The Cherry Orchard and Other Plays

About the book

This volume collects the plays Julius West translated for the second series of Chekhov’s plays in English, published in 1916: the last two of his full-length plays and six one-act pieces. In The Three Sisters (1901), Olga, Masha and Irina Prosorov, living in a provincial garrison town a year after their father’s death, dream of going back to Moscow while their brother’s marriage and the passing years close every way out. In The Cherry Orchard, first performed in January 1904, Madame Ranevsky comes home from Paris to the family estate, deep in debt, and will not hear of the one plan that could save it, which would mean cutting down its famous orchard. The one-act plays show Chekhov’s lighter side: farces such as The Proposal and The Bear, which were favourites on the stage throughout his life, the wedding-party comedy The Wedding, a long-suffering husband’s lament in A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, the chaos of a bank’s jubilee in The Anniversary, and the darker tavern scene of On the High Road. West’s introduction, kept here, places the plays in Chekhov’s life and in the Russian theatre of his time.

Characters

• Madame Ranevsky — Landowner · The Cherry Orchard

  Lubov Andreyevna, who comes home from Paris to her estate, generous to a fault, deep in debt and unable to face losing the orchard where she grew up.

• Ermolai Lopakhin — Merchant · The Cherry Orchard

  The son of a serf on the estate, now a rich merchant, whose plan to save it means cutting the orchard down.

• Leonid Gaev — Ranevsky’s brother · The Cherry Orchard

  Fond of billiards and long speeches, and as helpless with money as his sister.

• Peter Trofimov — Student · The Cherry Orchard

  The “eternal student”, once tutor to Ranevsky’s drowned son, who preaches work and a better future.

• Varya — Adopted daughter · The Cherry Orchard

  Ranevsky’s adopted daughter, who keeps house on the estate and waits for Lopakhin to propose.

• Fiers — Old footman · The Cherry Orchard

  A footman of eighty-seven who has served the family all his life.

• Olga — Eldest sister · The Three Sisters

  A schoolteacher, worn out by her work, who holds the family together.

• Masha — Middle sister · The Three Sisters

  Married at eighteen to the schoolmaster Kuligin, who falls in love with Vershinin.

• Irina — Youngest sister · The Three Sisters

  Twenty when the play begins, who longs for Moscow and for work that means something.

• Alexander Vershinin — Lieutenant-colonel · The Three Sisters

  The new battery commander, unhappily married, who loves to philosophise about life two or three hundred years from now.

About the author

AC

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, and a doctor by training. Born in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf, he paid his way through medical school in Moscow by writing comic sketches for magazines, and went on to write hundreds of stories, from those early humorous pieces to the quiet masterpieces of his later years, such as “The Lady with the Dog”. In 1890 he crossed Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island and wrote a study of it. His four great plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, were staged by the Moscow Art Theatre and changed modern drama, putting ordinary lives, and what goes unsaid in them, at the centre of the stage. Ill with tuberculosis for much of his adult life, he died at Badenweiler in Germany in 1904, aged forty-four.