Indifference in the story The Cherry Orchard. Essay on the topic: – “The Cherry Orchard” as an example of a Chekhov play

Essay by Chekhov A.P. - The Cherry Orchard

Topic: - Funny and tragic in Ranevskaya

The play “The Cherry Orchard,” like all of Chekhov’s dramas in general, is permeated by an atmosphere of general trouble, loneliness and unhappiness. So Ranevskaya, like many other Chekhov heroes, is unlucky. The writer sympathizes with his heroine, because she is losing not just a garden - she is losing everything dear to her that was in her life. And the drama of Ranevskaya is not in her economic bankruptcy - at the very beginning of the play she has an excellent option for economic prosperity, proposed by Lopakhin: to rent out the garden for dachas, but she refuses this saving solution. And all because the main drama of her existence is deeper than elementary ruin. Money cannot improve her situation; her life, which is fading away, cannot be restored. Ranevskaya, like the other heroes of “The Cherry Orchard,” experiences subjective dissatisfaction with her own life, which passes awkwardly and awkwardly, bringing neither joy nor happiness. She feels the temporary nature of her stay in this world: old foundations are disintegrating both in the souls of people and outside, and new ones have not yet been born. That’s why Lopakhin’s words addressed to Ranevskaya sound so sad and despondent: “Why, why didn’t you listen to me? My poor, good one, you won’t get it back now.”

Indeed, in Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya, Chekhov openly ridicules frivolity and emptiness of interests. Striving to live easily and beautifully, she sees nothing around her except love interests. Outwardly she is simple, charming, kind, but in essence she turns out to be a selfish person. Accustomed to wasting money, she orders Lopakhin to give her money. While the servants in her own house are starving, she gives out large alms to strangers or arranges a ball that no one needs, despite the fact that she has nothing to pay off her debts. She takes care of Firs, ordering him to be sent to the hospital, but he is forgotten in the boarded-up house. She is saddened by the sale of the estate, speaks of love for her homeland, easily interrupting her words with the remark: “However, you need to drink coffee.” In addition, she openly rejoices at the possibility of leaving for Paris. The heroine's sudden mood changes are unexpected: she moves from tears to fun. All this causes laughter, but laughter, indeed, through tears. Her disregard for maternal feelings also deserves reproach: her daughter remained in the care of a careless uncle for five years.

The contradictory nature of Ranevskaya is also reflected in her speech. Her language combines sensitivity, sincerity and mannerisms. Her speech is rich in poetic comparisons and metaphors. She likes to use words with diminutive suffixes: “dear student”, “little tree”, “darling”, “cabinet”, “my table”.

Showing that in Ranevskaya one can feel the echoes of the wonderful traditions of spiritual culture, A.P. Chekhov still strictly judges his heroine, ultimately placing the death of the cherry orchard on her conscience. Thus, the author conveys in his work the idea of ​​a person’s personal responsibility for the choice of life position and, in general, for the fate of beauty in the world.

Let's remember Chekhov's stories. Lyrical mood, piercing sadness and laughter... These are his plays too - unusual plays, and even more so that seemed strange to Chekhov's contemporaries. But it was in them that the “watercolor” nature of Chekhov’s colors, his soulful lyricism, his piercing accuracy and frankness were most clearly and deeply manifested.

Chekhov's dramaturgy has several plans, and what the characters say is by no means what the author himself hides behind their remarks. And what he is hiding may not be what he would like to convey to the viewer...

This diversity makes it difficult to define the genre. For example, a play

As we know from the very beginning, the estate is doomed; The heroes are also doomed - Ranevskaya, Gaev, Anya and Varya - they have nothing to live for, nothing to hope for. The solution proposed by Lopakhin is impossible for them. Everything for them symbolizes the past, some long-ago, wonderful life, when everything was easy and simple, and they even knew how to dry cherries and send them by cart to Moscow... But now the garden has grown old, fruitful years are rare, the method of preparing cherries has been forgotten... Constant trouble is felt behind all the words and actions of the heroes... And even the hopes for the future expressed by one of the most active heroes - Lopakhin - are unconvincing. Petya Trofimov’s words are also unconvincing: “Russia is our garden,” “we need to work.” After all, Trofimov himself is an eternal student who cannot begin any serious activity. The trouble is in the way the relationship between the characters develops (Lolakhin and Varya love each other, but for some reason they don’t get married), and in their conversations. Everyone talks about what interests him at the moment, and does not listen to others. Chekhov's heroes are characterized by a tragic "deafness", so the important and the small, the tragic and the stupid get in the way in the dialogues.

