything you see around you is yours. Everything is to the horizon.
If you have a thousand hectares, you see Russia. If you have several acres, you see a fence.
A poor man sees a fence ten meters from his house. The rich man is a hundred meters from his mansion. From the second floor of his mansion, he sees many fences.
Director R., who not only staged “The Cherry Orchard,” but also wrote a book about this play, said: “Two hectares.” Director P. (wonderful, subtle) said: “One and a half.”
A thousand hectares is a different feeling of life. This is your boundless space, boundless expanse. What to compare with? The poor man has a shower, the rich man has a jacuzzi. And there is the open sea, the ocean. Does it matter how many square kilometers there are? The important thing is that the shores are not visible.
...Why don’t Ranevskaya and her brother act according to such a simple, such a profitable plan of Lopakhin? Why don't they agree? Who plays - that they are out of laziness, who - out of stupidity, because of their inability (they say, the nobles are an obsolete class) to live in the real world, and not in their fantasies.
After all, no one thought what would happen next. If you hand over a thousand plots, a thousand dachas will appear. Summer residents are family people. Four to five thousand people will settle next to you. From Saturday to Sunday, families of friends will come to them for an overnight stay. In total, this means that under your nose there will be ten to twelve thousand people - songs, drunken screams, crying children, squeals of bathing girls - hell.

CHEKHOV - NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

August 22, 1903. Yalta
No special decorations are required. Only in the second act will you give me a real green field and road and a distance unusual for the stage.

You walk - fields, meadows, copses - endless open spaces! The soul is filled with high feelings. Anyone who has walked or traveled around Russia knows this delight. But this is if the view opens up for kilometers.
If you walk between high fences (with barbed wire on top), then the feelings are low: frustration, anger. Fences are higher, feelings are lower.

LOPAKHIN. Lord, you gave us huge forests, vast fields, the deepest horizons, and living here, we ourselves should truly be giants...

It didn't come true.

CHEKHOV TO SUVORINA

August 28, 1891. Bogimovo
I looked at several estates. There are small ones, but there are no large ones that would be suitable for you. There are small ones - one and a half, three and five thousand.

For fifteen hundred - 40 acres, a huge pond and a house with a park.

In our country, 15 acres is considered a large plot. For Chekhov, 44 hectares is small. Pay attention to the prices: 4400 acres, a pond, a house, a park - for one and a half thousand rubles. ...Below us is still Central Russian elevation.

- It's written in the play. But how vile she has become. Until now, there were only gentlemen and peasants in the village, and

Now there are more summer residents. All cities, even the smallest ones, are now surrounded by dachas. And we can say that in twenty years the summer resident will multiply to an extraordinary extent.
It came true.
The wall is high, and behind it is a patch of 6-12 acres, a crow settlement, cramped conditions. Previously, there was a plank house on such a piece of land and there was comparatively a lot of space for radishes. And now on such a piece of land stands a three-story concrete monster.
Instead of windows there are loopholes; You can only walk sideways between the house and the fence.
Landscapes have been destroyed.

Yesterday you were driving - on both sides of the highway there were endless fields, forests, meadows, hills.

Except for the vast space that no one noticed, There are two secrets in The Cherry Orchard. They haven't been solved yet.
...For those who have forgotten the plot. First year of the twentieth century. The noblewoman Ranevskaya returns from Paris to her estate. Her brother and her two daughters, Anya and Varya (adopted), live here. The entire estate is being sold at auction for debts. A family friend, the merchant Lopakhin, seemed to be trying to teach the owners how to get out of debt, but they did not listen to him. Then Lopakhin, unexpectedly for everyone, bought it himself. And Petya Trofimov is a 30-year-old eternal student, beggar, homeless, Anin’s boyfriend.
Petya considers it his duty to cut the truth straight into everyone’s eyes. He asserts himself so much... The cherry orchard is sold, everyone is leaving in all directions; Finally they kill the elderly Firs. Not with baseball bats, of course, but with nails;
they board up doors and shutters; crammed into an empty house, he will simply die of hunger.
What are the secrets in the old play? Over 100 years, thousands of theaters have staged it; everything has long been dismantled to pieces.
And yet there are secrets! - have no doubt, reader, evidence will be presented. life truth Secrets!.. What are real secrets? For example, was Ranevskaya Lopakhin’s mistress? Or how old is she?.. Such
(which is discussed by gossip girls on benches) is entirely in the hands of the director and actors. Scientifically called

interpretation. But most often it is rudeness, greasiness, vulgarity, antics, or that simplicity that is worse than theft.

Here the landowner Ranevskaya was left alone with the eternal student.
RANEVSKAYA.
I can scream now... I can do something stupid. Save me, Petya.

* * *
She prays for emotional sympathy, for consolation. But without changing a word - only facial expressions, intonation, body movements - it is easy to show that she is asking to quench her lust. It is enough for the actress to lift her skirt or simply pull Petya towards her.
Theater is a rough, old, street art, in Russian it is a disgrace.
She can barely walk, barely speak, and most importantly, she doesn’t remember anything. And the viewer immediately understands: aha! Russian lady Ranevskaya suffered a stroke in Paris (in our opinion - a stroke). The ingenious find brilliantly justifies many of the lines in the first act.

- It's written in the play. Lyubov Andreevna lived abroad for five years. Will she recognize me?

Strange. Has Lopakhin really changed so much in 5 years? Why does he doubt whether he will “find out”? But if Ranevskaya has a stroke, then it’s understandable.
The first words of Anya and Ranevskaya were also justified.

ANYA. Do you, mom, remember which room this is?
RANEVSKAYA (joyfully, through tears). Children's!

It's a stupid question. Ranevskaya was born and lived all her life in this house, grew up in this nursery, then her daughter Anya grew up here, then her son Grisha, who drowned at the age of 7.
But if Ranevskaya is mad, then the daughter’s question is justified, and the answer found with difficulty, with tears, and the patient’s joy that she was able to remember.
If only the play had ended here - bravo, Nyakrosius! But in 10 minutes Gaev will talk about his sister with indecent frankness.

GAEV. She's vicious. You can feel it in her slightest movement.

Sorry, in all of Ranevskaya-Maksakova’s movements we see paralysis, not depravity.
Yes, of course, the director has the right to any interpretation. But you can't turn too sharply. The play, having lost its logic, collapses like a train derailed.
And it becomes uninteresting to watch. Nonsense is boring.
Peculiarities of interpretation may be related to age, gender, the orientation of the director, and even nationality.
The world-famous German director Peter Stein staged “Three Sisters” and was a resounding success. Muscovites watched with curiosity as the guard of the zemstvo council, Ferapont, brought papers to the master’s house (office) for signature. It’s winter, so the old man comes in wearing earflaps, a sheepskin coat, and felt boots.
There is snow on my hat and shoulders. Foreign tourists are delighted - Russia! But the German does not know that the watchman cannot enter the master’s house in a hat and sheepskin coat, that the old man would be undressed and taken off his shoes at the distant approaches (in the hallway, in the servants’ room). He does not know that a Russian, an Orthodox Christian, automatically takes off his hat when entering a room, even if not to a master, but to a hut. But Stein wanted to show icy Russia (the eternal nightmare of Europe). If “Three Sisters” had been staged in a German circus, the snow-covered Ferapont would have ridden into the master’s office on a bear. In a rich circus - on a polar bear.
Chekhov is not a symbolist, not a decadent. It has subtext, but there are no substitutions. When Varya says to Trofimov:- the subtext, of course, is: “I’m so tired of you! How unhappy I am!” But the substitutions are of the flirtatious type: “You can take your galoshes, and if you want, you can take me too”- this is not the case. And it cannot be. And if they play like this (which is not excluded), then Varya’s image will be destroyed. And for what? - for the sake of a few teenagers cackling in the last row?
There is a limit to interpretations. You can’t argue against the direct meanings, direct indications of the text. Here in “Three Sisters” Andrei’s wife worries:

NATASHA. It seems to me that Bobik is unwell. Bobik's nose is cold.

