Lopakhin character analysis and review in The

Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov(2004)

The role of Lopakhin is very important in highlighting the ludicrous attitude of Lyubov . He is a practical
person and flourishing businessman. He belongs to the lower strata of Russian society that gained
affluence after the emancipation of serfs. His "father was a serf". He himself had served the aristocratic
family of Lubov once. He advises her to "divide up the orchard...rent them out". It would earn her an
income of a "twenty thousand roubles a year" as well as she will be able to save her a vast portion of the
orchard. But she is concerned more for the symbol of her aristocratic name i.e. Cherry Orchard. This is
really silly, laughable and ironical. But this holds deep pathos too. "Cut it down?" is her reaction to the
advice of Lopakhin. Ironically, though she does not want to cut even a single tree of the orchard, yet not
cutting a portion of the orchard would mean auction of the entire orchard. And the worst thing is...the
serf buys the orchard in auction. Though Lopakhin is a big success in business yet he seems to have
neglected the most important part of his life i.e. love and family. Varya is in deep love with him but he
would ignore her at all events despite the fact that she is a good match for him and he does like her but
Varya feels very negative about him: "His mind is all consumed with his deals, his business; I'm the
furthest thing from it...Everyone is saying we're congratulating me, but the truth of it is there's nothing
there, nothing at all whatsoever, it's all just a dream". His role remains more of a professional business
man than that of a sympathiser and rescuer of the family. Though he really and awfully respects
Lyubove yet he would not help her out of the situation except for the suggestion to divide the land into
portions and lease it out to the vacationers. Everybody in the play expects that he would save the family
but he acts like a pure utilitarian.

Lopakhin
Lopakhin is a wealthy businessman whose grandfather was once a serf on the
Ranevsky estate. Though sometimes seen as a calculating opportunist, he loves the
Ranevsky family and tries to persuade Mrs. Ranevsky (who helped him as a child) to cut
down the orchard to clear land for building country vacation cottages for the rising
middle class. He grows increasingly impatient with her as she refuses to see the solution
he suggests and does nothing to save the estate. Lopakhin eventually buys the estate at
the auction, and in a vulgar display during the ball, he rejoices in owning the estate his
family was once forced to serve. Much is made of the fact that Varya loves Lopakhin and
that the two should marry, but he is too consumed with making money to propose to
her. Lopakhin represents the triumph of vulgarity and ignorance of the middle class
over the traditions of nobility and elegance of Czarist Russia.
The Cherry Orchard is a tragedy despite the fact that
Chekhov described it as a comedy". How far would you
agree?(2005)
The prime characters of the play remain unsuccessful in achieving what
they could have done vey easily. The tragedy of Lyubov is that she is
extravaggant and wants to seeks physical and emotional love of a young
man leaving her daughters at the hands of this cruel world. She is
probably a bit too much preoccupied with herself. Her daughter, on the
other hand, remain unable to take control of the matters in theri own
hands and cannot save their estate from auction. We find all the
characters below human standards. Anya is stupid and foolish while
Varya is a bit too rigid in her self woven beliefs that Lopakhin is least
interested in her; infact, she herself does not try.
Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’: Comedy or Tragedy?
On the 17th of January 1904, The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov had its premiere at the
Moscow Art Theatre. The play was staged by the famous actor/director and creator of the
eponymous Stanislavski method, known as “method acting”, Constantin Stanislavski. The
original intention of Chekhov was for The Cherry Orchard to be a comedy; yet, Stanislavski
turned it into a tragedy. Despite the fact that, as remarked by Jean-Louis Barrault, the play has a
relatively simple story line: “In Act One, the cherry orchard is in danger of being sold, in
Act Two it is on the verge of being sold, in Act Three it is sold, and in Act Four it has been
sold” (Svetlana Evdokimova, What’s so Funny about losing One’s Estate, or Infantilism in “The
Cherry Orchard”, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter, 2000), The
Cherry Orchard provoked a rather complex discussion on the multi-layered understanding of its
true message.

It seems that even before its opening there was much confusion as to what the play was really
about. In a letter to his wife, Olga Knipper, from the 19th of October 1903, Chekhov said: “The
Odessa newspapers have reported the plot of my play. It doesn’t resemble it a bit.” (Anton
Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary). The article in
Odessa News outlined the plot of The Cherry Orchard on the basis of some third-hand account
of the play. According to the article, the first act showed a cherry orchard in full bloom featuring
a group of young people, who then gradually age as the play progresses. This was obviously not
true as “the central role in the play is that of an old woman” (from a letter to Vera
Kommissarzhevskaya (Yalta, January 27, 1903)). Even more distress was brought on Chekhov
by Stanislavsky, who claimed that, “This is not a comedy, not a farce, as you wrote; it is a
tragedy, whatever outlet for a better life you may have offered in the last act… I hear you
saying: ‘Wait a minute, but this is a farce…’ No, for an ordinary person this is a tragedy.”
(Evdokimova). Chekhov was very irritated by these distorted perceptions, which eventually put
him into a state of prolonged depression.

Then why did Stanislavski and the press assume the play to be tragic or sentimental? Was it
perhaps because of certain preconceived implications drawn from the title and the undeniably
sad ending? After all, the idea of a cherry orchard brings to mind certain sentimentalist vision or
metaphor on the passing of time – the process of germination, growth, blossoming, bearing fruits
and dying.  But according to Maurice Bénichou, assistant director of Peter Brook’s 1981
production of The Cherry Orchard, the play is neither sentimental nor tragic, but pathetic and
comic: “These characters are childish, excessive: when disasters occur, we cry with them;
then we forget them, just as they do.”” (Evdokimova). Furthermore, as to the words of
Svetlana Evdokimova: “Clearly, the source of the comic lies not in the play’s fabula or
situation, not in what happens, but in how it happens and to whom it happens. The
enigmatic, captivating, and almost mesmerising effect that The Cherry Orchard continues to
exert on its audience is to be found in its good-humoured but foolish protagonists – both
charming in their gullibility and pathetic in their utter confusion. But with the exception of
several minor farcical characters, most of the play’s characters cannot be classified as
traditional comic types. … the play focuses on the universal childishness of Russian society,
and the comic nature of the play’s characters stems to a large extent from their
infantilism.” (Evdokimova).

The ‘childishness’ refers here to a child-like behaviour of a grown-up, or, possibly, a lack of
acceptance of one’s own maturity. Bearing in mind that the play overlapped with very important
changes in Russian society, the intended ‘childishness’ of the play can be understood as a
representation of immaturity of different social classes – after all, the aristocracy, represented by
Ranevskaya, is unable to accept its social degradation; whilst on the other hand, the liberated
serfs – represented by the successful merchant Lopakhin, are still not ready to fully accept their
social ‘upgrading’. Therefore, Chekhov, by giving people a chance to laugh at these ‘childish’
characters, “indirectly and subtly facilitates the process of growth in his audience. By
laughing at the characters’ lack of maturity, we become more mature ourselves, for, as was
suggested by Freud in his discussion of the functions of humor, a good sense of humor is an
essential component of maturity. If, as it has been demonstrated in more recent research in
the area of cognitive development, humor is a force in the process of maturity, then
Chekhov’s choice of the genre of comedy for the treatment of infantilism is truly a
felicitous one and even therapeutic: not only is comedy the most amusing and enjoyable
medium by which to discuss human weaknesses and society’s flaws, but it is the most
effective way of dealing with the subject of maturity and infantilism. For it is by
appreciating the play’s comic nature that the reader or spectator grows in maturity, that is,
responds to the comedy’s criticism of infantilism in the most appropriate way. Whether
Russia will come of age remains to be seen. But Chekhov’s audience, one hopes, will do so.”
(Evdokimova).