Indeed, in “The Cherry Orchard,” as in human life, tragic (material difficulties, inability of the heroes to act), dramatic (the life of any of the heroes) and comic (for example, Petya Trofimov’s fall from the stairs at the most tense moment) are mixed. Discord is visible everywhere, even in the fact that servants behave like masters. Firs says, comparing the past and present, that “everything is fragmented.” The existence of this person seems to remind the young that life began a long time ago, even before them. It is also characteristic that he is forgotten on the estate...

And the famous “sound of a breaking string” is also a symbol. If a stretched string means readiness, determination, efficiency, then a broken string means the end. True, there is still a vague hope, because the neighboring landowner Simeonov-Pishchik was lucky: he is no better than others, but they either found clay or had a railroad...

Life is both sad and funny. She is tragic, unpredictable - this is what Chekhov talks about in his plays. And that is why it is so difficult to determine their genre - because the author simultaneously shows all aspects of our life...

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, like other writers, was interested in writing on the theme of human happiness, love, harmony. In most of the writer’s works: “Ionych”, “Gooseberry”, “About Love” - the heroes fail in love. They cannot create their own happiness, let alone others. In the story “The Lady in a Dog” everything is different. When Gurov and Anna Sergeevna part, she returns to her city S., and he returns to Moscow. “A month would pass, and it seemed to him that Anna Sergeevna would be covered in a fog in his memory and only occasionally would he dream of her with a touching smile, as others did. But more than a month passed, a deep crisis set in, and everything was clear in his memory, as if he had broken up with Anna Sergeevna only yesterday. And the memories became more and more intense.” Here is a twist in the development of the plot. Is love not weakening? does not die from a collision with life, does not turn out to be insolvent. On the contrary, it evokes in Gurov a disgust for the drowsy, philistine prosperous existence, and a desire for a different, new life. The familiar surroundings evoke almost disgusting disgust in the hero. He clearly sees the hypocrisy and vulgarity of those around him. “- Dmitry Dmitrich! - What? - And just now you were right: the sturgeon is fragrant! These words, so ordinary, for some reason suddenly outraged Gurov and seemed humiliating and unclean to him. What wild customs, what faces! What stupid nights, what uninteresting days! Furious card playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant conversations all about one thing... a short, wingless life... and you can’t leave, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or in a prison company.” What a storm and range of feelings love gives birth to in Gurov! Its cleansing power is beneficial. It never occurs to the writer to condemn the heroes for their “sinful feelings.” They are both married, breaking their vows. But the author’s idea is clear to the reader that life without love is even more sinful. Anna Sergeevna and Gurov love each other - this is their consolation, an incentive to live, because every person has the right to happiness. “Anna Sergeevna and he loved each other like very close, dear people... it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and it was not clear why he was married, and she was married... And it seemed that a little - and a solution will be found, and then a new, wonderful life will begin; and it was clear to both that the end was still far away and that the most difficult and difficult things were just beginning.” This is an almost romantic story by Chekhov the realist about love, its great power and purity. Reading the story, you understand that only with a loved one can you understand all the beauty of the world, feel the fullness of life, and that it is necessary to protect this

