SOURCE: "The Music of The Cherry Orchard: Repetitions in the Russian Text," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, September 1991, pp. 340-50

In the following essay, Anderson detects "musical structures" in The Cherry Orchard.

Kay Unruh Des Roches has recently demonstrated how an analysis of the verbal repetitions in the original text of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea contributes to a specific understanding of the play which a close study of its English translations would not be able to yield. Her essay suggests that all plays in translation "need a criticism based on a detailed description of untranslatable elements in the original text," a criticism which would be as relevant to the theater as to the classroom.¹ Chekhov's major plays certainly merit such an approach, not only because they are so popular in both settings, but because, even in translation, their verbal repetitions (and acoustic repetitions) are such...