You can, of course, give her a lap dog named Bobik. But if the play clearly states that Bobik is the child of Andrei and Natasha, then:
a) Bobik is not a dog;
b) Natasha is not a man in disguise; not a transvestite.
...So how old is Ranevskaya? The play doesn't say, but the answer is simple.
Chekhov wrote the role for Olga Knipper, his wife, and tailored it to her characteristics and talent. He knew all her habits, knew her as a woman and as an actress, and sewed her exactly to measure so that she would fit snugly. He finished the play in the fall of 1903. Olga Knipper was 35 years old. This means that Ranevskaya is the same; She got married early (at 18 she already gave birth to Anya, her daughter’s age is indicated as 17). She is, as her brother says, vicious. Lopakhin, waiting, is worried like a man.

CHEKHOV - NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

Chekhov really wanted both the play and his wife to be a success. Adult children age their parents. The younger Anya looks, the better for Olga Knipper. The playwright struggled to assign roles by mail.
September 2, 1903. Yalta

I'll call the play a comedy. Olga will take the role of the mother, but I don’t presume to decide who will play the 17-year-old daughter, a girl, young and thin.

CHEKHOV - OLGA KNIPPER
You will play Lyubov Andreevna. Anya should play October 14, 1903. Yalta certainly young

actress.

CHEKHOV - NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

("The Cherry Orchard", A.P. Chekhov)
Active Lopakhins are crowding out sluggish gentlemen who don't care
are not capable, but just sit and rant:
"Dear closet"...

V. Tokarev "My Chekhov"
“Like this, for centuries in a row, we are all in love at random...”

B. Akhmadullina
A.P. Chekhov clearly sympathized with this character. “After all, Lopakhin’s role is central.

A.P. Chekhov's favorite heroes, like Astrov, in addition to their main work, always plant something and appreciate beauty. So our “businessman” is like this: “I sowed a thousand acres of poppy seeds in the spring and now I have earned forty thousand net. And when my poppy bloomed, what a picture it was!” he tells Trofimov.

First of all, Lopakhin is a hard worker: “You know, I get up at five o’clock in the morning, I work from morning to evening, well, I always have my own and other people’s money, and I see what kind of people are around me. You just have to start doing something to understand how few honest, decent people there are.”
How relevant it sounds, but almost 110 years have passed!

However, he earned everything he has through honest labor, enormous capacity for work, and a bright, practical mind. After all, this peasant son could not receive any education. Apparently, this circumstance gives grounds for the empty slacker Gaev to treat him condescendingly: “Leonid Andreich says about me that I’m a boor, I’m a kulak, but that doesn’t really matter to me.” Of course, as a smart person, he simply ignores the arrogant tone of the brother of the woman for whom he abandoned his affairs and came to the rescue.

Lopakhin. Now, at five o'clock in the morning, I have to go to Kharkov. Such a shame! I wanted to look at you, talk... You are still just as gorgeous...
I only wish that you would still believe me, that your amazing, touching eyes would look at me as before. I... love you like my own... more than my own.

Isn't it true that this man, not prone to sentimentality, speaks like a lover.

And taking all the problems of this family to heart, he gives reasonable advice on how to avoid complete ruin: “You already know, your cherry orchard is being sold for debts, an auction is scheduled for August twenty-second, but don’t worry, my dear, sleep peacefully.” , there is a way out... Here is my project. Attention please! Your estate is located only twenty miles from the city, there is a railroad nearby, and if the cherry orchard and the land along the river are divided into dacha plots and then rented out as dachas, then you will have at least twenty-five thousand a year in income.
You will take from the summer residents the least amount of twenty-five rubles a year per tithe, and if you announce it now, then I guarantee anything, you will not have a single free scrap left until the fall, everything will be taken away. In a word, congratulations, you are saved.”

But the gentlemen are not ready to listen to a reasonable, business person. They tell him that this is nonsense, that he does not understand anything, that “if there is anything interesting, even wonderful, in the entire province, it is only our cherry orchard.”
Of course, the cherry orchard is beautiful, but they themselves “ate it.”

Meanwhile, the insightful entrepreneur insists on his “vulgar” dacha project: “Until now, there were only gentlemen and peasants in the village, but now there are also dacha residents. All cities, even the smallest ones, are now surrounded by dachas. And we can say that in twenty years the summer resident will multiply to an extraordinary extent. Now he only drinks tea on the balcony, but it may happen that on his one tithe he will start farming, and then your cherry orchard will become happy, rich, luxurious...”

And how he turned out to be right, we can confirm from the 21st century! True, about happiness, wealth and luxury, it’s like saying; but on their six hundred square meters the people work selflessly.

Then, for three months, Lopakhin unsuccessfully tries to help Lyubov Andreevna avoid disaster. And, in the end, in order not to lose to a competitor, he has to buy the estate himself.
Naturally, he celebrates the victory:
“My God, my God, my cherry orchard! Tell me that I’m drunk, out of my mind, that I’m imagining all this... (Stamps his feet.) Don’t laugh at me! If only my father and grandfather would get up from their graves and look at the whole incident, like their Ermolai, the beaten, illiterate Ermolai, who ran barefoot in the winter, how this same Ermolai bought an estate, the most beautiful of which there is nothing in the world. I bought an estate where my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even allowed into the kitchen.”

He is in ecstasy:
“Come everyone and watch how Yermolai Lopakhin takes an ax to the cherry orchard and how the trees fall to the ground! We will set up dachas, and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see a new life here... Music, play!”
But, looking at the bitterly crying Lyubov Andreevna, he immediately stops short and grieves her with grief: “My poor, good one, you can’t bring her back now. (With tears.) Oh, if only all this would pass, if only our awkward, unhappy life would somehow change.”

And he, the winner, why does he talk about his awkward life, what is he missing? Maybe love, family happiness? Lyubov Andreevna still wants to marry him to her adopted daughter Varya. And everyone teases the girl Madame Lopakhina. What's the matter?

Varya. Mommy, I can’t propose to him myself. For two years now, everyone has been telling me about him, everyone is talking, but he is either silent or joking. I understand. He is getting rich, busy with business, he has no time for me.

Here it is: “he has no time for me.” After all, for the sake of Ranevskaya, he gave up all his affairs, it is she who is ready to “loan” money without an account, with her he finds words of love and tenderness. And he understands that his feeling is completely hopeless. That she loves and will always love another. That she would again rush to this insignificant person, leaving her house and her girls. That it is probably quite reasonable to marry a serious, thrifty and loving girl, her daughter.

And he, a “soft man,” (according to the author’s plan) does not know how to refuse the woman he loves:
“You know this very well, Ermolai Alekseich; I dreamed... of marrying her to you, and from everything it was clear that you were getting married... She loves you, you like her, and I don’t know, I don’t know why you are definitely avoiding each other. I don't understand!
Lopakhin. I don’t understand it myself either, I must admit. Everything is somehow strange... If there is still time, then at least I’m ready now... Let’s finish it right away and that’s it, and without you, I feel I won’t make an offer.

And yet he doesn’t. It just can't. Because he doesn't love. Because the image of a beautiful young lady settled in his soul from early youth. And perhaps forever. Here is their first meeting:
“I remember when I was a boy of about fifteen, my late father - he was selling in a shop here in the village back then - hit me in the face with his fist, blood started coming out of my nose... We then came together to the yard for some reason, and he was drunk . Lyubov Andreevna, as I remember now, still young, so thin, led me to the washstand, in this very room, in the nursery. “Don’t cry, he says, little man, he’ll heal before the wedding...”

There is no wedding in the play. But people do not live by love alone - they are saved by work.
And Lopakhin, who had temporarily taken a break from work, already rushed into his usual rut: “I kept hanging around with you, I was tired of doing nothing. I can’t live without work, I don’t know what to do with my hands; hanging out somehow strangely, like strangers.”

Saying goodbye to the “eternal student”, unsuccessfully offering him money and listening to his pompous speeches, Lopakhin seems to sum it up:

“We bully each other, but life just goes by. When I work for a long time, tirelessly, then my thoughts are lighter, and it seems as if I also know why I exist. And how many people, brother, are there in Russia who exist for no one knows why.”

God, how right he is!

Alexander Minkin

Tender soul

The purpose of the theater at all times has been and will be:

hold a mirror up to nature,

show valor its true colors

and its truth is baseness,

and every century of history -

his unvarnished appearance.

Shakespeare. Hamlet

OPHELIA. It's short, my prince.

HAMLET. Like a woman's love.