Chekhov himself called “The Cherry Orchard” a comedy, although he admitted later that “What I came up with was... a comedy, sometimes even a farce.” And the great director K. S. Stanislavsky called the work a tragedy: “This is a tragedy...” The problem of the genre and the date itself is one of the most difficult when studying Chekhov’s play, although there seems to be such a genre as tragicomedy, which combines the tragic and funny, but in “The Cherry Orchard” there doesn’t seem to be anything tragic, just the usual collapse of not very lucky people who continue to live on, not really looking back - which is why they forget old Firs in the house abandoned by everyone.. At the same time, this “comedy” shows the deepest internal tragedy of people who have outlived their time and are feverishly trying to somehow get settled in a new, so incomprehensible to them, even hostile towards them, life, the passing of an entire historical era, replaced which was the era of the greatest social and moral upheavals. Only this is clear to us now, what will happen “after” Ranevskaya and Gaev, what will replace the “cherry orchard”, and for them, who lived then, it was incredibly difficult to “guess” the future, which frankly frightened them, because it destroyed the life in which they felt good and which they would like to keep for themselves forever.

The peculiarity of the era determined the main external conflict of the play “The Cherry Orchard”: it is a conflict between the past, present and future. However, not only does he determine the plot and composition of the work, it is permeated with internal conflicts, almost each of the image-characters carries duality, he not only confronts reality, but also painfully tries to reconcile himself with his own soul, which turns out to be the most difficult thing. Chekhov’s characters cannot be divided into “positive” and “negative”; they are living people, in whom there is a lot of good and not so good, who behave the way they think they should behave in the situations in which they find themselves - and It can be funny, or not very funny, or completely sad.

The image of Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya is the core image; all other characters are somehow connected with her. Ranevskaya combines sincerity and spiritual callousness, ardent love for the Motherland and complete indifference to it; they say about her that she is a “good”, “easy” person - and this is true, as is the truth that it is unbearably difficult to live next to her... First of all, it should be noted that the contradictory image of Ranevskaya does not mean that she is - some special, complex, incomprehensible person, rather, on the contrary: she is always who she is, it’s just that to those around her such behavior seems extravagant to some, and unusually attractive to others. The contradictory behavior of Lyubov Andreevna is explained by the fact that she never truly understood that life had changed, she continues to live in that life when there was no need to think about a piece of bread, when the cherry orchard provided an easy and carefree life for its owners. That’s why she wastes money, repenting of it herself, that’s why she doesn’t think about the future (“everything will work out!”), that’s why she’s so cheerful. She spends money on her “fatal passion,” realizing that she is thereby complicating the life of her daughters, and at the end of the play she returns to Paris again, where she can live as she is used to. Ranevskaya is one of the best manifestations of the old life (it is no coincidence that Lopakhin idolizes her, who since childhood sees in her an unattainable ideal), however, like all this life, she must leave - and the viewer perceives her departure with sympathy and pity, because -Humanly she is so sweet and attractive.

Little can be said about Ranevskaya’s brother, Gaev. He is very similar to his sister, but he does not have her lightness and charm, he is simply ridiculous in his reluctance and inability to face life and “grow up” - Chekhov emphasizes that the footman Firs still perceives him as a little boy, which he is in in essence, he is. Gaev’s inappropriate, tearful monologues (addressing the closet!) are not just funny, they take on a touch of tragedy, since such a blatant isolation from the life of an elderly person cannot but frighten.

Much attention in the play "The Cherry Orchard" is paid to the problem of the future. Chekhov shows us, so to speak, two options for the future: the future “according to Petya Trofimov” and the future “according to Ermolay Lopakhin.” At different periods of history, each of these future options had its adherents and opponents.

Petya Trofimov, with his vague calls, loud assurances that “All of Russia is our garden,” with his denunciation of modernity, during the creation of the play, was perceived as a positive hero, his words “I have a presentiment of happiness, Anya, I already see it...” were perceived the audience with great enthusiasm. However, Chekhov himself was wary of this hero: we see Petya, who, a “shabby gentleman,” does practically nothing. Behind his beautiful words it is difficult to see truly real deeds; moreover, he constantly finds himself in a funny position. Even when at the beginning of Act IV he loudly promises Lopakhin that he will reach “the highest truth, the highest happiness that is possible on earth,” because in this movement of humanity towards them he is “in the forefront!”, he in no way can find... his own galoshes, and this makes his confidence ridiculous: he sets his sights on such things, but cannot find the galoshes!..