How far do you think Chekhov is successful in presenting the theme of the
passing of the old order through the symbol of cherry orchard? (P.U. 2006)
 The play’s dominant theme is social change. We are made aware of this from the very
opening in the conversation between Lopakhin, the self-made man, and Dunyasha, the maid
with pretensions to gentility. Nearly every character is associated to some degree with social
ambiguity. Lyubov Andreyevna herself has lowered her status through marriage—her brother
tells us at the end of Act I that she had married someone who was not a nobleman. Her elder
daughter, Varya is adopted and is of peasant or lower class origin as she tells Lopakhin in Act II.
In effect, Varya seems more like a housekeeper than a daughter of the house. She is
characterized in Chekhov’s stage directions by her keys, (i.e., housekeeper, and during her
quarrel with Yepichodov in Act III, she seems mortally offended by the reference of this estate
clerk to her ‘superiors’. Most telling of all, she always addresses her mother and uncle by the
polite form of ’you’ (vy), whereas the true daughter Anya addresses them in the familiar form
(ty).

Anya herself will turn her back on the estate and the old life, under the influence of
Trofimov, who, although his own father was a drug store owner, is comically referred to as a
“shabby gentleman”. The real gentry, as exemplified by Lyubov Andreyevna, her brother Gayev
and the neighbour Simeonov—Pishchik, are chronically short of money. The Gayev family estate
will be sold, and Gayev himself will be offered a job in a bank.
Changing Times
Times are obviously changing. The younger servants, Yasha and Dunyasha, give themselves
airs and ape their masters. Dunyasha dances at the ball in Act III as though she were a guest,
and indeed the real guests are of low social status. Firs comments: ‘We used to have generals,
barons and admirals dancing at our balls, but now we send for the post-office clerk and the
station-master, and even they don’t come too willingly.’ The presence of such figures is in itself
significant—they represent the modern world of rapid communication: the railway (newly built)
and the telegraph (Lyubov Andreyevna is constantly being summoned back by telegram to her
lover in Paris). Thus Lyubov Andreyevna’s ball not only acknowledges social change, it invites
the new forces which are disrupting the old way of life.
Lopakhin, the self-made merchant of peasant origin, stands at the centre of this social
change. He is the bridge between the old world and the new. The ambiguity of his social position
is nicely judged; through his money he is the equal of the masters yet he is also aware of his
relationship to the lower orders. Thus on taking his leave in Act I he kisses the hand of Lyubov
Andreyevna, embraces the nobleman Pishchik, but does not forget to shake hands with the
servants Yasha and Firs. Lopakhin merely says a polite farewell to Gayev, but this is
understandable given Gayev’s rather squeamish hostility to this upstart who is destined to
replace him as owner of the estate.
The loss of a dacha is one of the first things we learn about Lyubov Andreyevna. As Anya
tells us: “She has already sold her dacha near Mentone. She has nothing left, nothing.” It is,
therefore, ironic that later in the same act Lopakhin should tell her of the transformation being
effected in the Russian countryside because of the hunger for dachas among the new rising force
of the urban middle class. Up to now in the countryside there have been only masters and
peasants, but now dacha owners have appeared as well. Every town, even the smallest, is
surrounded by dachas. Lopakhin rubs salt into the wound by suggesting that the Gayev estate
should undergo the same fate.
Social change in Russian literature is often presented as a conflict between generations.
Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is perhaps the best known example, and the novel is typical in
that it presents the struggle as one of ideas, which are identified by specific decades of the
 nineteenth century: it is the struggle of the “men of the sixties” against the “men of the forties”.
This theme, in essence the theme of the Russian intelligentsia, is also present in The Cherry
Orchard. Gayev, who is of the generation of the ‘fathers’ in the play, identifies himself towards
the end of Act I as a ‘man of the eighties’.
Gayev:      I’m a man of the eighties! No one pays tribute to those days, but I still went through plenty in
life for my convictions, I can tell you I did. The peasant has reason to love me. You must get to
know the peasant, I say. You must know how to...
 At this point he is shut up by a representative of the ‘children’, his niece Anya. Gayev is
always silenced when he makes such speeches; the others find it embarrassing—it is more
rhetoric. In fact words are the only mark of his claim to belong to the intelligentsia of the 1880s.
When he says that no one praises that period, he is right. Alexander II had been assassinated in
1881 and the event had ushered in a period of great repression in Russian political and
intellectual life. It was a time when all ideas and actions were suspect, a time of “petty deeds”.
Intellectually it was largely a cowed and demoralized generation, so that for Gayev to suggest
that he has suffered for his convictions as a “man of the eighties” must strike a Russian audience
as ludicrous. The role and nature of the peasant was a permanent preoccupation of the Russian
intelligentsia, and at no time more than during the decade preceding the 1880s. There is no
evidence in the play that Gayev has any real interest in the peasants, and (as we shall see) the
attitude to serfdom will be the corner stone of the criticism voiced by the younger generation
against the ‘fathers’ in the play. Moreover it is curious that Gayev should seek to identify himself
with the ‘eighties’. As he is now fifty-one years old, it would seem more natural for him to
consider himself a ‘man of the seventies’: for in 1881 he could not possibly have been younger
than twenty-eight, and the period of the 1880s would therefore have largely coincided with his
own thirties. Gayev’s self-identification with the 1880s doubly proclaims his intellectual
immaturity.
The “Man of the Eighties”
Gayev’s earlier, embarrassing, speech to the bookcase reveals the values of the “man of the
eighties”. Although he talks of “fruitful work”, it appears to be books which, in his view have
summoned the Russian intelligentsia to action throughout the whole century. There is no
evidence that Gayev himself has read any books; his one passion is that sign of a mis-spent
youth— billiards—and he frames his idea not in terms of books but of the bookcase. Thus books
are substituted for action, and a bookcase for the books themselves:
Gayev:      Your silent appeal to fruitful labor has never lessened in the course of a hundred years,
upholding (through tears) in generations of our line personal courage and faith in a better
future and nurturing in us the ideals of Cardinal good and social consciousness. (Pause.)
The ambiguities in this passage are striking. It is not only the ‘fruitful work’ which evokes
echoes for the symbol of the cherry orchard itself, but Gayev’s use of the word rod (kith and kin)
also suggest his ‘kind’: it opens up his argument to include the whole of the gentry class, yet
what the bookcase has taught them is not ‘social awareness’ but ‘social self-awareness’.
Typically, Chekhov’s own laughter at Gayev is conveyed by his direction: (through tears).
Some forty years earlier, in his influential essay What is Oblomovism ? the critic Nikolay
Dobrolyubov had assessed the tradition of gentry culture as  it had developed up to that point.
