LOPAKHIN. Please attend carefully! Your estate is only
thirteen miles from the town, the railway runs by, and if the
cherry orchard and the land by the river are broken up into
building lots and are then leased off for villas you'll get at
least twenty-five thousand roubles a year profit out of it.
GAEV. How utterly absurd!
LUBOV. I don't understand you at all, Ermolai Alexeyevitch.
LOPAKHIN. You will get twenty-five roubles a year for each
dessiatin from the leaseholders at the very least, and if you
advertise now I'm willing to bet that you won't have a vacant plot
left by the autumn; they'll all go. In a word, you're saved. I
congratulate you. Only, of course, you'll have to put things
straight, and clean up. ... For instance, you'll have to pull down
all the old buildings, this house, which isn't any use to anybody
now, and cut down the old cherry orchard. ...
LUBOV. Cut it down? My dear man, you must excuse me, but you don't
understand anything at all. If there's anything interesting or
remarkable in the whole province, it's this cherry orchard of ours.
LOPAKHIN. The only remarkable thing about the orchard is that it's
very large. It only bears fruit every other year, and even then you
don't know what to do with them; nobody buys any.
GAEV. This orchard is mentioned in the "Encyclopaedic Dictionary."
LOPAKHIN. [Looks at his watch] If we can't think of anything and
don't make up our minds to anything, then on August 22, both the
cherry orchard and the whole estate will be up for auction. Make up
your mind! I swear there's no other way out, I'll swear it again.
FIERS. In the old days, forty or fifty years back, they dried the
cherries, soaked them and pickled them, and made jam of them, and
it used to happen that ...
GAEV. Be quiet, Fiers.
FIERS. And then we'd send the dried cherries off in carts to Moscow
and Kharkov. And money! And the dried cherries were soft, juicy,
sweet, and nicely scented. ... They knew the way. ...
LUBOV. What was the way?
FIERS. They've forgotten. Nobody remembers.
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
why does this make me think of Oblomov? wonderful photographs.
ReplyDeletesomebody else said: why not oncle vanya. anyway it must be russian, I answered, the whole stimmung, what we call here "the melancholic russian soul". I was so happy when I saw the pictures, I thought immediately oh they are for A.
ReplyDeleteI was reading about Mauthner, in a rather disappointing book, "Wittgenstein's Vienna". I had been expected much more. Anyway, it would be impossible to read Mauthner here, we don't have such a library. yes, that's how things are.
[I like to play like this, move the mouse over the feather, the ineffable one, and then there is "Antonia" appearing and I start to dream about the sand and the deep tranquillity hidden in the two "a" of your name, but also something vaguely menacing, in the way the sea can be tranquil and menacing in the same time, "A noir", thought Rimbaud, A is "golfes d'ombre". and sometimes I feel this in your images and it seems to me there is some kind of baudelairian correspondance between sounds and images and your mysterious words. schlaf gut, ich traeume weiter...]
yes it looks very russian. maybe i thought of Oblomov because of the quiet, the timelessness of it and i always thought Oblomov lived in kind of a timelessness. and i think i can see this sandlike tranquility and a vague depth in deinem foto auch, aber deins sieht so viel meehr franzoesisch aus, nach Milchkaffee am morgen und verschlafenen Tagen, Tagen, die verschlafen begonnen werden mit Notizen und Buechern und dann mit lieben Menschen, mit denen man ueber Kunst spricht, oder Musik, die man gerade gehoert hat, und verbringt so den Tag und lernt immer neue interessante Dinge kennen...
ReplyDeleteund was ich noch sagen wollte, ich mag das so, dass du so denkst, oh diese fotos passen zu billos gedicht oder diese zu antonia, das ist genau das in Humboldt, man sieht irgendwo was und gebraucht die eigenen "denkkraft", um es zurückzustrahlen und dadurch wird es nur noch groesser...und das schoenste ist, die fotos machen dich gluecklich. und man 'just' gibt ab...also das bringt so einen grosszuegigen frieden in die seele....
oh interesting, you didn't like Wittgenstein's Vienna, I read it too, and i always thought well it's maybe not of superbig detail, but provides at least some sort of overview. what didn't you like about it?
ja traeume weiter. es ist noch so frueh.
and now have a sudden urge to see more of your photos, you :) now :)
ReplyDeleteoh it is not that I didn't like it, I found it very useful but it is as you say, lacking in a more detalied or subtle analysis, it leaves one with a constant feeling that something is missing, and that something could just happen to be the most interesting or important part.
ReplyDeleteand yes, photos - taking them is pure ek-stasis, or how can I put it? a beam of light right through the cortex and deeper down through the sap of the heart. and then there is the zurueckstrahlung yes, the silent exchange of joy.
yes i understand i thought this is maybe because they have written it together or so. yes it is not at all like for instance Simmel or those other scientific late 19th century books. i made many photographs today, of white flowers. and in this way, you know, against the sun, and i thought this is exactly this, photographing plants against the sun, this way how they zurueckscheinen, this is exactly that.
ReplyDeleteyes i understand i thought this is maybe because they have written it together or so. yes it is not at all like for instance Simmel or those other scientific late 19th century books. i made many photographs today, of white flowers. and in this way, you know, against the sun, and i thought this is exactly this, photographing plants against the sun, this way how they zurueckscheinen, this is exactly that, this silent joy.
ReplyDeleteoh zeig sie mir, ich sehne mich danach.
ReplyDelete