A Blog Post

In his play, The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov exhibits possibilities of literature new to my experience. In his description of events, he integrates vivid detail along with mention to banal activities. As we read we find characters doing anything from smoking to eating pickles, even when mention of these makes no relation to the dialogue. I had never read anything of the sort, expecting every word to add up to the ultimate meaning of a text. It took some time for me to adapt to this new narration, and still longer for me to appreciate such intense detail.

At the beginning of Act 2, Charlotta begins to share her past. She mentions details about her parents, her education and her country of birth. Suddenly, the narration intrudes into her story as we learn that she “takes a cucumber out of her pocket and eats it” (337). Not only is it completely isolated from her story; there is nothing that leads up to, or suggests, the entrance of a vegetable. At first it seems weird, almost as if this play was some sort of strange production from one of those guys in history whose strange mental state is their most intriguing asset. It continues to happen repeatedly, and as we read “Yawns, then lights a cigar,” we feel as if we were about to yawn as we create connections to reality. Then, after enough yawns, we realize that the problem is not this text but other narrations we are used to. Our frustrations don’t come from abnormality, but from extreme normality. It is Chekhov’s intent to mimic reality, or the normal, mundane events of everyday life, that exasperates us.

Reflect now upon the implications of reality. The first problem I face after such reflection is the intent of literature. Is writing, and other forms of art, supposed to imitate reality as to produce a tangible record of history? Are they supposed to recreate reality with opinion as to allow other to live their experience, or is it supposed to be an outlet for creativity and the materialization of individual conceptions? I tend to be very objective, and therefore writing in my life used to be primarily a means to keep record and reflect reality. Although I continue to enjoy objective writing and such texts that analyze numbers and a reality founded in science, these past years I have undergone a paradigm shift. With every novel that I read I begin to question my mentality as I find delight in literature beyond the mere facts writing can transmit. Even beyond that, this play proves how facts can become tiresome at times when our lives are already being bombarded by meaningless data.