The future “according to Ermolay Lopakhin” is depicted in a completely different way. A former serf who bought “an estate where his grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even allowed into the kitchen,” who gets up “at five o’clock in the morning” and works all day, who made millions and knows what needs to be done with the cherry orchard ( “Both the cherry orchard and the land must be rented out for dachas, do this now, as soon as possible”), in fact, he knows practically nothing about relationships between people, he is tormented by the fact that wealth does not give him a feeling of happiness. The image of Lopakhin is an image close to tragic, because for this man the meaning of life was the accumulation of money, he succeeded, but why then does he so desperately, “with tears,” exclaim at the end of the third act, when he had already become the owner of the estate , “there is nothing more beautiful in the world”: “Oh, if only all this would pass, if only our awkward, unhappy life would somehow change”? A millionaire - and an unhappy life?.. But in fact: he understands that he has remained a “man a man”, he loves Varya in his own way, but still does not dare to explain himself to her, he is able to feel beauty (“I in the spring I sowed a thousand dessiatines of poppy and now I earned forty thousand net. And when my poppy bloomed, what a picture it was!"), he has a “subtle, gentle soul” (as Petya Trofimov says about him) - but he is truly unhappy . What despair can be heard in his words: “We will set up dachas, and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see a new life here...”! Grandchildren and great-grandchildren - this is understandable, but what do you have left in life?..

An interesting image is the old servant Firs, for whom the liberation of the serfs was a “misfortune.” He cannot imagine a life other than life in slavery, which is why he remains in the house - to die along with the cherry orchard, which is not hit by Ermolai Lopakhin with an axe, but by time itself. The image of the “cherry orchard” is a semi-symbolic image of the past, which is doomed and which needs to be gotten rid of for the sake of the future, but we have already seen what it can be, this is the future. The historical doom of the past is obvious, but it in no way explains what, in fact, this future, desired by some and cursed by other heroes, could become, therefore Chekhov’s entire play is permeated with anxious expectations that make the heroes’ lives even more bleak, and parting with The “cherry orchard” is especially painful - isn’t that why Lopakhin is in such a hurry, ordering the trees to be cut down when the old owners have not yet left the doomed estate?

“The Cherry Orchard,” which we analyzed, was created by Chekhov on the eve of dramatic changes in Russian life, and the author, welcoming them, ardently wishing for a change in life for the better, could not help but see that any changes are always destruction, they bring with them someone else’s life. then dramas and tragedies, “progress” necessarily denies something that earlier, in its time, was also progressive. Awareness of this determined the moral pathos of Chekhov’s “comedy”, his moral position: he welcomes the change in life and at the same time he is worried about what it can bring to people; he understands the historical doom of his heroes and humanly sympathizes with them, who find themselves “between the past and the future” and trying to find their place in a new life that frightens them. As a matter of fact, Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard” is very relevant today, since now Russia is again “between the past and the future,” and I really want us to be happier than the heroes of “The Cherry Orchard.”

