What does Lopakhin's new life look like? Why does Chekhov end the play with the sounds of an ax hitting wood? and got the best answer

Answer from Alexey Khoroshev[guru]
The work of A.P. Chekhov dates back to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when the feudal system was replaced by a capitalist formation, which made it possible to introduce new forms of economy.
However, representatives of the local nobility reluctantly entered into a new life. The conservatism of most of them, the inability to abandon feudal methods of farming, and the inability to take advantage of the current situation led the landowners' estates to ruin.
Against the backdrop of the impoverishment of the nobility, a new layer of society enters the economic life of Russia, new people - entrepreneurs, “masters of life.”
In the play “The Cherry Orchard” this new master of life is Lopakhin, an intelligent, energetic businessman, industrialist. Compared to the impractical, weak-willed nobles Ranevsky and Gaev, who live more in the past than in the present, he is distinguished by his enormous energy, wide scope of work, and thirst for education. He knows his place both in life and in society and does not lose his dignity anywhere.
While Lopakhin realizes the hopeless situation of the owners of the cherry orchard and gives them practical advice, they compose pathetic hymns to the house and garden, talk to things - to the closet, to the table, kiss them and are carried away with their thoughts into a sweet, carefree past, so irretrievably gone.
Lopakhin directly and simply calls a spade a spade (“...your cherry orchard is being sold for debts...”), is ready to help in trouble, but he does not have a common language with the Gaevs. His sober, realistic approach to reality seems to them “rudeness,” an insult to their honor, a misunderstanding of beauty. Lopakhin has his own understanding of beauty: “We will set up dachas, and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see a new life here.”
Lack of will, inability to live, and carelessness characterize these gentlemen. They are behind the times and must give up their home and their garden, their place to the new masters of life, sober, practical, smart and businesslike.
Lopakhin's philosophy: work is the basis of life. “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.” He is able to feel beauty, admires the picture of a blooming poppy. According to Trofimov, he has “thin, gentle fingers, like an artist... a subtle, gentle soul.” He understands that “with a pig’s snout in the Kalash row...” he is climbing. But with what triumph he says: “The cherry orchard is now mine!” My! (Laughs.) My God, gentlemen, my cherry orchard!..”
Chekhov judges strictly, he wants to be heard: “Yes, if you love your garden, beauty, do at least something to protect it from the ax, take responsibility for the family hearth, and don’t just shed tears of tenderness over them.” . Wake up from carelessness when trouble is on the doorstep! “And only one Firs remained devoted to that life to the end, and that is why he found himself forgotten in a boarded-up house, despite all the cares of Ranevskaya, Varya, Anya, Yasha. The guilt of the heroes before him is also a symbol of universal guilt for the death of the beautiful that was in the passing life. With the words of Firs, the play ends, and then only the sound of a broken string and the sound of an ax cutting down a cherry orchard are heard.
The new owner of the garden, the house, and all such gardens and houses, and all this life, has come. What is the future for Lopakhin? Probably, having become even more rich in the years remaining before the revolution, he will contribute to the economic prosperity of Russia and become a philanthropist. Maybe he will build schools and hospitals for the poor with his own money. There were many such people in Russian life: Morozovs, Mamontovs, Ryabushinskys, Alekseevs, Soldatenkovs, Tretyakovs, Bakhrushins. And today, entrepreneurs and business people could play a significant role in the country’s economy. But their behavior, disregard for spirituality, culture, desire only for personal enrichment can lead to a decline in the spiritual forces of society, to the decline of the state, their ability to destroy, without thinking about the future, a beautiful cherry orchard - a symbol of Russia in Chekhov - can lead to sad consequences .

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Ermilov Vladimir Vladimirovich

“Hello, new life!”

“Hello, new life!”

“The Cherry Orchard,” Chekhov’s dying genius creation, is a bold combination of comedy—“even a farce in places,” as Anton Pavlovich wrote about the play—with tender and subtle lyricism.

Laughter, free and cheerful, permeates all the positions of the play. But the lyrical beginning is no less significant in it. Chekhov is the creator of the most original, innovative genre of lyrical comedy, social vaudeville.

Marx has a deep thought that humanity is “laughing” saying goodbye to its past, to obsolete forms of life.

The farewell of the new, young, tomorrow's Russia to the past, which is moribund, doomed to an early end, the aspiration to the tomorrow of the homeland - this is the content of “The Cherry Orchard.”