He claimed that for the gentry intelligentsia reading got in the way of deeds, that rhetoric
replaced action, and that its leaders showed little more than self-regard: he saw the summation
of its values in the hero of Goncharov’s novel Oblomov. Gayev, in paying tribute to a full century
of this tradition, seems cast in the role of an updated ‘Oblomov’ (in the emblematic sense
suggested by Dobrolyubov). Little appears to have changed: Gayev is lazy, lives in a childish
 world of the imagination, he too is nannied by an elderly servant, who dresses him much as
Zakhar dresses Oblomov. Gayev prefers rhetoric to books and most certainly to action; his social
consciousness is merely self-regarding—the social self-awareness of a class. Nevertheless,
Oblomov’s friend Shtolts, the representative of a newly rising entrepreneurial class, had been
Oblomov’s constant support, but in Chekhov’s play the activities of that entrepreneurial friend of
the family, Lopakhin, are ultimately destructive.
Representative of the Younger Generation
Nobody takes the elevated thoughts of Gayev seriously, yet Trofimov is listened to. He is of
the younger generation of the intelligentsia and his social origins are quite different from those
of Gayev. In Act II Gayev’s proclamation of aesthetic and romantic values, in the speech on
nature which he is forced to abandon, follows hard on the heels of Trofimov’s speech on the
future and on the need for work. It is as though Gayev had been spurred into vying with the
younger man; for, significantly, Trofimov’s words are an indictment of Gayev himself:
Trofimov: The educated people I know, the vast majority at any rate, aren’t in search of a single thing,
and they certainly don’t do anything. So far they lack even the ability for real work. They call
themselves the intelligentsia, but they speak to their servants as inferiors and treat their
peasants as if they were animals. They are poor students, they read absolutely nothing serious,
and they do precisely nothing. They only talk about science, and as for art, they understand next
to nothing.
Gayev, the ‘man of the eighties’, who claims to love the peasants, is just such an intellectual
charlatan. The pet name she reserves for Gayev himself—Lena seems to confirm his laziness
(len’).
Chekhov’s portrayal of Trofimov is not as explicit as he would have liked. The concept of
‘eternal student’ has not necessarily the comic implications it assumes in the play, as Chekhov
explained to his wife, in confiding the fears he had entertained about the play’s success: ‘I was
chiefly afraid about the lack of movement in the second act, and a certain lack of completeness
in the student Trofimov. You see, Trofimov is constantly in exile, he is constantly being expelled
from the university, and how can one depict things like that ? It would have been impossible for
Chekhov to have depicted his student as a revolutionary, nevertheless, when Trofimov refuses
Lophakin’s money, in Act IV, there can be no doubt as to his meaning:
Trofimov: I’m strong and proud. Humankind is on its way to a higher truth, to the greatest happiness
possible on this earth, and I’m in the vanguard!
There is a native, idealistic, purity about Trofimov which is reminiscent of the revolutionary
hero depicted by N.G. Chernyshevsky in his novel What is to be done ? His sexual purity is
mocked by Lyubov Andreyevna, but by treating Trofimov’s idealism and the involuntary
protraction of his university career with humour, Chekhov managers to present him in a way
acceptable to the censorship of the time. He did not deceive everybody. As The Cherry Orchard
was in rehearsal, Gorky is reported to have said to its author: “Now I am convinced that your
next play will be a revolutionary one”
Nevertheless Chekhov is polemicising with Gorky in the play. Trofimov’s words on being
‘strong and proud’ pick up the pride advocated by Satin in Gorky’s play The Lower Depths.
Gorky’s idealistic view of man’s potential derives from his semi-mystical philosophy of ’God-
building’, and it is significant that in criticizing the concept through the mouth of Trofimov,
Chekhov seems to be suggesting Gayev as its proponent:
Lyubov Andreyevna: No, let’s go on with what we were saying yesterday.
 Trofimov: What was it about?
Gayev:      Pride.
Trofimov: We talked a long time yesterday, but we didn’t get anywhere. The proud person in your sense
of the word has something mystical inside. Maybe you’re even right the way you see it. But if we
reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take
or what’s the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if
the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy? We must
stop admiring ourselves. What we ought to do is just keep on working.
Gayev:      We’re going to die, so it doesn’t matter.
Trofimov: Who knows for certain? Besides, what does “to die” really mean? It may be that man has a
hundred senses and at death only five known to us are lost, while the remaining ninety-five go
on living.
Trofimov, who begins by attacking the mysticism of Gorky’s ‘proud man’, is easily brought
round in argument to propounding his own mystical ideas on mortal man, and although his next
speech is his serious attack on the intelligentsia which, as we have already seen, is an implied
criticism of Gayev, there is, nevertheless, a measure of unconscious irony at his own expense as
a member of the intelligentsia:
Trofimov: They are all very serious people with stern expressions on their faces. They discuss nothing but
important matters and like to philosophize a great deal, while at the same time everyone can see
that the workers are detestably fed, sleep without suitable bedding, thirty to forty in a room with
bed bugs everywhere, the stench, the dampness, and the moral corruption...Obviously all our
fine talk has gone on simply to hoodwink ourselves and other people as well.
The Practical Businessman
Lopakhin, the practical businessman, and Trofimov, the idealist intellectual, do not always
see eye to eye, but in spite of their jibes there is a certain mutual respect. Lopakhin is impressed
by Trofimov’s extolling of work, and through him the argument once more turns to the nature of
man: he considers that the grand scale of Russia itself should produce native-born giants.
Significantly Lyubov Andreyevna sees such supermen as a threat, whereas Chekhov himself, by
suddenly forcing Yepichodov upon everyone’s attention, appears to endorse Trofimov’s original
objection to the mysticism of ’proud man’—the reality of man as he exists:
Lyubov Andreyevna: Now you find giants indispensable...Oh, they are very nice only in fairy stories;
anywhere else they can scare you. (Yepichodov crosses at the depth of the stage, playing his
guitar. Lyubov Andreyevna is deep in thought.) There goes Yepichodov...
Anya:        (deep in thought) There goes Yepichodov...
Gayev:      The sun has set, ladies and gentlemen.
Here is Chekhov creating mood, but one, which for all its poetic wistfulness has hard ironic
comment at its core, Yepichodov is similarly used at the end of the act. The melancholy guitar of
“Two-and-twenty hard knocks is heard when Trofimov is talking about ‘happiness’
Trofimov: Believe me, Anya, you must believe! I’m not yet thirty, I’m a young man, and I’m still a
student, but I have already gone through so much! As soon as winder’s come, I find myself
hungry, ill, worried, poor as a beggar, and—the places fate has driven me, the places! Where
haven’t I been, where? And the whole time, every minute of the day and night, I’ve felt
 impressions of the future abound in my soul, visions I can’t explain. I know happiness is coming,
Anya, I can feel it. I already see it on the way...
Anya:        (deep in thought) The moon is rising.
Yepichodov is heard playing the guitar, the same sad song as before. The moon rises.