Before us is a play with the prosaic title “The Cherry Orchard”. I wonder what the author meant by a cherry orchard? “All of Russia is our garden,” says one of the characters in the play, Petya Trofimov.
It is interesting that Anton Pavlovich Chekhov himself grew a garden in Melikhovo. In Crimea, the writer laid out a southern garden near his house on a high hill, which became his brainchild. He raised him according to a well-thought-out plan and created him as a work of art.
The Cherry Orchard in the play is the embodiment of everything beautiful, the personification of beauty and poetry. This is one of the heroes of the play. He appears in her constantly, as if reminding her of himself. Introduced into the characters' lines, the garden becomes a participant in the action.
The magnificent Chekhov's garden is connected in the play with the destinies of three generations: past, present and future. Thus, Chekhov very widely expands the time captured in his play. The garden itself embodies past culture and beauty. This is how Ranevskaya and Gaev perceive him. For them it is associated with childhood. According to Ranevskaya, “happiness woke up” with her every morning when she looked out the window at these trees.
For Lopakhin, the garden is wonderful only as a good “location”. According to him, “the only remarkable thing about this garden is that it is very large.” For him, this is a business commercial area. He believes that cherries “do not bring any income now,” but a poppy field is another matter! He is going to cut down the old cherry orchard, and now the threat hangs over the trees like the sword of Damocles.
Lopakhin feels like the master of life. “Come everyone and watch how Ermolai Lopakhin will hit the cherry orchard with an ax and how the trees will fall to the ground!” There is so much cynicism and courage in these words! “We’ll set up the dachas!” - he says. At the end of the play, the threat is put into action: the ax knocks, trees fall.
Indifference to what is happening can be felt in the words of Petya Trofimov. He approaches the eternal human value - beauty - from a narrow class position and begins to discredit the cherry orchard, seeing for some reason a tortured slave-serf behind every tree. “The earth is great and beautiful, there are many wonderful places on it,” he reassures Anya.
Only Anya, bright, gentle and enthusiastic, focused on the future, is ready to plant a new garden more beautiful than the previous one. She alone is worthy of the beauty that lies in the cherry orchard.
The play presents, as it were, two worlds: the world of dreams and the world of reality. Ranevskaya and Lopakhin live in different worlds. That's why they don't hear each other. Lyubov Andreevna lives in dreams, she is all in her love, in her fantasies. It’s as if she’s not here: part of her remained in Paris, despite the fact that at first she doesn’t even read messages from there, and part of her returned to this house, to this garden, but not today, but to the one that she remembers from childhood . From her shell, filled with the pink ether of dreams, she sees life, but cannot experience it as it really is. Her phrase: “I know, they wrote to me,” referring to the death of the nanny, her attitude towards Varvara is not at all cruelty, not indifference. Ranevskaya is just not here, she is in her own world.
It is generally accepted that Gaev, Ranevskaya’s brother, is, as it were, a distorted image of her. There is an obvious “stretch” in this. He simply lies on the border of these two worlds. He is not an idle dreamer, but, apparently, his existence is not entirely real if at his age they say about him “young and green.”
But Lopakhin is, perhaps, the only person from reality. But it's not that simple. Lopakhin combines both reality and dream. But his “dreams” lead to action: the memory of all the good that Ranevskaya did for him forces him to look for a way out of the situation in which they found themselves. But the matter ends with the purchase of a cherry orchard.
The comparison of director Efros seems very accurate, who said, while working on this play at the Taganka Theater, that all the heroes of the play are children playing in a minefield, and only Lopakhin, a serious person, warns of the danger, but the children captivate him with their play, he is forgotten, but soon remembers again, as if waking up. Only he alone constantly remembers the danger. One Lopakhin.
The question of the relationship between dreams and reality in the play “The Cherry Orchard” was also reflected in debates about the genre. It is known that Chekhov himself called the play a comedy, but Stanislavsky staged it as a drama. Still, let’s listen to the author’s opinion. Chekhov's play “The Cherry Orchard” is more of a sad thought about the fate of Russia than a revolutionary call, as they sometimes try to present it.
There are no ways to reorganize life, no specific actions in the play. It is generally accepted that Chekhov saw the future of Russia in the images of Trofimov and Anya. But the owners of the garden are the hereditary nobles Gaev and Ranevskaya. This garden has belonged to their family for many, many years. And the author deeply likes these people, despite their idleness and idleness. And here the question arises about the ambiguity of the play.
Take, for example, the image of the owner of the garden herself, Ranevskaya. It is known that Chekhov worked on this role with great enthusiasm and intended it for the actress O. L. Knipper, his wife. This image has always caused controversy and has become one of Chekhov’s mysteries. In response to the question of how this image should be played, Chekhov replied: “Fingers, fingers in rings; she grabs onto everything, but everything falls out of her hands, and her head is empty.” This is the key to the image, proposed by the author himself.
Ranevskaya has such wonderful character traits as kindness and devotion to the feeling of love. She is busy with the arrangement of her adopted daughter Varya, takes pity on the servant Firs, and gives her wallet to the peasants who came to say goodbye to her. But sometimes this kindness is simply the result of the wealth that she possesses and which reveals itself in the sparkle of rings on her fingers. She herself admits to her extravagance: “I have always wasted money without restraint, like crazy.”
Ranevskaya does not take her care for people to its logical conclusion. Varya is left without a livelihood after the sale of her estate and is forced to go to strangers. Firs remains in a locked house because Lyubov Andreevna forgot to check whether he was sent to the hospital.
Ranevskaya is characterized by frivolity and quick changes of feelings. So, she turns to God and begs to forgive her sins, but at the same time she offers to have a “party”. The duality of experiences also affects Russia. She tenderly treats her homeland, the cherry orchard, her old house with huge windows through which unruly branches climb. But this feeling is unstable. As soon as she receives a telegram from a former lover who robbed her, she forgets the insult and goes to Paris. It seems that Ranevskaya is devoid of an inner core. Her frivolity and carelessness lead to the fact that the garden is sold and the estate goes into the wrong hands.
Will Lopakhin become the new owner? It is clear that before us is a representative of a new class, and this class is ousting the ancestral nobles from Russian life. Lopakhin both attracts and frightens Chekhov. The writer makes it clear that Lopakhin is only a temporary master of life. He introduces himself to Ranevskaya as a grateful friend, and he himself begins to cut down the garden even before her departure. No, he is not the owner of the cherry orchard, but only its temporary owner
“The Cherry Orchard” is the last play in Chekhov’s work, his “swan song”. In the play, the cherry orchard united all the main characters and became a symbol of the beautiful, unchanging and indestructible. He became a symbol of the country. Russia. True, the writer’s dream for all of Russia to be a garden has not yet come true. But it depends on us whether this will remain a dream or come true.

