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One hears a sound coming from afar, like from the sky, a sound of a string breaking, a sad, dying sound. In the distance, from the garden, the axe chops at the tree.
And then the curtain falls. Not only on Chekhov's artistic journey but also on his very existence, as he - ill for a long time - died six months after the first staging of ""The Cherry Orchard".
Indeed, reread by posterity, the final director's note of the play seems to gain a double meaning: on one hand, it foreshadows the last, extreme breaths of life of its author, who already hears the sound of nails sealing the coffin; on the other hand, it is a sort of testament, a key to understanding all his theater.
The common belief holds Chekhov to be an essentially naturalist playwright, a man anchored to the psychological and social mechanisms of the present to which fate had destined him, reflecting perfectly in his artistic production.
But there's more; in Chekhov, little is as it seems, and the poetry of ""The Cherry Orchard" is absolutely universal.
The chronicles tell us he was furious with the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre who had "over-typified" the characters. Chekhov's merchants are not simple merchants; they retain within themselves an aesthetic sense that certainly doesn't dissolve with their profession; the fallen nobles are not simply vacuous and outside of History, but at times they exude an unexpected practical sense and have an empathy far from superficial towards other social classes; the servants are not reduced to two-dimensional caricatures who zealously serve their masters only to complain when they are absent, but their passions and desires are expressed with a subtlety crucial to the narrative.
What was missing was above all the evolution of the individual character in the becoming of the play. A progressive unveiling that should have contaminated the attitude of all the other actors, who, in turn, should have contributed to the single mutation.
Chekhov's ire spared neither Stanislavski's direction, which had given the work a unidirectional interpretation: a sociological drama in which the property's garden marked the passing of the torch between the old nobility and the emerging merchant class.
Instead, Chekhov wrote ""The Cherry Orchard" as a "Comedy" where the comic elements - a legacy of his early One-Act plays - substantiate and strengthen the work. There's a temptation to downplay them only because they are inserted in a context that is not comic.
The point is that this work marks the final stage of a process that began with ""The Seagull" and in this sense, the title-symbol they share is not coincidental.
What Chekhov desires is to depict the life of a social microcosm during the flow of time.
For this reason, comedy and drama, realism and symbolism, grotesque and everyday, nobles and merchants coexist and influence each other continually in the folds of the play. For this - and this is the great novelty brought by Chekhov the dramatist - it doesn't make sense to speak of leading roles, secondary roles, and extras (or more or less main themes): the contribution that everyone gives to life is decisive and irreplaceable.
Above all looms that garden: its imminent sale, its upcoming destruction. Ominous symbol, symbol of death.
But the death to which Chekhov refers is not that of some social order: it's rather the end of a life shared together with others, a segment of Time and Space that will never return for any of the characters.
Here lies the universality of Chekhov's message.
Because all of us have heard, are hearing, or will soon hear that "sound coming from afar, like from the sky, a sound of a string breaking, a sad, dying sound. In the distance, from the garden, the axe chops at the tree."
Certain sounds all have the same noise.
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