Somewhere near the popular trees, Varya is looking for Anya and is calling, “Anya! Where are
you?”
Trofimov: Yes, the moon is rising. (Pause.) There it is happiness. There it comes, coming nearer, always
nearer. I can already hear its footsteps. And if we don’t see it, if we don’t experience it, what does
it matter? Other people will see it.
The rising moon seems to take up: “ The sun’s gone down, ladies and gentlemen” in the
earlier passage. Gayev’s setting sun seems like a valedictory symbol for an age and a class, but it
is replaced by a moon which Trofimov identifies with the future happiness of mankind. Such a
symbol, taken together with Yepichodov’s mournful guitar, and the calls of a searching Varya,
suggests the same sort of ambivalence that surrounded the arguments on ‘proud men’ and
giants. Moreover the Trofimov, who here at the end of Act II compares himself to winter and
welcomes the moon as happiness, invites comparison with the Trofimov who had concluded Act
I with an invocation to Anya.” My little sun! my Spring”.
If the guitar and person of ‘Two-and-twenty misfortunes’ seem to add a melancholy,
pessimistic note to hopes about the nature of man and the happiness to come through social
change, there is yet another ‘sad’ sound of a string to be heard in Act II, and it provides an even
more ominous commentary on the theme. Again the mood is pensive: (They all sit deep in
thought; the silence is only broken by the subdued muttering of Firs, Suddenly a distant sound
is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly
dying away). Although the sound appears to come from above, Lopakhin suggests it might have
an underground explanation—a pit accident. Even more improbably Gayev and Trofimov think
of birds (a heron and an eagle owl). Lyubov Andreyevna shudders, finding the sound
‘unpleasant, somehow’, but it is left to Firs, whose own mumbling the sound had disturbed, to
interpret it as an omen: (A pause) First. ‘It was the same before the misfortune: the owl hooted
and the samovar kept singing’. When he is asked to what ‘misfortune’ (neschast’ye) he is
referring, Firs replies: ‘before freedom’. He has in mind the greatest social upheaval of
nineteenth-century Russia—the liberation of the serfs in 1861, but he does not see this great
reform which gave him the new status of a free man, as bringing happiness—it was
‘unhappiness’ (i.e. misfortune). Similar omens before the liberation of the serfs are referred to in
an earlier story by Chekhov, actually entitled Happiness (Schast’ye), and many commentators
have also pointed to the fact that a strange sound occurs in that story, which is also ascribed to
the fall of a pit-tub deep below the ground.
Symbolism
The symbolism of the play, which on one level evokes a poetic penumbra of lyrical mood
and pensive reflection, in reality exhibits the same mixed elements as the comedy—it contains
an undercurrent which is ominous and disturbing. The central image of the cherry orchard is
seen by different characters in different ways. It represents both happiness and suffering, and its
fate also reflects the theme of social change. In Act I, the orchard, although off-stage, is an
obvious presence; the windows of the nursery open directly on to it, and its beauty is a local
point of attention. Act II is set outside on the estate, but not in the cherry orchard. The opening
directions indicate that the orchard begins beyond the poplars on one side of the set. During Act
III, when the estate is being sold, there is little real evidence of the orchard’s existence, and in
Act IV the audience is aware of the cherry orchard through its negation in the off-stage sounds of
 the axes which are chopping it down. Thus with each successive act there is a sense of the cherry
orchard receding further and further towards oblivion.
For Lyubov Andreyevna the cherry orchard symbolizes her childhood and the past. It is the
most remarkable phenomenon in the whole province, a thing of beauty, which also produces
fruit (though not as often as it might, and now unfortunately it can no longer be put to use). Like
Gayev’s century-old bookcase it stands as a symbol for the flowering of nineteenth-century
gentry’ culture, whose fruits and usefulness are now in the past. Its existence is threatened by a
more democratic age, in which every little bourgeois wants his dacha and his own plot of land,
which, as their spokesman Lopakhin hopes, they will one day set about to cultivate.
The symbolism of trees is strongly developed in Russian literature— from Turgenev and
Tolstoy to writers of the twentieth century such as Pasternak and Leonov. It is a recurrent
feature of Chekhov’s own-writing (Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Masha’s oak tree in The Three
Sisters) yet most relevant of all, as a symbol for nineteenth-century Russian society, is the
extended allegory of the forest in Dobrolyubov’s essay What is Oblomovism? Dobrolyubov
depicts the gentry’ intelligentsia as attempting to lead the ordinary people through a dangerous
forest. They climb the trees to avoid the dangers and to spy the way ahead, but the trees are
comfortable and they have found fruit there. They ignore the people below until the latter in
desperation begin to hack down their trees:
Oh! Oh! Don’t do that! Stop! they howl when they see the people setting to work to cut down
the trees on which they are ensconced. Don‘t you realise that we may be killed and that with us
will perish those beautiful ideas, those lofty sentiments, those human strivings, that eloquence,
that fervour, that love for all that is beautiful and noble that have always inspired us? Stop!
Stop! What are you doing.
The trees of Dobrolyubov’s allegory were to be taken as representing the institution of
serfdom, which supported the gentry and yielded them fruit, whilst at the same time affording
them an elevated position which they could claim was for the benefit of others, but axes remove
this social myth as they remove the Gayev’s cherry orchard at the end of Chekhov’s play.
For Lyubov Andreyevna the orchard is still alive with happy ghosts. She looks out of the
window in Act I and believes she sees her mother in a white dress. It is of course mere a tree. But
for Trofimov the orchard is peopled with other ghosts, as he tells Anya towards the end of Act I:
Trofimov: All Russia is our orchard. The land is vast and beautiful and filled with marvelous places.
(Pause.) Just think, Anya, your grandfather and your great-grandfather and all your ancestors
owned both land and serfs, they owned living souls. Don’t you see that from every cherry tree in
the orchard, from every leaf and every trunk, generations of human beings are gazing down at
you, don’t you hear their voices...To own human souls—it has transformed every one of you,
don’t you see, those who lived before and those living today. And so your mother, your uncle,
and you no longer notice that you are living in debt, at the expense of other people, at the
expense of the very people you will allow no farther than the entrance to your home... We are at
least two hundred years behind the times, we haven’t made any real headway yet, and we still
don’t have any clear idea about our relation to the past. We just philosophize, complain of
boredom, or drink vodka. It’s so clear, you see, that if we’re to begin living in the present, we
must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can
redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast
and endless work. You must realize this, Anya.
This is undoubtedly the most important speech in the play. It begins with a broad vision, an
exhortation to look beyond the narrow confines of the cherry orchard: ‘The whole of Russia is