Shakespeare. Hamlet

What was the first thing Papa Carlo bought for his wooden son? More precisely: not the first, but the only one (for Papa Carlo did not buy Pinocchio anything else). A book!

The poor old fool sold his only jacket for this gift. He acted like a Man. Because a person became a real person only when the book became most important.

Why did Pinocchio sell his only book? Just to go to the theater once.

Stick your curious nose into a dusty piece of old canvas, into a dusty old play - a stunningly interesting world opens up there... Theatre.

“The purpose of theater at all times” – but who says that? An actor in London four hundred years ago or Hamlet in Elsinore one thousand two hundred years ago?

And how does he want to show Claudius (a high-ranking lowlife) his true face? What kind of mirror does he put under his nose? Hecuba! - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides...

This is the goal of classical education, which included (until 1917) Latin and Greek. Dead languages ​​carried living culture.

Shakespeare (through the mouth of Hamlet) says: “The purpose of the theater is to show the age its unvarnished appearance, its real face.”

Show the century? – What if the age doesn’t understand? What if you are blind? What if he looks, but doesn’t understand that he sees himself? They won't listen! they see and don’t know! Covered with bribes of tow(Derzhavin).

Show baseness its true colors? But baseness refuses to recognize itself. Moreover, in ceremonial portraits she is depicted as the Greatest Valor.

...And every century of history - his unvarnished appearance. When we stage Hamlet, we must, therefore, show the 21st century, and not the 17th century (Shakespeare’s) and not the 9th century (Hamlet’s). The theater is not a museum; costumes are not important. Boyars in fur coats? No, they are in armored Mercedes. And Hamlet shows Claudius his unvarnished appearance, not Hecuba and not Baptista. He uses ancient texts like an X-ray machine, like a laser - it burns right through.

And X-rays already existed then (and always).

KING. I wish you nothing but the best. You wouldn't doubt it if you saw our thoughts.

HAMLET. I see a cherub who sees them.

Tom Sawyer does not study the Bible for the sake of Faith (he believes in dead cats, in ghosts). This provincial boy in wild slaveholding America thinks in terms of chivalric times. He has stories of dukes and kings on his lips...

Benvenuto Cellini, Henry of Navarre, Duke of Northumberland, Guilford Dudley, Louis XVI, Casanova, Robin Hood, Captain Kidd - ask the twelve-year-old boy next door: which of them does he know (and not only by name, but life events, exploits, famous phrases). And Tom Sawyer, in his historical and geographical wilderness, knows them all: some are examples to follow, others are objects of contempt. But they are all guidelines.

People do not always need a common language to understand each other. Yum-yum - clear without translation. What about emotional experiences? A painful choice: what to do? The basis for understanding is a common book, common heroes.

Huck understands Tom as they discuss what to eat and where to run. But the liberation of the Negro Jim... Tom uses the experience of dukes and kings, but Ge doesn’t understand what is happening and why complicate things.

Tom, having read a lot of nonsense, what are you doing? He frees a slave, a black man. Moreover, in a country where it was considered a shame, not a feat. Tom is aware of his crime, but does it. What is pushing him?

Of course, Tom Sawyer plays. But what he plays - that’s what’s infinitely important. Free the prisoner!

The moral law is within us, not outside. Book concepts about honor and nobility (concepts read, learned from books) were stronger and more important for Tom than those among whom he grew up. He acts like Don Quixote, endlessly complicates the simplest situations, trying himself on great models, obeying not profit or customs, but the movements of the soul. Crazy. Nearby (on the bookshelf) is another madman. Hamlet tries on Hecuba, who died thousands of years ago. Here is the connection of times: Hecuba (1200 BC) - Hamlet (9th century) - Shakespeare (1600) - and we, holding our breath in the 21st century - thirty-three centuries!

For understanding, general concepts are needed - that is, general book. People die, but she remains. She is a carrier of concepts.

The Bible worked. But now many people do not have a common book. What is it today? Pushkin? In Russia, it exists only as a name, as a school name “there is a green oak near the Lukomorye” - that is, as eniki-beniki.

To understand, you need not just a common (formally) language, but also the same understanding of common words.

These notes (including those on power, theater and time) stand, as if on the foundation, on the texts of Pushkin, Shakespeare... And there is hope that the reader knows these texts (that is, the fate of the heroes), and the fate of the authors, and the fate of the texts , and why the Politburo was written with a big one, and God - with a small one.

We are lost, what should we do?

The demon leads us into the field, apparently

And it circles around...

...Even if not the foundation, but the texts of the great ones stick out like landmarks - from the snow, from the swamp, into the darkness, into the storm, into the fog - and guide you.

Why a stupid book about old plays that everyone knows, about performances that don’t exist?

Why have Hamlet been staged in Australia, Germany, Russia, France, Japan (this is in alphabetical order) for more than four hundred years? An old English play about a prince, who for some reason was also Danish. Why has the whole world been staging “The Cherry Orchard” for more than a hundred years?

We look at old plays like in a mirror - we see ourselves and our age.

Tender soul

Dedicated to two geniuses of the Russian theater

In memory of Anatoly Efros, who staged The Cherry Orchard at Taganka in 1975

In memory of Vladimir Vysotsky, who played Lopakhin

FIRS. They knew the way back then.

RANEVSKAYA. Where is this method now?

FIRS. Forgot. Nobody remembers.

Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard

Characters

RANEVSKAYA LYUBOV ANDREEVNA, landowner.

ANYA, her daughter, 17 years old.

VARYA, her adopted daughter, 24 years old.

GAEV LEONID ANDREEVICH, brother of Ranevskaya.

LOPAKHIN ERMOLAY ALEXEEVICH, merchant.

TROFIMOV PETER SERGEEVICH, student.

SIMEONOV-PISHCHIK BORIS BORISOVICH, landowner.

CHARLOTTE IVANOVNA, governess.

EPIKHODOV SEMEN PANTELEEVICH, clerk.

DUNYASHA, maid.

FIRS, footman, old man 87 years old.

YASHA, young footman.

Size matters

“The Cherry Orchard” is an old play, more than a hundred years old. And no one knows what it’s about.

Some remember that the estate of the noblewoman Ranevskaya is being sold for debts, and the merchant Lopakhin teaches how to get out - you need to cut the land into plots and rent them out for dachas.

How big is the estate? I ask my friends, I ask the actors playing “The Cherry Orchard” and the directors who staged the play. There is only one answer: “I don’t know.”

- It’s clear that you don’t know. But guess what.

The person asked grunts, hums, then hesitantly:

– Two hectares, perhaps?

- No. Ranevskaya's estate is more than one thousand one hundred hectares.

- Can't be! Where did you get this from?

- It's written in the play.

LOPAKHIN. If the cherry orchard and the land along the river are divided into dacha plots and then rented out as dachas, then you will have at least twenty-five thousand a year in income. You will take from summer residents the least twenty-five rubles a year per tithe. I guarantee you anything, you won’t have a single free scrap left until the fall, everything will be taken apart.

This means a thousand dessiatines. And a tithe is 1.1 hectares.

In addition to the garden and “land along the river,” they also have hundreds of acres of forest.

It would seem that what a problem if the directors are mistaken a thousand times. But this is not just arithmetic. There is a transition from quantity to quality.

It's such a vast space that you can't see the edge. More precisely: everything you see around you is yours. Everything is up to the horizon.

If you have a thousand hectares, you see Russia. If you have several acres, you see a fence.

A poor man sees a fence five meters from his shack. The rich man is a hundred meters from his mansion. From the second floor of his mansion, he sees many fences.

Director R., who not only staged “The Cherry Orchard,” but also wrote a book about this play, said: “Two hectares.” Director P. (wonderful, subtle) said: “One and a half.”

A thousand hectares is a different feeling of life. This is your boundless space, boundless expanse. What to compare with? The poor man has a shower, the rich man has a jacuzzi. And there is the open sea, the ocean. Does it matter how many square kilometers there are? The important thing is that the shores are not visible.

...Why don’t Ranevskaya and her brother act according to such a simple, such a profitable plan of Lopakhin? Why don't they agree? Who plays - that they are out of laziness, who - out of stupidity, because of their inability (they say, the nobles are an obsolete class) to live in the real world, and not in their fantasies.