The end of the old life is so ripe that it already seems vaudeville-ridiculous, “ghostly,” unreal. This is the mood of the play.

The outdated “types” of this passing life are also “ghostly.” These are the main characters of the play - Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev. With good reason they could say about themselves: “We don’t exist... we don’t exist, but it only seems that we exist.”

Autograph of A.P. Chekhov. "The Cherry Orchard"

Ranevskaya and Gaev are the owners of an estate, “more beautiful than which there is nothing in the world,” as one of the characters in the play, Lopakhin, says - a delightful estate, the beauty of which lies in the poetic cherry orchard. The “owners” brought the estate to a pitiful state with their frivolity and complete lack of understanding of real life; The estate is to be sold at auction. The rich peasant son, merchant Lopakhin, a friend of the family, warns the owners about the impending disaster, offers them his rescue projects, and encourages them to think about the impending disaster. But Ranevskaya and Gaev live with illusory ideas. Gaev is rushing around with fantastic projects. Both of them shed many tears over the loss of their cherry orchard, which they are sure they cannot live without. But things go on as usual, auctions take place, and Lopakhin himself buys the estate. When the disaster is over, it turns out that no special drama is happening for Ranevskaya and Gaev. Ranevskaya returns to Paris, to her absurd “love”, to which she would have returned anyway, despite all her words that she cannot live without her homeland and without the cherry orchard. Gaev also comes to terms with what happened. “A terrible drama”, which for its heroes, however, does not turn out to be a drama at all for the simple reason that they cannot have anything serious, nothing dramatic at all - such is the vaudeville basis of the play.

A.P. Chekhov in Yalta (1900)

The image of the cherry orchard plays a large, multifaceted role in the play. First of all, it symbolizes the poetry of old life, that poetry of “moonlit nights”, “white figures with thin waists”, “noble nests”, exhaustion, the obsolescence of which was so poignantly expressed in the story “At Friends”. This poetry has already degenerated into farce and vaudeville. The noble culture, once alive and fruitful, has long since become dead, turned into a “respected wardrobe”, to which the vaudeville Uncle Gaev, suffering from pathological talkativeness, addresses one of his usual buffoonish speeches on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the wardrobe. And the legitimate heir to the obsolete poetry of the “noble nests,” young Anya, Ranevskaya’s daughter, successor to Liza Kalitina, Tatyana Larina, cheerfully, with a youthful ringing voice, irrevocably says goodbye to all this outdated, dead “beauty” that has lost its living content. Student Petya Trofimov helps her in her spiritual development, in determining her attitude towards the past, present and future of her homeland. He opens Anya's eyes to the dark, terrible thing that lurked behind the poetry of noble culture.

“Think, Anya,” he says to the girl eagerly listening to him: “your grandfather, great-grandfather and all your ancestors were serf owners who owned living souls, and aren’t human beings looking at you from every cherry in the garden, from every leaf, from every trunk?” , don’t you really hear voices... Owning living souls - after all, this has reborn all of you, who lived before and are now living, so that your mother, you, uncle no longer notice that you live in debt, at someone else’s expense, at the expense of those people, whom you do not allow further than the front hall... After all, it is so clear that in order to begin to live in the present, we must first atone for our past, put an end to it..."

End of the past! This is the pathos of the play.

Trofimov calls Anya to the beauty of the future.

“I have a presentiment of happiness, Anya, I already see it... Here it is, happiness, here it comes, coming closer and closer, I can already hear its steps. And if we don’t see him, don’t recognize him, then what’s the harm? Others will see him!”

Petya Trofimov himself hardly belongs to the number of advanced, skillful, strong fighters for future happiness. In his entire appearance, we also feel a certain contradiction between the strength, scope of the dream and the weakness of the dreamer, characteristic of Vershinin, Tuzenbach and other Chekhov heroes. “Eternal student”, “shabby gentleman”, Petya Trofimov is pure, sweet, but eccentric and not serious enough for the great struggle. He has the traits of “klutziness” that are characteristic of almost all the characters in this play. But everything that he says to Anya is dear and close to Chekhov.

Once again we encounter the familiar Chekhovian motif of the proximity of happiness. But is the businessman Lopakhin really carrying it with him? This is how the theme of the play was presented by various interpreters from among those who included Chekhov in the department of the “radical” and other bourgeoisie. There is nothing more absurd than this most vulgar interpretation.