our orchard. The earth is great and beautiful and there are many, many wonderful places on it.’
 Here Trofimov seems to be almost on the point of endorsing Lopakhin’s earlier idea that the
grand scale of nature in Russia should produce giants, but the body of the speech contains one of
Chekhov’s strongest indictments of Russia’s past. It is a speech with many resonances. Thus it is
significant that Trofimov projects the particular, legal situation of the orchard’s present owners
into the general and moral position of a whole class. They are in debt, but not to the bank: they
are ‘living on credit, on somebody else’s account, at the expense of those people whom you do
not allow beyond the entrance hall’. Similarly the ‘redemption’ he proposes is no mere financial
transaction—it is nothing less than the redemption of the entire past.
Trofimov’s assertion: “To own living souls that has caused degeneration in us all” is an idea
of prime importance. It occurs at a meridian point in the play, but before the significance of its
various resonances is pursed both backward and forward it is essential to look its linguistic
implications. The verb, which Trofimov uses to indicates ‘degeneration’—pererodit’ is based on
the root rod (the concept celebrated by Gayev in his speech to the bookcase). The First meaning
of rod is ‘birth’, ‘breed’ but it also means ‘kith’ as well as ‘kind’. The adjective derived from it:
rodnoy, denotes close blood relationship; so that Gayev is the ‘blood brother’, rodnoy bral, of
Lyubov Andreyevna. More loosely, however, the adjective can be used as a term of endearment
indicating that someone is regarded as ‘close’, or ‘dear’. By using the verb pererodit Trofimov is
asserting that a complete change of ‘kind’ has come about in the nation as a whole, through the
owning of ’living souls’. ‘Soul’ is the legal term for a serf. It is term which contains a great irony,
in as much as serfdom treated living human souls as through they were inanimate objects—mere
chattels. Trofimov’s phrase ‘living souls’ evokes the ambiguities of Gogol’s famous novel about
the buying and selling of serfs—Dead Souls. The soul, of course, is also the ‘living spirit’—anima
—and in its nouns Russian grammar makes a distinction between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’
(odushevlennyy and neodushevlennyy). Trofimov’s point is that serf-owning has blurred this
distinction, so that the human needs of people can be ignored , while objects , such as the cherry
orchard, are invested with emotional values more proper to people.
Lopakhin’s Peasant Past
Lopakhin believes that he can forget his peasant past. In Act I he tells Lyubov Andreyevna,
that although her brother regards him as an oaf and a kulak, (‘a tight-fisted peasant’) he feels
that he has an affinity with her:
Lopakhin: My father was a serf, belonging to your grandfather and after him your father, but you—you
personally—did so much for me once I’ve forgotten all that and I love you as if we were flesh and
blood...even more than my own flesh and blood.
The word Lopakhin uses here is not ‘sister’ but rodnoy (Lyublyu vas kak rodnuyu...borshe
chem rodnuyu)—i.e., ‘I love you as kith and kin ... more than kith and kin’.
Lyubov Andreyevna completely ignores this declaration of affection and kinship. Instead
she proclaims her restlessness and almost immediately exhibits her affection for an inanimate
object, using the very same kinship-like term of endearment—rodnoy: ‘My dear little bookcase’
(shkafik moy rodnoy). She kisses it, then addresses her table.
There is no stage direction to indicate that Lopakhin might have taken this as a rebuff, but
the next time he speaks, the comic juxtaposition of ideas suggests a certain irony: “I feel I’d like
to tell you something nice, something jolly. (Glances at his watch.) I’ll have to go in a moment,
there’s no time to talk.” He then broaches his scheme for the cherry orchard.
Firs
Earlier, when the aged family retainer, Firs, had brought her a cushion, Lyubov Andreyevna
had extended the endearment rodnoy to him and kissed him, calling him “her dear little old
 man” (may starichok). In Act III she shows concern about his health and asks him where he will
go if the estate is sold. Yet in Act IV, although she takes an emotional farewell of the house itself,
and actually personifies it as ‘old granded’, she shows little concern for Firs, the real ‘old
granded’, of the house, who is thoughtlessly left behind along with the furniture. Indeed there is
unconscious irony in her words: “When we leave here there I won’t be a soul in the place.”
This final act opens with Gayev and Lyubov Andreyevna returning from saying farewell to
the peasants. With typical lack of restraint in matters of money, she has given them her purse,
but she is more thrifty with her attention when it comes to saying goodbye to her faithful old
retainer. Firs is ill, she knows that she will not see him again, yet at the end of the acts she looks
impatiently at her watch and says she can spare him some five minutes. When she is told that he
has already gone, she makes absolutely no comment but passes immediately to what she sees as
her duties in respect of Varya.
There is a general lack of concern about Firs. In Act III the other servants enjoy themselves
as guests at the ball, leaving Firs to do all the work, so that his complaint:’ There’s no one in the
house but me’ (odin na ves’ don) seems almost prophetic of the ending. Prophetic too is the
apparent nonsense reply which Firs makes in Act II, when Gayev complains of being ‘fed up’
with him for fussing over him about his clothes: “There’s nothing to be done there ... they went
off in the morning without saying anything.” Yasha, who ironically addresses Firs as ‘grandad’
expresses his boredom more strongly in Act III: “How you weary me, Grandad! (Yawns.) I wish
you’d go away and die soon.” A similar unsympathetic sentiment is expressed by Yepichodov in
Act IV at the very time that Anya is trying to find out whether Firs has already left:
Anya:        Has Firs been sent to the hospital?
Yasha:       I told them this morning. They’ve sent him, it stands to reason they have.
Anya:        (to Yepichodov, who is passing through the room) Semyon Panteleich, please ask and find out
if they’ve taken Firs to the hospital.
Yasha:       (offended) I told Yegor this morning. Why keep on asking about it? You’ve brought it up ten
times.
Yepichodov: Firs has lived through so many years, my final and decisive opinions is that he’s gone far
beyond repair. It’s time for him to meet his forefathers. And I can only envy him.
 Saying farewell to Firs has been left to the unsympathetic, even hostilely disposed, younger
generation of servants, and the fact that the letter, which should have accompanied him, is still
in the house alerts neither Anya nor Varya to the possibility that he might not even yet have
gone. It is Trofimov’s point that serf owning has corrupted everybody—masters and servants
alike.
Firs, the human embodiment of the old order is left locked up in the old manorial house,
which is soon to be destroyed. Yet, although the masters have forgotten him, he, as, ever, is
solicitous for them:
Firs:          (goes up to the door and touches the handle) Locked. They’ve gone away...(Sits on the sofa.)
They forgot me...It’s nothing... I’ll sit here for a while... And Leonid Andreich didn’t put on his
fur coat, I suppose, he must have gone away in his light one...(Sighs anxiously.) I just didn’t look
after it...Oh, these green young things—they never learn !
The finer feelings of Leonid Andreevich (Gayev) himself seem reserved for such things as a
bookcase (‘an inanimate object, true, but still a bookcase’) the house itself or even such abstract
concepts as Nature, apostrophized as a person. The confusion of animate and inanimate of
