Three Sisters
CHARACTERS
1 Gymnasium: See note 10 to Ivanov, Act Three.
2 nyanya: See note i to Uncle Vanya, Characters.
3 provincial capital: Seat of the governor of a province or guberniya, and of many institutions of local government; the town in which Three Sisters is set is loosely modelled on Perm, a remote city in the Urals.
ACT ONE
1 name-day: Day of the saint after whom a person is named in the Orthodox calendar — often celebrated more than a birthday. St Irina’s day is 5 May in the Orthodox calendar (17 May in the Western).
2 . Cadet school: A secondary stream of military high schools.
3 Dobrolyubov: See note 9 to Ivanov, Act Two.
4 ‘An oak in leaf ... a chain of gold’: From the Prologue to Pushkin’s fairy-tale poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), known to every Russian schoolchild.
5 ‘He had no time ... upon him fell’: Quotation from Krylov’s fable ‘The Peasant and the Labourer’ (1815). The Aesopian fables of Ivan Aleksandrovich Krylov (1769-1844) were classics of the schoolroom.
6 Novodevichy Cemetery: The old cemetery attached to the Novodevichy Convent in south-western Moscow, where many famous Russians are buried (including Chekhov and his wife).
7 uniform frock-coat: Kulygin as a civil servant wears uniform.
8 Court Councillor: The seventh civilian grade in the Table of Ranks, see note 1 to The Seagull, Act Four.
9 Feci quod potui ... potentes: ‘I have done what I can. Let those who are able do better’ (Latin). The words spoken by the Consuls of ancient Rome in handing over to their successors.
10 mens sana in corpore sano: ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body’ — Latin tag from Juvenal, Satires, X.356.
11 rolling his rs: Rode is probably of foreign (French or German) origin.
ACT TWO
1 The set of Act One: It is some twenty-one months later. The coming of the mummers indicates that it is Carnival time — Shrovetide.
2 Testov’s ... Bolshoy Moskovsky: Among Moscow’s better restaurants. The Baedeker guidebook of 1914 still lists both these and gives the latter a star.
3 Veneʐici: ‘Come here’ (French).
4 ‘Gentlemen ... boring!’: The last sentence of ‘The story of how Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’ (1832).
5 Berdichev: Balzac indeed got married in Berdichev in the Ukraine — to his mistress Madame Hanska, who had estates nearby, a few months before his death in 1850.
6 Tsitsihar: A city in Manchuria, north-east China (Qiqihar).
7 the Panama affair: The French Minister of Public Works Charles Baïhot (1843 — 1905) was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for accepting a substantial bribe in connection with the construction of the Panama Canal. After his release he published a diary, Impressions cellulaires (1898).
8 Je vousprie ... grossières: ‘Please forgive me, Marie, but your manners are a little crude’ (French).
9 Il parait ... pas: ‘It seems my Bobik isn’t asleep yet’ (French).
10 I am strange ... Aleko: Solyony’s first remark is a quotation of Chatsky’s words from Griboyedov’s Woefrom Wit, III.1. Aleko is the hero of Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies (1824), but the words declaimed by Solyony here and later are made up. More recently, the poem had been adapted into the libretto of Rachmaninov’s one-act opera Aleko, written when he was nineteen (1892). That too may have been on Chekhov’s mind.
11 Lermontov’s character: Touchy and quarrelsome, Lermontov was killed in a duel.
12 Basta!: ‘Enough!’ (Italian).
13 ‘Oh lobby ...’: A traditional folksong with a lively dance-tune but near-nonsense words.
14 drink to brotherhood: I.e. they will use the familiar forms of address to one another.
15 Common little woman!: The original here is meshchanka, a petite bourgeoise.
16 O fallacem ... spem!: ‘O illusory hope of mankind!’ - Latin tag from Cicero.
ACT THREE
1 Olga and Irina’s room: Another year has passed. Natasha has had a second child.
2 In 1812 Moscow burnt down too: Much of Moscow was destroyed in 1812 by fires, both deliberate and accidental, after Napoleon’s occupation of the city.
3 Invino veritas: ‘In wine is truth’ — another Latin tag, a cliché even in antiquity.
4 Poland ... Chita: I.e. to the opposite ends of the Russian Empire: to Poland, last an independent kingdom in 1795, or to Chita in eastern Siberia, virtually at the Chinese frontier, on the recently opened Trans-Siberian Railway.
5 ‘Won‘tyousample a date from the palm-tree’: Snatch from an operetta, but Chekhov when asked could not remember which.
6 ‘Allto love ... blessings flow...’: From Prince Gremin’s aria in the third act of Tchaikovsky’s opera Yevgeny Onegin (1879), after Pushkin’s verse novel (VIII, 29: 1 — 3).
7 ‘Mythought could well ... the geese I fear’: An inexact quotation from Krylov’s fable ‘The Geese’ (1811). See also note 5 to Three Sisters, Act One.
8 Amo, amas ... amant: ‘I love, thou lovest, he/she loves,’ etc. — the conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb amare, ‘to love’.
9 Omnia mea mecum porto: ‘All my goods I carry with me’ — Latin tag.
10 Gogol’s madman: Poprishchin in Gogol’s Notes of a Madman (1835). His narration is characteristically broken by exclamations of ‘silence!’