What kind of beauty can be associated with Lopakhin? So he will cut down the beautiful garden and let in the summer residents. The vulgar bourgeois prose of life will burst in here along with him - prose that destroys all beauty, cutting it off at the root! Lopakhin, as Petya Trofimov characterizes his function, is “a predatory beast that eats everything that gets in its way.” This is how he “eats” the beauty of the cherry orchard. Lopakhin is needed for “metabolism,” as Petya Trofimov says: to fulfill a short social role - to help destroy, “devour” what has already become obsolete.

No, the future is not with Lopakhin!

“The Cherry Orchard” is a play about the past, present and future of the homeland. The future appears before us in the form of an unprecedentedly beautiful garden.

“All of Russia is our garden,” Trofimov says in the second act, and Anya echoes him in the final act: “We will plant a new garden, more luxurious than this...”

The image of the beauty of the homeland itself appears before us.

The Gaev-Ranevskys are unworthy of either the beauty of the future, or even the beauty of the dying past. They are completely shredded, degenerate descendants, not even epigones of a past culture, but simply funny ghosts.

People will come who will be worthy of all the beauty of their native land. They will cleanse, redeem her entire past and turn her entire homeland into a magical, blooming garden. We feel that Anya will be with these people.

This is the poetic content of Chekhov’s wise and brightest, optimistic work.

Chekhov wanted the performance of the Art Theater to sound in the optimistic tone in which he wrote the play. He wanted the audience to laugh uncontrollably at the insignificant, “ghostly” world of the Gaevs and Ranevskys, he demanded that Ranevskaya be played by a “comic old woman”, he wanted the viewer to clearly feel the vaudeville quality of all the suffering of the tear-jerking heroes, all the tears they shed . When V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to him that there were “a lot of people crying” in the play, Anton Pavlovich was sincerely surprised by this impression. “Why,” he asks V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, “in your telegram you say that there are a lot of people crying in the play? Where are they? Only Varya alone, but this is because Varya is a crybaby by nature, and her tears should not arouse sad feelings in the viewer. I often see “through tears,” but this only shows the mood of the faces, not the tears.”

And in fact, can the viewer sympathize with the empty, insignificant suffering of empty, insignificant, although very good-natured, sweet people in their own way, like Ranevskaya and Gaev? Everything about them is funny and absurd, even the fact that Ranevskaya’s husband “died from champagne.” Here death itself becomes vaudeville, buffoonish - the death of a man who, as Ranevskaya says about her late husband, “did” only one thing in his life - debts.

The way in which Chekhov emphasizes the buffoonish “ghostliness” and frivolity of the entire world of the Gaev-Ranevskys is very interesting. - surrounds these central characters of his comedy with side characters, already openly farcical, completely grotesque, reflecting the comic worthlessness of the main figures.

Even in his youthful play “Fatherlessness,” Chekhov discovered this artistic technique of reflection. The lackey’s inner essence of the “masters” was emphasized by their similarity to their lackeys: the masters were reflected in the servants, according to the proverb: “like the master, like the servant,” or: “like the priest, so is the parish.” One of the heroes of “Fatherless” is amazed at how similar lackeys are to masters. “They're wearing tailcoats! Oh, damn it! You look awfully like gentlemen!” - he repeats.

In “The Cherry Orchard” this reflection motif develops in many variations, ranging from simple to complex, encrypted ones.

The maid Dunyasha says to her lover, the footman Yasha: “I have become anxious, I keep worrying. I was taken to the masters as a girl, I was now unaccustomed to simple life, and now my hands are white, white, like a young lady’s. She has become tender, so delicate, noble, I am afraid of everything. It's so scary. And if you, Yasha, deceive me, then I don’t know what will happen to my nerves.”

Dunyasha is a parody of “white figures with thin waists” and “thin”, “noble”, fragile nerves - figures that have long outlived their time. She rave about the same things they once raved about - dates under the moon, tender romances.

The figures of the eccentric magician Charlotte, the clerk Epikhodov, and the lackey Yasha have the same parody-reflective significance in the play. It is in these images - caricatures of “gentlemen” - that the complete illusory, clownish frivolity of the entire life of the Gaevs and Ranevskys is reflected with complete clarity.