 embarrassment he frequently asks: ‘whom?’ instead of ’what?’, and the billiard terminology
which is constantly on his lips treats the billiard balls as grammatical animates rather than
inanimate entities.
The values of rod (breed) receive comic treatment at the beginning of Act III, in the figures
of Simeonov-Pishchik. It involves the confusion of the human with the animal:
Pishchik:   I’m as healthy as a horse, however. My departed father was something of a joker—may the
kingdom of heaven be his—and he used to explain our origins like this. The ancient line of
Simeonov-Pishchik, he’d say, comes down from the very same horse that Caligula had seated in
the senate...
Such absurdity involving names has many parallels in Russian literature. They all go back to
Gogol. Thus Maksimov in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brother Karamazov claims to be the
identical Maksimov mentioned by Gogol in Dead Souls. There is something Gogolian about
Pishchik too. At his First appearance in Act I he is described as wearing sharovary—those loose,
baggy Cossack breeches which seem to link him with the comic heroes of Gogol’s Ukrainian tales
(one of whom, Ivan Ivanovich Pererepenko, is mortally offended when a ‘gander’ is added to his
noble name). In Act IV, Pishchik’s desire to have his existence established for others is an
obvious literary ‘quotation’ from the comic character Bobchinsky in Gogol’s play The
Government Inspector:
Pishchik:   And if the news gets to you that my end has come, just recall this very...old horse and say,
“Once on this earth there was such-and-such a person...Simeonov-Pishchik...may the kingdom
of heaven be his...”
The name Pishchik means ‘swazzle’ (the device used in puppetry to distort the human
voice), as such, not only does it hint at the theme of ‘animate/ inanimate’, but also suggests the
methods of Gogol’s comic characterization, which had its roots in the Ukrainian puppet theatre
(vertep). The linking of robust health to an identification with an animal recalls Gogol’s ‘bear’,
Sobakevich, in Dead Souls, and the absurdity of the supposed origin of Pishchik’s rod suggest
that Chekhov is reworking that famous confusion of animate with inanimate in Gogol’s story.
The Overcoat, where the name of the hero is supposedly derived from an actual shoe. One
cannot escape the impression that Chekhov is playing one of his elaborate literary jokes:
Pishchik does not suggest that his rod came from a Roman emperor, but rather from his horse,
yet, like Gogol’s hero, Bashmachkin, the emperor in question, Caligula, also has a name derived
from a shoe (caliga), and his forename Gaius (in Russian Gay) has provided the root for the
name of the play’s other champion of rod—Gayev.
Attitude towards the Past
Trofimov’s speech on the cherry orchard contains a statement which is of crucial
importance for understanding the ambiguity at the heart of the symbol of the cherry orchard
itself: “we have no clear defined attitude to the past”. The past for Lyubov Andreyevna has happy
as well as painful memories; they exist side by side. She talks of the heavy stone of the past
round her neck and shoulders, but immediately afterwards ‘laughs happily’ when she thinks she
sees the ghost of her mother in the orchard.
The sale of the cherry orchard, with both its happiness and its pain seems unthinkable:
Lyubov Andreyevna: You know I was born here, my father and my mother lived here, my grandfather,
too. I love this house. Without the cherry orchard my life would lost its meaning, and if it must
really be sold then go and sell me with the orchard... (Embraces Trofimov and kisses him on the
forehead.) You see my son was drowned here...(Weeps.) Have pity on me, my fine, kind friend.
 Yet the estate is sold and it is Firs who is left behind not Lyubov Andreyevna. Nor, after all,
is its sale the irreparable loss, which her words might suggest. When Gayev returns in Act III
bearing the bad news. Chekhov’s directions hint at comedy in their suggestion of ‘on the one
hand, and yet on the other’: (Enter Gayev; he carries some parcels (i.e. purchases) in his right
hand and wipes away his tears with his left). He makes no reply to his sister’s anxious
questions but, still crying, hands Firs ‘anchovies’ and ‘Kerch herrings’, and complains of not
having eaten and of how much he has suffered. But his expression suddenly changes and he
stops crying when he hear the sounds of Yasha playing billiards. In Act IV, Gayev even seems to
have caught some of Anya’s optimism at the prospect of a new life:
Gayev:      (cheerfully) Yes, indeed, everything is fine again. Before the cherry orchard was sold, we were
all upset and worried ourselves sick, but afterwards, when the whole thing was settled once and
for all, and not one chance of turning back, we all simmered down and even started to feel
cheerful...I’m an employee of a bank now. I’m a financier...Off the yellow right into the middle.
And Lyuba, in spite of everything, you are looking better, no doubt about it, none.
Lyubov Andreyevna: Yes. My nerves are much better, that’s true. (Someone helps her put on her hat
and coat.) I’m sleeping fine.
Leave-Taking
It is true that the brother and sister are allowed their emotional leave-taking of the house,
but then they both go off to their different lives: Lyubov Andreyevna to her lover in Paris, and,
symbolically, on money right (in Act III she told us that the money had been sent to buy the
estate in the aunt’s name as she didn’t trust them); money will also figure in Gayev’s new life: he
is to become a banker. Yet the improbability of such a career is suggested through oblique
commentary. When Gayev First mentions the offer of this job in Act II his infertility is
immediately stressed: Firs fusses over him with a coat. Moreover in the final act, as we have
seen, Gayev refers to himself ironically as a financier and adds a scrap of his perpetual play-talk:
“I pot the red”. In the leave-taking of these middle-aged children, one senses pathos is verging
on the comic. It is aptly parodied in the clowning of Charlotta.
Gayev:      Happy Charlotta, she’s singing!
Charlotta: (picks up a bundle -which resembles a baby in swaddling clothes) Bye, bye, little baby mine...
(The crying of a baby is heard, “Wah, Wah!...”) Be quiet, my dear, my fine little boy.
(“Wah!...Wah!...”) I feel sorry for you, so sorry! (Throws the bundle down.) Then please find me
another job, won’t you? I can’t go on like this.
Hope seems to lie with the younger generation, represented by Anya (under the influence of
Trofimov). For them whole of Russia is their orchard, and an ‘ill-defined attitude to the past’ is
no longer possible. Anya rejects all the nostalgic ties of the estate, when she tells Trofimov at the
end of Act II: “The house we live in hasn’t really been ours for a long time. I’ll leave it. I give you
my word”. But the ties of the past are ambiguous; its associations are also painful. Anya’s
mother had left the estate, inn order never to see again the river where her little son had
drowned. Anya ends Act II with a gesture of defiance, not only escaping from Varya, but more
importantly exorcising spectres of the past: “Let us go to the river. It’s nice there”.
In the final act Anya and Trofimov make their farewells with the minimum of emotion:
Anya:        “Good-bye’, old house! Good-bye, old life!”
Trofimov: ‘Greetings to the new life!’ (Goes out with Anya).
 Gayev and Lyubov Andreyevna are left for their last tearful scene together, but their
emotional farewell to their past is punctuated by happy calls from off-stage (together with the
enigmatic ‘Ah-oo’). Anya’s Voice: (gaily). ‘Mammal!’. Trofimov’s Voice: (gaily and excitedly),
‘Ah-oo!’ These calls are repeated a second time...before the older couple finally depart.