But for them, endless space is a reality, and fences are a disgusting fantasy.

If the director does not see a huge estate, then the actors will not act, and the audience will not understand. Our usual landscape is the walls of houses, fences, billboards.

After all, no one thought what would happen next. If you hand over a thousand plots, a thousand dachas will appear. Summer residents are a family people. Four to five thousand people will settle next to you. From Saturday to Sunday, families of friends will come to them for an overnight stay. In total, this means that under your nose there will be ten to twelve thousand people - songs, drunken screams, crying children, squeals of bathing girls - hell.

CHEKHOV – NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

No special decorations are required. Only in the second act will you give me a real green field and road and a distance unusual for the stage.

You walk - fields, meadows, copses - endless open spaces! The soul is filled with high feelings. Anyone who has walked or traveled around Russia knows this delight. But this is only if the view opens up for kilometers.

If you walk between high fences (with barbed wire on top), then the feelings are low: frustration, anger. Fences are higher, feelings are lower.

L O P A KH I N. Lord, you gave us huge forests, vast fields, the deepest horizons, and living here, we ourselves should truly be giants...

It didn't come true.

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

I looked at several estates. There are small ones, but there are no large ones that would be suitable for you. There are small ones - one and a half, three and five thousand. For fifteen hundred - 40 acres, a huge pond and a house with a park.

In our country, 15 acres is considered a large plot. For Chekhov, 44 hectares is small. (Pay attention to the prices: 4400 acres, a pond, a house, a park - for one and a half thousand rubles.)

In our country, 15 acres is considered a large plot. For Chekhov, 44 hectares is small. Pay attention to the prices: 4400 acres, a pond, a house, a park - for one and a half thousand rubles. elevation. But how vile she has become.

LOPAKHIN. Until now, there were only gentlemen and peasants in the village, but now there are also summer residents. All cities, even the smallest ones, are now surrounded by dachas. And we can say that in twenty years the summer resident will multiply to an extraordinary extent.

The wall is high, and behind it is a patch of six to twelve acres, a crow settlement, cramped. Previously, there was a plank house on such a piece of land and there was comparatively a lot of space for radishes. And now on such a piece of land stands a three-story concrete monster. Instead of windows there are loopholes; You can only walk sideways between the house and the fence.

Landscapes have been destroyed. Yesterday you were driving - on both sides of the highway there were endless fields, forests, meadows, hills. Today, five-meter fences have shot up on both sides. It's like driving in a tunnel.

Five meters is the same as a hundred meters: the earth disappears. All you have left is the sky above the barbed wire.

Someone grabbed the land, and our Motherland disappeared. The look that shapes a personality more than a banner and anthem has disappeared.

Theatrical liberties

In addition to the huge space, which no one noticed, the Cherry Orchard has two secrets. They haven't been solved yet.

...For those who have forgotten the plot. First year of the twentieth century. The noblewoman Ranevskaya returns from Paris to her estate. Her brother and her two daughters, Anya and Varya (adopted), live here. The entire estate is being sold at auction for debts. A family friend, the merchant Lopakhin, seemed to be trying to teach the owners how to get out of debt, but they did not listen to him. Then Lopakhin, unexpectedly for everyone, bought it himself. And Petya Trofimov is a thirty-year-old eternal student, beggar, homeless, Anin’s boyfriend. Petya considers it his duty to cut the truth straight into everyone’s eyes. He asserts himself so much... The cherry orchard is sold, everyone is leaving in all directions; Finally they kill the elderly Firs. Not with baseball bats, of course, but with nails; they board up doors and shutters; crammed into an empty house, he will simply die of hunger.

What are the secrets in the old play? Over a hundred years, thousands of theaters staged it; everything has long been dismantled to pieces.

And yet there are secrets! – have no doubt, reader, evidence will be presented.

Secrets!.. What are real secrets? For example, was Ranevskaya Lopakhin’s mistress? Or how old is she?..

Such life truth(which is discussed by gossip girls on benches) is entirely in the hands of the director and actors. In scientific terms it is called interpretation. But most often it is rudeness, greasiness, vulgarity, antics, or that simplicity that is worse than theft.

Here the landowner Ranevskaya was left alone with the eternal student.

RANEVSKAYA. I can scream now... I can do something stupid. Save me, Petya.

She prays for emotional sympathy, for consolation. But without changing a word - only with facial expressions, intonation, body movements - it is easy to show that she is asking to quench her lust. It is enough for the actress to lift her skirt or simply pull Petya towards her.

Theater is a rough, old, public art, in Russian it is a disgrace.

Adventures of the body are much more spectacular than mental work, and they are a million times easier to play.

How old is the heroine? The play doesn’t say, but usually Ranevskaya is played “from fifty.” It happens that the role is played by a famous actress in her seventies (she saw Stanislavsky as a child!). The Grand Old Woman is led onto the stage arm in arm. The audience greets the living (half-living) legend with applause.

The famous Lithuanian director Nyakrosius gave this role to Maksakova. Her Ranevskaya is approaching sixty (in the West this is what women over eighty look like). But Nyakrosius came up with not only an age for Ranevskaya, but also a diagnosis.

She can barely walk, barely speak, and most importantly, she doesn’t remember anything. And the viewer immediately understands: aha! Russian lady Ranevskaya suffered a stroke in Paris (in our opinion, a stroke). The ingenious find brilliantly justifies many of the lines in the first act.

LOPAKHIN. Lyubov Andreevna lived abroad for five years. Will she recognize me?

Strange. Has Lopakhin really changed so much in five years? Why does he doubt whether he will “find out”? But if Ranevskaya has a stroke, then it’s understandable.

The first words of Anya and Ranevskaya were also justified.

ANYA. Do you, mom, remember which room this is?

RANEVSKAYA(joyfully, through tears) . Children's!

It's a stupid question. Ranevskaya was born and lived all her life in this house, grew up in this nursery, then her daughter Anya grew up here, then her son Grisha, who drowned at the age of seven.

But if Ranevskaya is mad, then the daughter’s question is justified, and the answer found with difficulty, with tears, and the patient’s joy that she was able to remember.

If only the play had ended here - bravo, Nyakrosius! But in ten minutes Gaev will speak about his sister with indecent frankness.

GAEV. She's vicious. This is felt in her slightest movement.

Sorry, in all the movements of Ranevskaya-Maksakova we see paralysis, not depravity.

Yes, of course, the director has the right to any interpretation. But you can't turn too sharply. The play, having lost its logic, collapses like a train derailed.

And it becomes uninteresting to watch. Nonsense is boring.

Peculiarities of interpretation may be related to age, gender, the orientation of the director, and even nationality.

The world-famous German director Peter Stein staged “Three Sisters” and was a resounding success. Muscovites watched with curiosity as the guard of the zemstvo council, Ferapont, brought papers to the master’s house (office) for signature. It’s winter, so the old man comes in wearing earflaps, a sheepskin coat, and felt boots. There is snow on my hat and shoulders. Foreign tourists are delighted - Russia! But the German does not know that the watchman cannot enter the master’s house in a hat and sheepskin coat, that the old man would be undressed and taken off his shoes at the distant approaches (in the hallway, in the servants’ room). He does not know that a Russian, an Orthodox Christian, automatically takes off his hat when entering a room, even if not to a master, but to a hut. But Stein wanted to show icy Russia (the eternal nightmare of Europe). If “Three Sisters” had been staged in a German circus, the snow-covered Ferapont would have ridden into the master’s office on a bear. In a rich circus - on a polar bear.

Chekhov is not a symbolist, not a decadent. It has subtext, but there are no substitutions.

When Varya says to Trofimov:

VARYA. Petya, here they are, your galoshes.(With tears.) And how dirty and old they are... -

There is, of course, a subtext: “I’m so tired of you! How unhappy I am!” But the substitutions are of the flirtatious type: “You can take your galoshes, and if you want, you can take me too- this is not the case. And it cannot be. And if they play like this (which is not excluded), then Varya’s image will be destroyed. And for what? – for the sake of a few teenagers cackling in the last row?

There is a limit to interpretations. You can’t argue against direct meanings, direct indications of the text. Here in “Three Sisters” Andrei’s wife worries:

NATASHA. It seems to me that Bobik is unwell. Bobik's nose is cold.