My attitude towards Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya

Only those works remain to live for centuries and become a universal property in which the writer most accurately and deeply recreated his time and revealed the spiritual world of the people of his generation, his people. In my opinion, A.P.’s play also belongs to such works. Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard", created by the author back in 1904, it still enjoys considerable popularity today.

One of the most striking images of the play “The Cherry Orchard” is the image of Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya. We meet her already at the beginning of the play: everyone is waiting for her arrival from Paris. But the reason for her return is completely sad: her home with a beautiful cherry orchard is about to be sold for debts. For Lyubov Andreevna, the cherry orchard is a symbol of childhood, a symbol of happiness, a symbol of the homeland. This is, after all, her way of life. Everything dear and dear to her was connected with the house and the cherry orchard. And suddenly all this should disappear. “My life, my youth, my happiness, goodbye,” the heroine says excitedly. And in human terms it can be understood. Even regret it, because her fate is bitter and hopeless. Lyubov Andreevna suffers, because, losing the cherry orchard, she loses the country of her childhood, maternal affection, beauty, poetry. But my attitude towards the heroine is ambiguous. Yes, she is a kind, sincere, sympathetic, delicate woman. Everyone loves and appreciates her. But at the same time, she is very frivolous: she throws money away, keeps a parasite and lackeys, fell in love with evil and a carefree man who only needs money from her. Tender, caring, selfless in love, she is ready to do anything for her beloved. Wonderful impulses! But why doesn’t she take care of her children - Anya and Varvara, whose lives are completely unsettled. I understand her and sympathize with the death of her son Grisha. Trying to forget this terrible tragedy, she goes to Paris. But at what cost? She spends the money that Anya’s grandmother, Lyubov Andreevna’s former mother-in-law, gave her not on her daughter, not on family needs, but on her lover, who robbed her and abandoned her. Or is this a reasonable decision for a woman who has children and is responsible for their future?

And when she loses the cherry orchard, does she understand that this is also her fault: after all, she is responsible for everything that happened around her. On the one hand, I perceive Lyubov Andreevna as a bearer of wonderful traditions, high spiritual culture, and on the other hand, it is quite obvious that the death of the cherry orchard is on her conscience, because thanks to her wastefulness, inaction, and ambition, she is losing her family nest.

Could his fate have turned out differently?

I think I could. If only she weren't so frivolous, weak-willed, irresponsible. Then she would not have gotten confused in her personal life, and perhaps the family estate would have been preserved. But then, of course, it would not be that Chekhov heroine Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya, in whom good and evil, sensitivity and indifference, sacrifice and selfishness coexist.