. "It is not what the characters say which matters, it is

what they are and what they are doing with their lives".
How far do you agree with this assessment of the
characters in The Cherry Orchard?(2007)
Madame Lubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya

Madame Lubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (lew-BOHF ahn-DREH-ehv-nuh rah-NEHF-skah-yah),

a middle-aged woman and the owner of a large estate that has become impossible to maintain
because of debts. Madame Ranevskaya is a remnant of the old order of Russian feudal
aristocracy being pushed aside by social change. Her estate, her mansion, and especially the
cherry orchard exist for her as symbols of her past, her innocent youth, and her formerly carefree
life. She cannot reconcile herself to giving them up, she cannot change with the times, and she
cannot assume the financial and emotional responsibility demanded of her. the forces that
molded her are disappearing from Russian life.

Anya

Anya (AHN-yah), Madame Ranevskaya’s seventeen-year-old daughter. Although she loves the
estate and the cherry orchard, her youth makes it possible for her to bend with the social tide. She
reconciles herself to loss and change, to a new Russia of which she will be a part. Her love for
Peter Trofimov, a student representative of the intellectual liberal in the new order, influences
her toward confidence and hope for the future.

Varya

Varya (VAH-ryah), the adopted daughter of Madame Ranevskaya. Having managed the estate
for years, she is exhausted by concern: about debts, for the servants, and about the future. Her
efforts have come to nothing. She is in love with Lopakhin, a wealthy merchant who is so busy
making money that he cannot bring himself to propose to her. Varya’s illusions of happiness and
peace tempt her to run away to enter a convent. Neither of the aristocracy nor of the rising
middle class, but caught between both, she finds that only work can ease her frustration and
unhappiness.

Leonid Andreyevitch Gaev

Leonid Andreyevitch Gaev (leh-oh-NIHD ahn-DREH-yeh-vihch gah-EHF), Madame

Ranevskaya’s brother, a restless, garrulous, and impractical dreamer. Bound to the old ways, he
tries in vain to save the estate by borrowing or begging the necessary money. Like his sister, he
is unwilling to sell the cherry orchard and let it be used for a housing subdivision. Until the last,
he cherishes his illusions that they will be saved by a stroke of good fortune.

Ermolai Alexeyevitch Lopakhin

Ermolai Alexeyevitch Lopakhin (ehr-moh-LIH ah-lehk-SEH-yeh-vihch loh-PAH-khihn), a

wealthy merchant whose father was a peasant. Without sentiment for the past, he lives in the
present and for commercial opportunism. He redeems the past, literally, when he buys the
Ranevsky estate, where his father and grandfather had been serfs. His feelings are calculated in
terms of profit and loss, and his love for Varya cannot compete with his commercial zeal.

Peter Sergeyevitch Trofimov

Peter Sergeyevitch Trofimov (PYOH-tr sehr-GEH-yeh-vihch troh-FIH-mof), an idealistic young

student willing to work for the future betterment of humankind. He claims his mission is freedom
and happiness, escape from the petty and deceptive elements of life. His love for Anya is
confused with social zeal, and his understanding of people is slight.

Boris Borisovitch Simeonov-Pishchik

Boris Borisovitch Simeonov-Pishchik (boh-RIHS boh-RIHS-eh-vihch sih-MEH-ehn-of-PIH-

shchihk), a landowner constantly in debt, always trying to borrow money. Unlike the Ranevskys,
he has no feeling for the land or his heritage. He eventually leases his land to be torn up for its
valuable deposits of clay.

Charlotta Ivanova

Charlotta Ivanova (shahr-LOHT-teh ih-VAH-neh-vah), the governess to the Ranevskys, a young

woman who does not know her parentage. She is classless, ready to be swept by any tide.

Simeon Panteleyevitch Epikhodov

Simeon Panteleyevitch Epikhodov (seh-MYOHN pahn-teh-LEH-yeh-vihch eh-pih-KHOHD-of),

a clerk in the Ranevsky household. He is in love with Dunyasha, a maid, who does not return his
love.

Dunyasha

Dunyasha (doo-NYAH-shah), who is in love with the brash young footman, Yasha. She dresses
well and pretends to be a lady.

Fiers

Fiers (fihrs), an old footman, faithful to the Ranevsky family for generations. Concerned only
with the well-being of his employers, he is inadvertently left to die in the abandoned house, a
symbol of the dying past.
Yasha

Yasha (YAH-shah), an insolent young footman, Fiers’s grandson. Caring nothing for his family,
Yasha thrives on cruelty and opportunism. He knowingly leaves his grandfather to die alone.

The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s best-known play, was published in 1904, the year
Chekhov died. The author’s brief life had been a painful one. After an unhappy childhood he was
forced, by his father’s bankruptcy, to assume the responsibility of supporting his family. This he
did by writing at the same time that he pursued a medical degree. By the time he earned his
doctorate in 1884, his health was impaired by tuberculosis, which was to cut his life short at the
age of forty-four. One might expect the final product of such an existence to reveal bitterness and
rage. Instead, like most of Chekhov’s work, The Cherry Orchard exemplifies his profound
humanity.

The characters of The Cherry Orchard are not tragic in the usual sense of the word because they
are incapable of any great heroic action. Chekhov shows them clearly in their frustrations,
jealousies, and loves. Beyond his subtle characterizations, he catches in Madame Ranevskaya’s
household a picture of the end of an era, the passing of the semifeudal existence of Russian
landowners on their country estates. Chekhov’s fictional world is populated by persons who do
not have the perception to understand their own lives, to communicate with those around them,
or to bring their dreams to fruition. Most of the characters dream but only a few act. Madame
Ranevskaya dreams that their estates will somehow be saved; her daughter, Anya, of a future
without blemish; Fiers, the old valet, of the glories that used to be; Dunyasha, the maid, of
becoming a fine lady; Trofimov, the student, of a magnificent new social order. Their
predicament is summed up by Gaev, Madame Ranevskaya’s somewhat unstable brother: “I keep
thinking and racking my brains; I have many schemes, a great many, and that really means
none.” Only the merchant Lopakhin, the son of a serf, has the energy and will to make his
dreams come true—but he does so with the single-mindedness of the ruthless manipulator he
may well become.

The few characters who do not dream are perhaps even more pitiable than those who do.
Yephodov, nicknamed two-and-twenty misfortunes because of his habitual bad luck, sees failure
and despair everywhere. His only triumphant moments come when he fulfills his nickname.
Charlotta, the governess, performs tricks to make others laugh because she herself is unable to
laugh and views the future with empty eyes. Yasha, the young valet, a callous, self-centered
cynic, is beyond dreams.

Only Varya, able to see her dreams for what they are, is realistic and fully human at the same
time. Perhaps because she is the adopted daughter and unrelated to the ineffectual aristocrats, it
is she who can look the future full in the face, who can see other characters—and accept them—
for what they are. With the security of the estate crumbling, with prospects increasingly dim for
her hoped-for marriage to Lopakhin, she finds salvation in work.

Madame Ranevskaya and her family have done nothing with their plot of land, which was once a
grand and famous estate. Even the cherry orchard has become more dream than reality. Forty
years before, the cherries made famous preserves, but the recipe has been forgotten. Lopakhin,
the pragmatic merchant, points out, “The only thing remarkable about the orchard is that it’s a
very large one. There’s a crop of cherries every alternate year, and then there’s nothing to be
done with them, no one buys them.” Yet to the family the orchard continues to symbolize their
former grandeur. When Lopakhin suggests that it should be cut down and the land developed
into a summer resort, Gaev protests proudly, “This orchard is mentioned in the ’Encyclopaedia.’”

The Cherry Orchard, like Chekhov’s other plays, is objectively written and may vary greatly in
different productions. Madame Ranevskaya can be played as a dignified if somewhat inept
woman caught in the vise of changing times, or as a silly lovesick female refusing to face truth.
Lopakhin can be portrayed sympathetically—it is certainly easy to applaud his rise from menial
to master of the estate—or as a villain, pretending to warn the family while knowing full well
that they are incapable of action, gloating over his triumph, and heartlessly rejecting Varya.
Trofimov has been interpreted as the perpetual student, given to long intellectual rumination and
little else; after the 1917 Revolution, he was frequently portrayed as the spokesman for the new
social order, a partisan of the common people.