You can, of course, give her a lap dog named Bobik. But if the play clearly states that Bobik is the child of Andrei and Natasha, then:

a) Bobik is not a dog;

b) Natasha is not a man in disguise; not a transvestite.

...So how old is Ranevskaya? The play doesn't say, but the answer is simple. Chekhov wrote the role for Olga Knipper, his wife, and tailored it to her characteristics and talent. He knew all her habits, knew her as a woman and as an actress, and sewed her exactly to measure so that she would fit snugly. He finished the play in the fall of 1903. Olga Knipper was 35 years old. This means that Ranevskaya is the same; She got married early (at 18 she already gave birth to Anya, her daughter’s age is indicated as 17). She is, as her brother says, vicious. Lopakhin, waiting, is worried like a man.

Chekhov really wanted both the play and his wife to be a success. Adult children age their parents. The younger Anya looks, the better for Olga Knipper. The playwright struggled to assign roles by mail.

CHEKHOV – NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

I'll call the play a comedy. Olga will take the role of the mother, but I don’t presume to decide who will play the 17-year-old daughter, a girl, young and thin.

CHEKHOV to OLGA KNIPPER

You will play Lyubov Andreevna. Anya should play definitely young actress.

CHEKHOV – NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO

Anyone can play Anya, even a completely unknown actress, as long as she is young, looks like a girl, and speaks in a young, ringing voice.

It didn't work out. Stanislavsky gave Anya to his wife, Marya Petrovna, who was thirty-seven at that time. Stage Anya became two years older than her mother. And Chekhov insisted in subsequent letters: Anya doesn’t care who she is, as long as she’s young. The corset and makeup don't help. The voice and plasticity at thirty-seven are not the same as at seventeen.

Ranevskaya is pretty and exciting. Lopakhin hastily explains to her:

LOPAKHIN. You are still just as gorgeous. Your brother says about me that I’m a boor, I’m a fist, but that doesn’t really matter to me. I only wish that you would still believe me, that your amazing, touching eyes would look at me as before. Merciful God! My father was a serf to your grandfather and father, but you once did so much for me that I forgot everything and love you like my own... more than my own.

Such a passionate explanation, and even in the presence of her brother and servants. How would Lopakhin behave if they were alone? There was something between them. What does it mean “I forgot everything and love you more than my own”? “Forgot everything” sounds like “forgave everything.” What did he forgive? Serfdom? or treason? After all, she lived in Paris with her lover, everyone knows this, even Anya.

Ranevskaya is a young, passionate woman. And Lopakhin’s remark “will she recognize me?” – not her stroke, but his fear: how will she look at him? is there any hope for renewing the exciting relationship?

Or is he aiming to grab the estate?

Petya and the wolf

In The Cherry Orchard, we repeat, there are two mysteries that have not yet been solved.

First secret- Why did Petya Trofimov decisively and completely change his opinion about Lopakhin?

Here is their dialogue (in the second act):

LOPAKHIN. Let me ask you, how do you understand me?

TROFIMOV. I, Ermolai Alekseich, understand this: you are a rich man, you will soon be a millionaire. Just as in terms of metabolism you need a predatory beast that eats everything that gets in its way, so you are needed. (Everyone laughs.)

This is very rude. It looks like rudeness. And even in the presence of ladies. In the presence of Ranevskaya, whom Lopakhin idolizes. Moreover, this transition from “you” to “you” to demonstrate outright contempt. And he didn’t just call it a predator and a beast, but also added information about metabolism, tightening up the gastrointestinal tract.

A predatory beast - that is, a forest orderly. Okay, I didn’t say “worm” or “dung beetle,” which are also needed for metabolism.

And three months later (in the last act, in the finale):

TROFIMOV(Lopakhin) . You have thin, gentle fingers, like an artist, you have a thin, gentle soul...

This “you” is completely different, admiring.

Both times Trofimov is absolutely sincere. Petya is not a hypocrite, he speaks out directly and is proud of his directness.

One might suspect that he was flattering the millionaire for some purpose. But Petya doesn’t ask for money. Lopakhin, hearing about the gentle soul, immediately melted; offers money and even imposes. Petya refuses decisively and stubbornly.

LOPAKHIN. Take money from me for the trip. I'm offering you a loan because I can. Why rub your nose? I'm a man... simply. (Takes out wallet.)

TROFIMOV. Give me at least two hundred thousand, I won’t take it.

“Beast of Prey” is not a compliment, it’s very offensive and no one can like it. Even a banker, even a bandit. For brutality and predation are not considered positive qualities even now, much less a hundred years ago.

“Beast of Prey” completely excludes the “tender soul.”

Has Lopakhin changed? No, we don't see that. His character does not change at all from beginning to end.

This means that Petya’s view has changed. How radical - 180 degrees!

Chekhov's view of Lopakhin cannot change. For Lopakhin exists in Chekhov’s brain. That is, Chekhov knows everything about him. Knows from the very beginning. Knows before it starts.

And Petya gets to know Lopakhin gradually, but along the way he can get lost and be deceived.

Othello doesn't know that Iago is a scoundrel and a slanderer. Othello will understand this with horror only in the finale, when it is too late (he has already strangled his wife). If he had known from the very beginning, there would have been no trust, no betrayal, there would have been no play.

Shakespeare knows about Iago everything before the beginning.

The viewer recognizes the essence of Iago is very quickly - as quickly as Shakespeare wants.

Lopakhin is a merchant, nouveau riche (a rich man in the first generation). He kept pretending to be a family friend, throwing things up little by little...

RANEVSKAYA. Ermolai Alekseich, lend me more!

LOPAKHIN. I'm listening.

...and then - Petya was right - the predator took over, seized the moment and grabbed it; everyone was dumbfounded.

RANEVSKAYA. Who bought it?

LOPAKHIN. I bought! Hey musicians, play, I want to listen to you! Come and watch how Ermolai Lopakhin takes an ax to the cherry orchard and how the trees fall to the ground! We will set up dachas, and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see a new life here! Music, play clearly! Let everything be as I wish! I can pay for everything! My cherry orchard! My!

Correctly, Gaev says disgustingly about Lopakhin: “Boor.” (It’s strange that Efros, for the role of a boorish merchant, took the Poet - Vysotsky - a rude man with the subtlest, ringing soul.)

Lopakhin innocently admits:

LOPAKHIN(to the maid Dunyasha) . I read the book and didn’t understand anything. I read and fell asleep...(to Gaev and Ranevskaya) . My dad was a man, an idiot, he didn’t understand anything... In essence, I’m the same idiot and idiot. I didn't learn anything.

Often a rich man speaks about books with contempt and contempt. He flaunts: “I read it and didn’t understand” - it sounds like this: they say, it’s all nonsense.

Lopakhin is a predator! At first, of course, he pretended to care, empathized, and then he revealed himself - he grabbed it and swaggered in a frenzy: come, they say, to see how I grab an ax through the cherry orchard.

Subtle soul? And Varya (Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter)? He was a generally recognized groom, he showed hope and - he deceived, did not marry, and before that, it is possible that he took advantage - there she is, crying... Subtle soul? No - an animal, a predator, a male.

Maybe there was something good in him, but then instinct, the greed, took over. Look how he yells: “My cherry orchard! My!"

What happened? Why Did Petya turn around so sharply?

Not a single performance solved this mystery. Or maybe the directors didn’t see any secret here. For most, the main thing is to create an atmosphere; there is no time for logic.

Having already guessed, he called Smelyansky, a major theorist, expert on theatrical history, and director of the Art Theater:

- What happened to Petya? Why first “predator” and then “gentle soul”?

– This, you know, is a sharp complication of the image.

“Complicating the image” is a luxurious, literary and theatrical expression, but it does not explain anything.

Why complicate Petya at the last minute? The finale is not dedicated to him. It’s already the end, now they will disperse forever, this will no longer have any development; It is impossible to make us re-evaluate everything that has happened so far; there are only seconds left.

Poetry of egoism

Second secret- why does Ranevskaya take all the money for herself (to squander it in Paris), and no one - neither her brother nor her daughters - protests, remaining poor and homeless?

...When the auction came close, the rich “Yaroslavl grandmother-countess” sent fifteen thousand to buy out the estate in Anya’s name, but this money would not have been enough to pay the interest. I bought Lopakhin. Grandma's money remained intact.