In the lonely, absurd, unnecessary fate of the hanger-on Charlotte Ivanovna, there is a similarity with the absurd, unnecessary fate of Ranevskaya. Both of them regard themselves as something incomprehensibly unnecessary, strange, and both of them see life as foggy, unclear, somehow “ghostly.” Here's what Charlotte says about herself:

“Charlotte (thoughtful). I don’t have a real passport, I don’t know how old I am, and it still seems to me that I’m young. When I was a little girl, my father and mother went to fairs and gave performances, very good ones. And I did salto-mortale jumps and various things. And when my father and mother died, a German lady took me in and began to teach me. Fine. I grew up. Then she became a governess. But where I come from and who I am, I don’t know. Who are my parents? Maybe they didn’t get married... I don’t know. (Takes a cucumber out of his pocket and eats it.) I don’t know anything. (Pause.) I really want to talk, but not with anyone... I don’t have anyone... and who I am, why I am, is unknown..."

These are sad statements, but the performer of this role would be mistaken if she colored the entire image of Charlotte Ivanovna with sadness. The main thing about her is that she is addicted to tricks and eccentricities to the point of oblivion. From a “ghostly” life, in which everything is incomprehensible, in which “it only seems that we exist,” Charlotte goes into an even more ghostly world of eccentricity that mocks logic. In this escape from reality lies her consolation and her whole life.

Ranevskaya also “doesn’t understand her life,” like Charlotte, and she also “has no one to talk to.” She complains to Petya Trofimov in the words of Charlotte: “You see where the truth is and where the untruth is, but I’ve definitely lost my sight... I’m scared alone in silence...”

Like Charlotte, Ranevskaya also “everyone thinks she’s young,” and Ranevskaya lives like an eccentric hanger-on during her life, not understanding anything about her.

The buffoonish figure of Epikhodov is remarkable. With his “twenty-two misfortunes,” he also represents a caricature - of Gaev, and of the landowner Simeonov-Pishchik, and partly even of Petya Trofimov (let us remember Vershinin with the pettiness of his misfortunes). Epikhodov is a “klutz,” using the favorite saying of old man Firs, Gaev’s lackey. One of Chekhov’s contemporary critics correctly pointed out that “The Cherry Orchard” is “a play by klutzes.” Epikhodov focuses on this theme of the play. He is the soul of all “incompetence.”

After all, Gaev and Simeonov-Pishchik also have constant “twenty-two misfortunes”; like Epikhodov, nothing comes of all their intentions; they are haunted by comic failures at every step. The figure of Epikhodov emphasizes the frivolity, undramatic nature of these misfortunes, their farcical essence.

There are many purely grotesque moments in the image of Gaev. His tendency towards gaiety, buffoonery, incontinence of speech, organic laziness, and inability to do any kind of work are emphasized; all this is emphasized in Epikhodov. Like Epikhodov, everyone around him doesn’t take Gaev seriously. Both of them are very fond of the “beautiful” phrase.

Simeonov-Pishchik, who is constantly on the verge of complete bankruptcy and, out of breath, runs around to all his acquaintances asking them to lend money, also represents a complete “twenty-two misfortunes.” Simeonov-Pishchik is a man “living on credit,” as Petya Trofimov says about Gaev and Ranevskaya: these people live at someone else’s expense - at the expense of the people. And soon, soon their ghostly, absurd life must end.

But where does the lyrical beginning of “The Cherry Orchard” have its origins?

The play echoes Chekhov's constant sadness about beauty wasted in vain. Here it is sadness about the poetic cherry orchard, the elegiac sadness of farewell.

But this is a bright, Pushkin sadness. The whole play is imbued with the mood of a bright farewell to the passing life, with all the good and bad that was in it, the mood of a joyful greeting to the new, young.

The sadness of “The Cherry Orchard” cannot in any way be connected with the frivolous “suffering” of the Gaevs and Ranevskys. One has only to identify for a moment the lyrical beginning of the play - the image of a “cherry orchard” - with these vaudeville figures, one has only to consider Gaev and Ranevskaya as some kind of “representatives” of dying poetry and beauty, and one will have to take seriously all their experiences and all their tears . And then what Chekhov was so afraid of will happen: “The Cherry Orchard” will cease to be a lyrical comedy, “even a farce in places,” but will turn into a “heavy drama,” in which an abundance of tears will not only characterize the “mood of faces,” but also cause sadness. the viewer's mood. And the viewer, especially the modern, Soviet viewer, will experience an extremely awkward feeling: he will have to seriously “experience” the suffering of people who themselves are not capable of any serious experience. Chekhov will appear in a strange form. As if he were capable of suffering the “sufferings” of worthless, “ghost” people!

