Sunday night, and I finally opened The Cherry Orchard. It was on the World Literature list I stared at two days ago and did not close. Chekhov. A house, a family, and an orchard they love so much they would rather lose everything than cut it down.
I thought it would be about trees. It is about money, which annoyed me at first and then felt honest.
The family comes home after years away. The orchard is famous, even beautiful, and it does not pay. A man who used to be poorer than they are has a plan: divide the land, build summer houses, sell them. The family finds this vulgar. They talk about the past as if talking were a kind of payment. Meanwhile the debt sits there, not listening.
In Business we have a colder name for this. An asset is supposed to be useful, or to be sold. If you keep something because it reminds you of your childhood, that is not stupid, but it is also not a plan. Opportunity cost again: every year they keep the orchard as a memory, they do not keep the house as a house. I felt disloyal writing that sentence, because I also have things I would not sell. A sketchbook. The music box from June. They are not an estate, and nobody is coming to auction them. That is the difference, and Chekhov knows it.
What I cannot stop noticing is how people in the play speak past the problem. They have parties. They lose a purse. They remember a mother walking the rows of white trees. The merchant keeps repeating the maths, not unkindly, and they treat him as if maths were a lack of feeling. I do not think he is the villain. I also do not think love of trees is the villain. The play is uncomfortable because both things can be true at once, and still the bank will not accept a feeling as a payment.
This is the same argument as the rose, in a way, except Wilde made it a bird and Chekhov made it a whole childhood. Price is what someone will pay for the land. Value is what the family thinks the orchard is. Those two numbers never meet, so the story has to end with an axe. I have not reached the end yet. I already know the sound.
I am sixteen, and I want to study finance, which sounds like choosing the merchant. I do not want to be the person who only sees dachas. I also do not want to be the person who talks beautifully while the roof is sold. Maybe the point of reading this now, before school is fully noisy again, is to practise holding both. The orchard is real. The debt is real. A good sentence does not cancel a bad balance sheet.
I should sleep. Tomorrow I have to be a student again, not a landowner. I will read the next act on the bus, which is a smaller orchard, but it is the one I actually have.