The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s last play, opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on January 17, 1904. The directors of the theater, and of the play, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, scheduled the premiere to coincide with Chekhov’s forty-fourth name-day (the feast of St. Anthony) and the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into literature. At the end of the third act, they brought Chekhov on stage, where he had to endure the applause and congratulations of theater members, critics and the audience—“endure” because Chekhov hated such public attention, and also because the tuberculosis he had suffered from for many years was reaching its final stage and he was barely able to stand through the twenty-minute tribute. Stanislavsky describes the moment in My Life in Art: “He stood deathly pale and thin on the right side of the stage and could not control his coughing, while gifts were showered on him and speeches in his honor were being made.”^* He died less than six months later in a sanatorium in Badenweiler, Germany.

      Chekhov began to think about writing a new play for the Moscow Art Theatre soon after the production of Three Sisters in 1901. In a letter from his home in Yalta to the actress Olga Knipper, whom he was about to marry, he gives some suggestions for their wedding trip, and adds: “At moments I experience an overwhelming desire to write a four-act comedy for the Art Theatre. And I’m going to do so, if nothing interferes, except that I won’t let the theater have it before the end of 1903.”^† His facetious calculation of the time turned out to be exact, but his conception of the play as a comedy, which he insisted on, caused disputes that started in his correspondence with Stanislavsky and other members of the Art Theatre even before the play went into rehearsal, and continue to this day.

      Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko kept urging their leading playwright to give them a new play. On February 5, 1903, Chekhov finally wrote to reassure Stanislavsky: “I do intend to sit down properly with the play after 20 February, and finish it by 20 March. It is all complete in my head. Its title is The Cherry Orchard; it has four acts, in the first of which flowering cherry trees are seen through the windows, an entire orchard of white. And the women will be in white dresses.”^‡

      However, the work went much more slowly than he anticipated, partly because of his ill health, partly because of the difficulty of the composition itself. In early September, Chekhov wrote to Nemirovich: “My play (if I continue to work as I’ve been working up to now) will be finished soon, rest assured. Writing the second act was hard, very hard, but it seems to have come out all right.” After two further revisions, he mailed the script to Olga Knipper in Moscow. She received it on October 18th. Stanislavsky read it the next day and sent Chekhov two enthusiastic telegrams, followed on October 22nd by a passionate letter of appreciation:

      To my mind, The Cherry Orchard is your best play. I am fonder of it even than of dear Seagull. It is not a comedy nor a farce, as you wrote—it’s a tragedy, whatever outlet to a better life you may reveal in the last act. The effect it makes is colossal, achieved by half-tones and delicate pastels . . . I can hear you say: “Excuse me, but it is a farce.” . . . No, for the average man it is a tragedy . . . if it were possible, I would really like to play all the parts, darling Charlotta included.^§

      In November, a copy was sent to the theater censors for review. They demanded that two short passages, deemed politically unacceptable, be cut from the speeches of Petya Trofimov in Act Two. In early December Chekhov went to Moscow himself, where he attended rehearsals and made some further small revisions. There his work as playwright ended; the resulting script, with his handwritten corrections, has come down to us. But he also took part in the staging of the play, discussing the sets for each act, the rooms they take place in, the details of the open-air scenery in the second