And here’s the finale: the hosts are leaving, things are packed, and in five minutes Firs will be scored.

RANEVSKAYA(But not) . My girl... I'm leaving for Paris, I'll live there ( with a scoundrel lover. – A.M.) with the money that your Yaroslavl grandmother sent to buy the estate - long live grandmother! “But this money won’t last long.”

ANYA. You, mom, will be back soon, soon, won't you?(Kisses mother’s hands.)

This is great! Anya is not three years old, she is seventeen. She already knows what and how much. The grandmother sent money to her, her beloved granddaughter (the rich countess does not like Ranevskaya). And mommy takes everything clean and goes to Paris to her boyfriend. He leaves his brother and daughters in Russia without a single penny.

Anya – if we’re talking about ourselves ashamedly – ​​could have said: “Mom, what about uncle?” Gaev – if we’re talking about himself ashamedly – ​​could have said to his sister: “Lyuba, what about Anya?” No, nothing like that is happening. No one is indignant, although this is a robbery in broad daylight. And the daughter even kisses her mother’s hands. How can we understand their submission?

Varya is an adopted daughter, her rights are less. But she was not silent when it came to just five rubles.

RANEVSKAYA. There is no silver... It doesn’t matter, here’s a gold one...

PASSERBY. Dearly grateful to you!

VARYA. I'll leave... Oh, mommy, people at home have nothing to eat, but you gave him a gold one.

Varya publicly reproached her mother when she gave too much to the beggar. But he is silent about fifteen thousand.

And how to understand Ranevskaya? – this is some kind of monstrous, transcendental selfishness, heartlessness. However, her high feelings exist next to dessert.

RANEVSKAYA. God knows, I love my homeland, I love it dearly, I couldn’t watch from the carriage, I kept crying.(Through tears.) However, you need to drink coffee.

When suddenly these secrets were unraveled, the first thing that came was doubts: it couldn’t be that no one had noticed this before. Are all the directors of the world, including such geniuses as Stanislavsky, Efros...

Can't be! Didn’t he really see the subtlest, magical Efros? But if he had seen it, it would have been in his performance. Which means we would see it on stage. But this was not the case. Or was it, but I looked through it, overlooked it, didn’t understand?

Didn’t you see Efros?! He saw so much that I flew home from the theater to check: was it really such written by Chekhov?! Yes, it's written. I didn’t see, I didn’t understand until Efros opened my eyes. And to many, many.

His play “The Cherry Orchard” changed the opinion about Taganka actors. Someone considered them Lyubimov’s puppets, but here they revealed themselves as the finest masters of psychological theater.

...It became so unbearable that I wanted to find out immediately. It was midnight. Efros in the next world. Vysotsky (who played Lopakhin in the play Efros) in the next world. Who to call?

Demidova! Efros played Ranevskaya brilliantly. It’s late, the last time we talked was ten years ago. Will they understand who is calling? Will he be angry at the midnight call or will he think he’s crazy?.. Time passed, it became later, more and more indecent (in addition, the middle name flew out of my head), and it was impossible to wait until tomorrow. Eh, was not there:

– Alla, hello, sorry, for God’s sake, for the late call.

- Yes, Sasha. What's happened?

- I'm talking about The Cherry Orchard. You played Ranevskaya at Efros’s and... But if it’s inconvenient now, maybe tomorrow I’ll...

– I’m ready to talk about The Cherry Orchard until the morning.

I said about fifteen thousand, about my grandmother, about my daughters and brother, who are left without a penny, and asked: “How could you take all the money and go to Paris? Such selfishness! And why did they endure it? Demidova answered without hesitation:

- Oh, Sasha, but this is a poetic theater!

Poetry theater? But the whole play is endless talk about money, debts, interest.

ANYA...not a penny<…>gives the lackeys a ruble tip each<…>did you pay interest?

VARYA. The estate will be sold in August<…>I would like to pass you off as rich.

LOPAKHIN. The cherry orchard is being sold for debts. The auction is scheduled for August 22<…>if you rent out the land for dachas, you will have twenty-five thousand a year in income<…>twenty-five rubles a year per tithe.

PEEKER. Lend me two hundred and forty rubles<…>pay the mortgage...

GAEV. The garden will be sold for debts<…>It would be nice to marry Anya to a rich man<…>It would be nice to borrow against a bill.

RANEVSKAYA. Varya, to save money, feeds everyone only peas<…>My husband drank terribly<…>Unfortunately, I fell in love with someone else and got together<…>I sold my dacha near Menton. He robbed me, left me, got along with someone else...

A noblewoman could say “ruined”, but “robbed”, “got along” - not at all poetic.

PEEKER. The day after tomorrow three hundred and ten rubles to pay...

RANEVSKAYA. Grandmother sent fifteen thousand.

VARYA. Even if it were a hundred rubles, I would give up everything and leave...

PEEKER. Lend me one hundred and eighty rubles.

GAEV(Ranevskaya) . You gave them your wallet, Lyuba! You can not do it this way!

PEEKER. A horse is a good animal, a horse can be sold.

For him, even a horse is just money.

LOPAKHIN. Eight rubles a bottle.

PEEKER. Get four hundred rubles... I have eight hundred and forty left.

LOPAKHIN. I have now earned forty thousand...

I'm afraid I'll tire you. If you write out all the remarks about money and interest, there won’t be enough space.

The main theme of “The Cherry Orchard” is the menacingly impending sale of the estate. And disaster - sold!

Ten years earlier, Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya. There's only words about the proposed sale the estate caused an ugly, ugly-natural scandal, insults, screams, sobs, hysterics, even a direct attempt to kill the professor for the intention sell. Uncle Vanya shoots - twice! - into a professor. And he misses twice. And in the poetic theater they always hit it on the spot. (Poor Lensky.)

...Chekhov is a practicing doctor, and often in a poor, impoverished environment.

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

Over this summer, I have gotten so good at treating diarrhea, vomiting and all sorts of cholera that even I myself am delighted: I’ll start in the morning, and by the evening it’s ready - the patient asks to eat.

The doctor knows how a person works and what affects his behavior. Because behavior is influenced not only by high thoughts, but also by low diseases (for example, bloody diarrhea).

They are not shy in front of the doctor. They are naked in front of the doctor (in every sense and angle). He doesn't have to make things up; he has seen and heard enough.

CHEKHOV – ROSSOLIMO

My studies in medical sciences had a serious influence on my literary activity; enriched me with knowledge, the true value of which for me, as a writer, can only be understood by someone who is a doctor himself... Thanks to my proximity to medicine, I managed to avoid many mistakes. My acquaintance with the natural sciences always kept me on my guard, and I tried, where possible, to comply with scientific data, and where impossible, I preferred not to write at all.

Poetic theater - what is it? Fluttering lyricism, moon baths, awkward feelings, curls, lack of everyday logic, buttercups instead of logic?

If you get to the bottom of logic, fragile poetry will not survive.

So you don’t have to look for it, otherwise you’ll end up with a household theater. Moreover, if the great ones haven’t found it, then it’s not necessary.

Poetic? Did Chekhov write high tragedy? Pathetic drama? No, The Cherry Orchard is a comedy. Chekhov insisted: a comedy with farcical elements. And he was afraid (in letters) that Nemirovich-Danchenko would be angry at the farce. So Salieri was angry at Mozart’s frivolity: “You, Mozart, are God and don’t know it yourself.” That is, like a sparrow - he chirped, without understanding what.

“The Cherry Orchard” is an everyday play. What to be afraid of? Household does not mean small. Life is tragic. Most die not in an embrasure, not in a duel, not on the Varyag, not even on stage - in everyday life.

Blok - yes, a poetic theater. That's why they don't put it anywhere. And Chekhov is meat!

CHEKHOV - LEIKIN

I opened the opening together with the district doctor in a field, on a country road. The dead man was “not from here,” and the men on whose land the body was found, by Christ God, prayed with tears to us not to open it in their village... The murdered man was a factory worker. He walked from the Tukhlovsky tavern with a barrel of vodka. The Tukhlov innkeeper, who does not have the right to sell takeaway, in order to obscure the evidence, stole a barrel from the dead man...