ACT FOUR
1 The old garden ... : It is summer and rather more than a year later. The action of the whole play takes place over approximately four years.
2 kochany: ‘Beloved, darling’ (Polish).
3 Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay: The title and refrain of an American music hall song by Henry J. Sayers of 1891. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and caught on all over Europe. (The Russian refrain is ta-ra-ra-bum-bi-ya!)
4 modus vivendi: ‘Way of living’ (Latin).
5 he thought it was written in Latin: To spell this out — chepukha (nonsense) as handwritten in Russian could be read as the meaningless renyxa in Latin script.
6 the consecutive ut: I.e. ut meaning ‘so that’ in Latin.
7 Stanislav: The Tsarist decoration of the Order of St Stanislav. Chekhov himself in 1899 had been awarded a third-class Stanislav for his ‘outstanding work in the field of popular education’.
8 ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’: ‘La prière d‘une vierge’, a popular piano piece.
9 ‘He had no time ... upon him fell’: See note 5 to Act One.
10 Walks off with Chebutykin: Andrey too must have left the stage. An oversight of Chekhov’s.
11 ‘Andhe, so restless ... can offer calm’: The concluding two lines, slightly misquoted in the Russian, of Lermontov’s poem ‘The Sail’ (1832).
12 kvass: See note 2 to The Cherry Orchard, Act One.
13 Il ne faut pas ... Vous êtes un ours: ‘You mustn’t make a noise, Sophie has already gone to sleep. You are a bear’ (French). Natasha’s French is not quite accurate, as one might expect.
14 ‘An oak in leaf...’: Masha is still quoting the opening of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (see note 4 to Act One). The cat appears in the next two lines - thus: ‘An oak in leaf beside the seashore, upon that oak a chain of gold, and day and night the chain a-circling, a learned cat stalks round and round.’
15 and the maid: Chekhov forgets to mention the entry of the maid in his stage direction.
The Cherry Orchard
CHARACTERS
1 Firs: The old ex-serf is named after the obscure Orthodox Saint Thyrsus, martyred in 251 (rendered yet more obscure by transliteration).
ACT ONE
1 muʐhik: Male Russian peasant, a word which can bear literal, affectionate or derogatory meanings.
2 kvass: As much the national drink as vodka, a ‘beer’, sweet, mildly acid and mildly alcoholic, made from fermenting grain with water and sugar.
3 twenty-five thousand a year income: Maxim Gorky’s play Summerfolk examines critically just such a c
olony of dachas and its summer population. The first draft was finished a month after The Cherry Orchard opened on 20 January 1904. Did Gorky conceivably intend his play as some kind of comment on Chekhov’s?
4 the Eighties: The period of the reactionary governments of Alexander III.
ACT TWO
1 salto mortale: cartwheel or somersault (Italian).
2 Buckle: Henry Buckle (1821 — 62), English social historian, whose History of English Civiliʐation was translated into Russian in 1861.
3 Emancipation: The Emancipation of the serfs had come in 1861. Before that most domestic servants were owned and tied serfs. After Emancipation they had freedom of movement.
4 rude to servants: I.e. they call servants by the familiar ‘thou’.
5 ‘Mybrother ... whose moan ...’: The passer-by is quoting (inaccurately) the opening of a poem by the hugely popular Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862 — 87) — literally, ‘My friend, my brother, tired, suffering brother’ (1881). And the second phrase is a snatch from a poem by Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov (1821 — 77), ‘Thoughts by a main entrance’ (1858).
6 ... Okhmeliya ... : Here and in his next line Lopakhin is roughly quoting Hamlet’s words to Ophelia (Hamlet, III.1) and is making a heavy-handed play on the name of Ophelia and the verb okhmelyat‘,to intoxicate. See also note 12 to The Seagull, Act One.
ACT THREE
1 Promenade ... vos dames: Pishchik’s calls during the dance are: ‘Partners, promenade!’, ‘Grand circle, get set!’ and ‘Gentlemen, on your knees and thank your partners.’
2 horse ... in the Senate: The unstable Roman Emperor Gaius, nicknamed Caligula (12 — 41), was said to have intended to make his favourite horse Incitatus Consul (and therefore a Senator).
3 Nietʐsche: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 — 1900), German philosopher.
4 leʐginka: A dance tune from the Caucasus.
5 Eins, ʐwei, drei!: ‘One, two, three!’ (German).
6 ‘I too ... attractive’: It is impossible to translate the voice’s, that is Charlotta‘s, mistake here with Russian gender - the verb which should be plural and feminine is singular and masculine.
7 Guter Mensch ... : ‘A good man but a bad musician’ (German) — a phrase from Clemens Brentano’s comedy Ponce de Leon (1804).
8 ‘The woman who was a sinner’: A poem of 1857 by Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (poet, novelist and dramatist, 1817 — 75) on the subject of Mary Magdalene, which opens with a feast in a rich man’s house. It was a popular subject for recital at literary soirees.
ACT FOUR
1 basta: Enough (Italian).
2 alleʐ: Go (French).
3 sit ... a moment more: It is a Russian custom to sit down for a moment before embarking on a journey.
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