There is only one image in the play that does not contradict the beauty of the cherry orchard, but could harmoniously merge with it. This is Ann. But Anya is the image of spring, the image of the future. She says goodbye to all her old life. This younger sister of Olga, Masha and Irina differs from them in that she found her “Moscow”, just as Nadya, the heroine of the story “The Bride”, the last story of Anton Pavlovich, found her “Moscow”.

The image of Anya can be fully understood only when compared with the image of Nadia. The story “The Bride” was written in the same year, 1903, as “The Cherry Orchard”; in its theme and motifs it is partly a variant of The Cherry Orchard. The couple we meet in The Cherry Orchard: Anya and Petya Trofimov, corresponds to the couple we meet in The Bride: Nadya and Sasha. Between Nadya and Sasha there is the same relationship as between Anya and Petya. An “eternal student” who spent almost fifteen years in his painting school, an eccentric and a loser, Sasha is only a temporary, “passing” figure in Nadya’s life. He helped her understand herself; under his influence, Nadya broke up with her philistine fiancé, walked away from the crown, fled to the capital from her family, from the military stuffiness of vulgarity, from insignificant “happiness” - to the struggle for a wonderful future. And then, when she had already plunged into this struggle, into real life, Sasha seemed to her as still sweet, honest, pure, but far from being as smart and advanced as he had seemed to her before. After they had not seen each other for a long time , Sasha seemed to her “gray, provincial,” and then the whole “acquaintance with Sasha seemed to her sweet, but distant, distant past!” And her acquaintance with Petya will seem the same to Anya.

People like Petya Trofimov, Sasha and other related heroes of Chekhov’s work are distinguished by the fact that they bear the imprint of something eccentric, “stupid”; their significance in life is temporary, not independent. Not they, but some other people will realize the wonderful dream of a fair life...

The inner closeness of “The Bride” and “The Cherry Orchard” is reflected primarily in the fact that both works are colored by the dream of the imminent flourishing of their homeland. The heroes of “The Bride,” like the heroes of “The Cherry Orchard,” foresee the approaching time when there will be no gray “provincial” cities left in their native land, “everything will fly upside down, everything will change as if by magic. And then there will be huge, magnificent houses, wonderful gardens, extraordinary fountains, wonderful people.”

And with what a spring, bravura motif “The Bride” ends!

After a long separation, Nadya comes to her hometown for a few days. She “walked through the garden, along the street, looked at the houses, at the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the city had long since grown old, become obsolete, and everything was just waiting for something different.” the end, or the beginning of something young and fresh. Oh, if only this new, clear life would come soon, when you can look your fate directly and boldly in the eyes, recognize yourself as right, be cheerful and free! And such a life will come sooner or later... and a new, wide, spacious life was pictured ahead of her, and this life, still unclear, full of secrets, captivated and beckoned her.”

How different are the bright ends of “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Bride” from the ends of “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters”! Both Anya and Nadya found the path to which Chekhov called his heroes to search, and the joyful music of affirmation of life and struggle colors both “The Bride” and “The Cherry Orchard” - these dying works of Chekhov, most deeply imbued with light and youth.

It was quite clear to the reader and viewer what Anton Pavlovich could not explain due to censorship conditions: that both Anya and Nadya were going into the revolutionary struggle for the freedom and happiness of their homeland. V.V. Veresaev recalls that while reading Gorky’s “The Bride,” there was even a small controversy: to Veresaev’s remark that “that’s not how girls go into the revolution,” Chekhov replied: “There are different paths there.”

The reader could not help but understand that before him was a wonderful image of a Russian girl who had embarked on the path of struggle to turn her life around, to turn her entire homeland into a blooming garden. “The main thing is to turn your life around, and everything else is not necessary,” says Sasha.

It seemed to Anton Pavlovich himself, together with his heroes, that “everything has long since become old, outdated” and everything is just waiting for “the beginning of something young, fresh.” And with youthful joy he said goodbye to the past he hated. “Farewell, old life!” rings in the finale of “The Cherry Orchard” the young voice of Anya, the voice of young Russia, the voice of Chekhov.

The images of Anya and Nadya merge into a charming image of the bride - the image of the youth of the homeland. “Hello, new life!” - these words, spoken in The Cherry Orchard, were Chekhov's last words - words of Pushkin's joyful greetings to the new day of the motherland - the day of its freedom, glory and happiness.