ABSTRACT
. . .For anything I see, said Johnson's friend, ‘old’ Meynell, foreigners are fools. Russians are foreigners, but, even so, it is highly improbable that they are such fools as they seem in the English version of Chekhov's comedy. The fact is, when actors are set to present alien types which they have never seen and which they can only imagine from the necessarily imperfect indications of a translation, they are bound to produce grotesques. Further, who says translation says transvaluation - the relations of the parts are altered, and so the balance of the whole is upset. Though Anton Chekhov's comedy may be a harmonious work of art, presented at home in its own atmosphere before people who know all about, if they do not actually live, the life it depicts, Mrs. Edward Garnett's ‘Cherry Orchard’ cannot but strike an English audience as something queer, outlandish, even silly. . . . [The characters] all seem children who have never grown up. Genuine comedy and scenes of pure pathos are mixed with knock-about farce.