You are indignant at the examination of nurses. What about examining prostitutes? If the medical police can, without insulting the personality of the seller, testify to apples and hams, then why can’t they also inspect the goods of wet nurses or prostitutes? Anyone who is afraid of offending should not buy.

"Money?! - fi!” No, not "fi". In his letters, Chekhov constantly worries about money, asks for money, scrupulously calculates: how much is an apartment, how much per line, interest, debts, prices. (Many of Pushkin’s letters are full of the same torment; not poetic; debts were suffocating.)

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

Thanks for the nickel increase. Alas, she cannot improve my affairs. To emerge from the abyss of penny worries and petty fears, there was only one way left for me - immoral. Marry a rich woman. And since this is impossible, I gave up on my affairs.

And he is also a professional in buying and selling estates. I bought it several times, searched for a long time, asked the price, bargained. I didn’t buy it with money, but with money I earned.

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

When purchasing the estate, I owed the former owner three thousand and gave him a mortgage for this amount. In November I received a letter: if I pay the mortgage now, they will give me 700 rubles. The offer is profitable. Firstly, the estate costs not 13 thousand, but 12,300, and secondly, there is no interest to pay.

By seeing “poetry” where there is none, the theater makes its life easier.

- Why does the heroine do this?

- The devil knows! This, you see, is a poetic theater.

What about “Little Tragedies”? “The Miserly Knight” – isn’t it a poetic theater? And there everyone talks only about money, they count money, they poison and kill for money. “Mozart and Salieri” is a recognized masterpiece of poetry. And there they poison and kill out of envy - is this a poetic feeling? How to play envy poetically? Like haze, pink fog? Howling like a bad Baba Yaga at a children's party?

Chekhov did not consider that he was engaged in poetic theater. He was extremely concerned about the logic of images. And he looked very soberly (as only doctors can) at his contemporaries - at all classes and strata. To call his plays poetic is to directly state: Chekhov did not understand what he was doing. Unconscious genius; or, as Salieri says about Mozart, an idle reveler.

Times and manners

In the center of Moscow, a woman (who looked non-Russian, with an accent) admitted:

– I don’t have a real passport.

She said it loudly; and not during interrogation by the police, not drunk, not begging for alms (although it is unlikely that a person of a foreign nationality will pity a Muscovite by telling him that he is living on false documents). Many have heard.

Strange. For some reason, this sad woman with the awkward name Charlotte was absolutely sure that no one would tell. And why, for her stupid frankness, won’t she end up in ten minutes in a “funnel”, where she will have to pay off with money, and maybe something else (if she is considered pretty enough).

And, indeed, no one reported it, although several hundred people heard it.

Charlotte traveled to Paris with a false passport - from Russia (from the prison of nations, from the police state) to France and back.

Charlotte - on stage; the 19th century had just ended there. We are in the hall; we started the twenty-first. In Moscow there are four Cherry Orchard theaters at once. Sometimes two or three coincide in one evening. Why do we need them?

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

...why lie to the people? Why assure him that he is right in his ignorance and that his gross prejudices are the holy truth? Can a wonderful future really atone for this vile lie? If I were a politician, I would never dare to disgrace my present for the sake of the future, not even for my spool they promised a hundred pounds of bliss to vile lies.

We have become different. Life is different, time is different, way of life, upbringing, attitude towards children, towards women, towards the elderly. Everything became like Yasha’s: rude, lackey-like.

FIRS. In the old days, about forty to fifty years ago, cherries were dried, soaked, pickled, jam was made... And it used to be that dried cherries were sent by carts to Moscow and Kharkov. There was money! And dried cherries then were soft, juicy, sweet, fragrant... They knew the method then...

God! This is what a garden must be like to send dried (!) food in carts... But old people are not needed, of course.

In the old days, people talked, read aloud in the evenings, played home plays... Now they watch others chatting (falsely and rudely) on TV.

Pushkin was traveling one from Moscow to St. Petersburg, to Odessa, to the Caucasus, to Orenburg in the footsteps of Pugachev... If he sat in the “Red Arrow”, the showman, newsmaker, producer Khlestakov would immediately join him:

- Alexander Sergeich! How's it going, brother?

Pushkin was traveling alone. Moreover, he thought, he had nothing more to do; You can’t talk to the coachman’s back.

Fellow travelers, radio and TV leave no room for thought.

Chekhov traveled part of the road to Sakhalin with fellow travelers and lieutenants and suffered greatly from empty talk (he complained in letters).

...The characters in The Cherry Orchard are nobles, merchants... For Chekhov, these were friends, acquaintances - the environment. Then she was gone.

The nobles and merchants died 90 years ago. They were cancelled.

There are nobles in the play, but not in real life. What will they be like on stage? Fictional. It’s just like the fish would play a play about the birds. They would talk about flying while moving their gills.

In Bulgakov’s “Theatrical Novel,” the young playwright examines portraits of founders, luminaries, and artists in the foyer of the Art Theater... Suddenly, with amazement, he stumbles upon a portrait of a general.

"- And who is this?

– Major General Claudius Aleksandrovich Komarovsky-Echappard de Bioncourt, commander of the Life Guards of His Majesty’s Uhlan Regiment.

– What roles did he play?

- Kings, generals and valets in rich houses... Well, naturally, we have manners, you understand. And he knew everything through and through, whether the lady should wear a handkerchief, whether to pour wine, he spoke perfect French, better than the French.”

“We have manners, you understand...” The conversation takes place in the 1920s, but the general entered the theater under the Tsar. Even then it was necessary to show the actors how the aristocrats served the scarf.

Today, entering our theater (whether big or small), Russian boyars would not recognize themselves. So Ivan the Terrible did not recognize himself in the cowardly house manager. After all, we don’t recognize ourselves (Russians, Soviets) in the stupid, clumsy idiots from Hollywood films.

There were no nobles or merchants for almost a hundred years. They remained in textbooks - once and for all approved school popular prints. The merchant is a greedy, cruel, rude tyrant Dikoy (he does not know spiritual movements, he rejects marriage for love). The noblewoman is a cutesy, hypocritical, stupid, empty doll.

The merchants and nobles were gone, but the lackeys remained. And everyone was judged by themselves - like a lackey. These lackeys, wanting to please the new masters (also lackeys), portrayed the destroyed (cancelled) in a mocking, vulgar, caricatured manner. And no one was free from these interpretations - and since the 1930s they had already been hammered into them from kindergarten.

And the merchant in the Soviet theater was always Dikaya and never Tretyakov (whose gallery).

We still use it: Botkin hospital, Morozov hospital (and many more) were built by merchants for the poor, not VIP clubs and fitness centers. Not every king built so much for the people.

Soviet power ended in 1991. Capitalism has returned. What about nobles and merchants? They weren’t waiting behind the scenes for the command “to go on stage!” They died. And their culture died.

The language remained almost Russian. But concepts... The very word “concepts” a hundred years ago referred to honor and justice, and now to robbery and murder.

In 1980, Yuri Lotman wrote “Commentary to “Eugene Onegin” - a manual for teachers.” At the beginning it says:

“To explain what the reader already understands means, firstly, to uselessly increase the volume of the book, and secondly, to offend the reader with a derogatory idea of ​​​​his literary horizons. It is useless and offensive for an adult and a specialist to read explanations designed for a fifth-grade student.”

Having warned that understandable will not explain, Lotman continues:

“A large group of words in Eugene Onegin that are lexically incomprehensible to the modern reader relate to objects and phenomena of everyday life, both material (household items, clothing, food, wine, etc.) and moral (the concept of honor).”


This means that we still (or already) had to explain teachers, what is Mentic, Clicquot and honor.

Over the same years, the water in the Moscow River became polluted, the fish changed beyond recognition, to horror: claws, fangs, blind eyes... Are we the same?

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

God's light is good. There's only one thing that's not good: us. How little justice and humility we have, how poorly we understand patriotism! We, they say in the newspapers, love our great homeland, but how is this love expressed? Instead of knowledge - impudence and conceit beyond measure, instead of work - laziness and swinishness, there is no justice, the concept of honor does not go further than the “honor of the uniform”, the uniform that serves as the everyday decoration of our docks for defendants. ("Werewolves." – A.M.) You have to work, and to hell with everything else. The main thing is to be fair, and the rest will follow.

Or maybe we are still the same?..

...Then the pendulum swung - they began to wax poetic about the nobility.

All the ladies of the 19th century became the wives of the Decembrists. All men are Andrei Bolkonsky. Who did Pushkin call “secular rabble”, “secular bastard”? Who lost at slave cards? Who poisoned peasant children with dogs and kept harems? Who drove the peasants to such anger that, having caught a white officer, instead of humanely spanking him, they impaled him?

The internal, sometimes unconscious protest of Soviet people against Soviet ideology gave rise to admiration for the nobles. Exactly according to Okudzhava:

...Followed by duelists, adjutants.

Epaulets shine.

They are all handsome, they are all talented,

They are all poets.

Not all. In 1826, when five Decembrists were hanged and 121 were taken to hard labor, there were 435 thousand male nobles in Russia. Heroes and poets made up three hundredths of one percent (0.03%) of the aristocracy. Let us not count their share in the sea of ​​people.

Chekhov did not wax poetic about his contemporaries. Neither the nobles, nor the people, nor the intelligentsia, nor brothers in writing.

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

Today's best writers, whom I love, serve evil because they destroy. One of them… ( rude words. – A.M.) Others... ( rude words. – A.M.) Not satiated with the body, but already satiated with the spirit, they refine their imagination to the extreme. They compromise science in the eyes of the crowd, disparage conscience, freedom, love, honor, morality from the heights of literary greatness, instilling in the crowd the confidence that everything that restrains the beast in it and distinguishes it from a dog and that was obtained through a centuries-old struggle with nature is easy may be discredited. Do such authors really make you look for something better, make you think and admit that the bad is really bad? No, in Russia they help the devil breed slugs and woodlice, which we call intellectuals. Lethargic, apathetic, lazy-philosophizing, cold intelligentsia, which is not patriotic, dull, colorless, who grumbles and willingly denies EVERYTHING, since for a lazy brain it is easier to deny than to affirm; who does not marry and refuses to raise children, etc. And all this is due to the fact that life has no meaning, that for women... ( rude word. – A.M.) and that money is evil.

Where there is degeneration and apathy, there is sexual perversion, cold debauchery, miscarriages, early old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, there is INJUSTICE in all its form. A society that does not believe in God, but is afraid of signs and the devil, does not dare even mention that it is familiar with justice.

CHEKHOV - LEONTIEV

I cannot understand that you mean some kind of sophisticated, higher morality, since there are neither lower, nor higher, nor average moralities, but there is only one, namely the one that gave us Jesus Christ and which now prevents me and you from stealing, insulting, lying, etc.

In The Cherry Orchard, the decrepit Firs dreamily recalls serfdom, abolished forty years ago.

FIRS. Before the disaster there was also...

LOPAKHIN. Before what misfortune?

FIRS. Before the will. Then I didn’t agree to freedom, I stayed with the masters... And I remember, everyone is happy, but what they’re happy about, they themselves don’t know... And now everything is fragmented, you won’t understand anything.

A typical Soviet person grieves about order, about the times of Brezhnev and Stalin, and grieves about the decline.

FIRS. Previously, generals, barons, and admirals danced at our balls, but now we send for the postal official and the station master, and even they are not willing to go.

YASHA. I'm tired of you, grandpa. I wish you would die soon.

Yes, it used to be an honor to visit a professor. And the delicacies in his family did not surprise anyone. And the caviar bank could not achieve success (let alone delight).

Then for seventy years they taught that there are two classes: workers and peasants (collective farmers), and the intelligentsia is a stratum. There is no doubt that the intelligentsia is extremely small in number. But why is she a layer between workers and collective farmers, it is impossible to understand.

The professors (layer) did not know how to get cervelat. As long as they were issued, it was good. They stopped giving it out - the refrigerator became empty. And the thieves' blonde around the corner stuns the professor's family with a stick of cervelat, a piece of brisket - the fruits of a body kit, a shortcut.

Now delicacies are no longer in short supply. Now these capable blondes and blonds have come around the corner. In Soviet times, they knew how to solve their gastronomic problems. It turned out - in new conditions - that you can arrange a career in the same way, right up to the Kremlin.

CHEKHOV - SUVORINA

What a horror it is to deal with liars! Seller artist ( Chekhov bought the estate from him. – A.M.) lies, lies, lies unnecessarily, stupidly – ​​resulting in daily disappointments. Every minute you expect new deceptions, hence the irritation. We are used to writing and saying that only merchants measure and weigh, but look at the nobles! It's disgusting to look at. These are not people, but ordinary fists, even worse than fists, for a peasant fist takes and works, but my artist takes and only eats and quarrels with the servants. You can imagine that since the summer the horses have not seen a single grain of oats or a scrap of hay, and they eat only straw, although they work for ten people. The cow does not give milk because she is hungry. The wife and mistress live under the same roof. The children are dirty and ragged. The stink of cats. Bugs and huge cockroaches. The artist pretends to be devoted to me with all his soul, and at the same time teaches men to deceive me. Generally nonsense and vulgarity. It’s disgusting that all this hungry and dirty bastard thinks that I’m just as anxious over a penny as she is, and that I’m also not averse to cheating.

We lived under socialism for a long time. Lost the habit of capitalism. But now everything that was the same - debts, trades, interest, bills - has come to life.

A huge number of people were ready for a new life.

TROFIMOV. Im free person. I am strong and proud. Humanity is moving towards the highest truth, towards the highest happiness that is possible on earth, and I am in the forefront!

LOPAKHIN. Will you get there?

TROFIMOV. I’ll get there... or I’ll show others the way to get there.

ANYA(joyfully). Goodbye old life!

TROFIMOV(joyfully). Hello, new life!..

The young people run away holding hands, and a minute later they kill Firs.

...Gaev and Ranevskaya are crying from hopelessness. Their youth is behind them, they don’t know how to work, their world is literally collapsing (Lopakhin ordered the demolition of the old house).

But others are young, healthy, educated. Why hopelessness and poverty, why can’t they maintain their property? Can't work?

The world has changed, rents have risen, teachers are paid little, engineers are not needed.

Life displaces them. Where? It is customary to say “on the sidelines.” But we understand that if life displaces someone - she displaces into death, to the grave. Not everyone can adapt, not everyone is able to become a shuttle or a security guard.

Readers are dying out. The world's best readers have died: 25 million in 25 years. The rest forgot (" no one remembers"), that it was possible to live differently: read other books, watch other films.

Beneath us is the same Central Russian Upland. But how base she has become.

Territory doesn't matter. Okudzhava, who had been evicted from Arbat, once walked along his former street and saw that everything here was as before. Except people.

Occupiers, fauna - this is not about the Germans. And not about the Soviets, not about the Russians, and not even about the new Russians. These are poems from 1982. This is about the nomenklatura, they are not people.

The territory is the same, but there are no people.

They don't want to live in a new way

…May. (I act.) Cherry blossoms. Ranevskaya returned from Paris. The family is ruined.

LOPAKHIN. Don't worry, my dear, there is a way out! If the cherry orchard and the land along the river are divided into summer cottages, you will have at least twenty-five thousand a year in income. You will take the least from the summer residents, twenty-five rubles a year for a tithe, I guarantee anything, you won’t have a single free scrap left until the fall, everything will be taken away. The location is wonderful, the river is deep. We just need to demolish this house, which is no longer any good, and cut down the old cherry orchard...

RANEVSKAYA. Cut it out?! My dear, forgive me, you don’t understand anything.

The garden is alive for them. Cutting off is like cutting off a hand. Trees for them are part of life, part of the body, part of the soul. That's why they imagine:

RANEVSKAYA. Look, the late mother in a white dress is walking through the garden... No, it seemed to me that at the end of the alley there was a tree covered with white flowers.

How can I turn it off? How can one agree that all this has become unnecessary? And the garden is not needed, and people are not needed - the time of young cannibals is coming.

…July. (II act.) Catastrophe is approaching.

LOPAKHIN. They tell you in Russian, your estate is for sale, but you definitely don’t understand.

Notes

Ten years before the premiere of The Cherry Orchard.

Four grams.

Slap - shoot without trial.

In the film “The Blonde Around the Corner,” the heroine, a sassy (without complexes) grocery store saleswoman, charms a modest research assistant and his professor parents.

End of free trial.



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