Ambiguity is consistent with Chekhov’s insistence that “to judge between good and bad,
between successful and unsuccessful, would need the eye of God.” The author himself chose not
to play God but to be the eye of the camera, letting selected details speak for themselves.
Madame Ranevskaya, exhorted by Trofimov to “face the truth,” retorts, “What truth?” She and
Chekhov are aware that there are many truths and that reality, like beauty, is frequently in the
eye of the beholder.

Chekhov’s friend Maxim Gorky once commented that “No one ever understood the tragic nature
of life’s trifles so clearly and intuitively as Chekhov did.” Yet if Chekhov saw tragedy, he was
also capable of recognizing the comedy in human experiments in living. “This was often the way
with him,” Gorky reported. “One moment he would be talking with warmth, gravity, and
sincerity, and the next he would be laughing at himself and his own words”—as with himself, so
with the remainder of humanity.

Chekhov saw life with double vision that encompassed the tragic and the comic almost
simultaneously. It is accurate, therefore, that The Cherry Orchard is classified as tragicomedy.
The comedy is evident in stretches of apparently meaningless dialogue (which makes The
Cherry Orchard a precursor of the theater of the absurd much later in the century), and in the
superficial behavior typical of a comedy of manners. The tragedy lies in the lack of
communication—much is said, but little is heard, let alone understood—and in the blindness of
the characters as they blunder through their lives, hardly ever fully aware of what is happening to
them. In the final speech, Fiers, the ill, elderly valet, mutters words that echo as a coda to the
entire play: “Life has slipped by as though I hadn’t lived.”

Is the Cherry Orchard a political play?(2008)

The Cherry Orchard: Historical Context
Politics
 In 1904, the year The Cherry Orchard was first produced, Russia was in a state of
upheaval. The Japanese declared war on Russia on February 10, 1904, following
Russia‘s failure to withdraw from Manchuria and its continuing penetration of Korea.
The Japanese defeated Russia at the Yalu River on May 1, 1904; by October of that year
the Japanese had forced Russia to pull back its forces. This war was the beginning of
tensions in Asia and the establishment of Japan as a military force.

On the home front, Russia’s minister of the interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, exercised
complete control over the public. He forbid any political assemblies, required written
police permission for small social gatherings, and forbid students to walk together in the
streets of St. Petersburg, Russia’s capital. On Easter Sunday of 1904, 45 Jews were
killed, 600 houses were destroyed in Kishenev in Bessarabia on orders from Plehve, and
the police were instructed to ignore rioting in the streets. These events culminated with
Plehve’s assassination on July 28, 1904. This kind of civil unrest marked the beginning
of a time of great conflict and transformation in Russia that ended with the Communist
Revolution in 1917. These tensions both in and outside Russia made life difficult for
Russian citizens. The middle class began to assume an elevated position in society as
many nobles lost their wealth and large, lavish estates. As the Ranevsky family
discovers, Russia is changing and the climate is no longer hospitable to those who do
not act in their own interests. Trofimov’s character alludes to the strict control of the
public when he speaks of the “things he’s seen” that have caused him to age
prematurely. When the serfs were freed, the landowners were forced to pay for labor,
and as conditions in Russia worsened due to war and the totalitarian regime, revolution
becomes imminent.

Transportation and Industry

The Trans-Siberian Railroad’s link from Moscow to Vladivostok opened in 1904.
This is the longest line of track in the world, spanning 3,200 miles between the two
cities. In the United States, the first New York City subway line of importance opened on
October 27, with the Interborough Rapid Transit, known as the IRT, running from the
Brooklyn Bridge to 145th Street with stops in between. This system would grow to
become the world’s largest rapid transit system, covering more than 842 miles. These
transportation systems are important because, as society became more urbanized
around the world, it changed. Large plots of land, such as the cherry orchard in
Chekhov’s play, were broken up into smaller plots for building and industry. The
railroads allowed people of all economic backgrounds to travel and allowed goods to be
shipped long distances using much less manpower.
Science and Technology
Marie Curie discovered radium and polonium in uranium ore in 1904; these two
new radioactive elements helped to fuel the nuclear age in the decades to come. Also in
1904, German physicists Julius Elster and Hans Friedrich Geitel invented the first
practical photoelectric cell, which led to the invention of radio. The first wireless radio
distres ssignal was sent the same year. Clearly, the time in which Chekhov wrote The
Cherry Orchard— during 1903 and 1904—was a time of much change and scientific
advancement. The simple way of life on the orchard was being phased out of existence; a
different mindset was required for the dawning age of science and industry. The
Ranevsky family is unable to adapt to this new, quickly evolving world in which
discoveries are made almost weekly and change is imminent.
Literature and Drama
1904 saw the first publication of such works as Lincoln Steffens’s expose of urban
squalor The Shame of the Cities, The Late Mattia Pascal, by Italian novelist Luigi
Pirandello, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, and Reginald, by English writer Saki, also
known as H. H. Munro. Plays which, like The Cherry Orchard, were first produced in
1904 include: Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge, Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s
Box, George Bernard Shaw’s Candida and How He Lied to Her Husband, and Peter
Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, by James M. Barrie. Chekhov’s style was
substantially different from his contemporaries’; his self-proclaimed “farce,” The Cherry
Orchard, portrays psychology and human behavior far more realistically than many of
his fellow playwrights. Unlike the other plays of its time, The Cherry Orchard focuses
upon an historical era and examines the whole of society rather than just characters.

Is the CHERRY ORCHARD a blend of smiles and tears?

THEMES

Indirect Action
Indirect Action is a technique Chekhov was most famous for. It involves action important to the
play's plot occurring off-stage, not on. Instead of seeing such action happen, the audience learns
about it by watching characters react to it onstage. Lopakhin's speech at the end of Act III,
recounting the sale of the cherry orchard, is the most important example of indirect action in the
play: although the audience does not see the sale, the entire play revolves around this unseen
action.

Mixing of Genres
Traditionally, humor and tragedy have been kept separate in dramatic works. Although Chekhov
is certainly not the first playwright to mix comic and tragic elements onstage, he develops this
tendency by creating a play that defies classification as either one of these two dramatic genres.
Works such as The Cherry Orchard, which cannot be subjected to the traditional standards of
classification, have helped build new modern literary traditions through their innovation in genre.

Symbolism
There are many symbols in this play. The keys at Barbara's waist symbolize her practicality and
her power. Gay's imaginary billiards game symbolizes his desire to escape. The cherry orchard
symbolizes the old social order, the aristocratic home, and its destruction symbolizes change.
Firs himself is a figure of time; Anya is a figure of hope. The symbols in this play are too
numerous to count, but many of them hinge on the idea of the changing social order or the
specific circumstance of a given character.
Irony and Blindness
Irony appears in many instances throughout the play, and when it is not used for purely comic
effect, it is tightly bound to the theme of blindness. On the one hand, the positions of the
character's themselves are ironic. For example, the opposite circumstances of Lopakhin, Firs, and
Dunyasha point out the irony in the now supposedly free-moving class system; characters talk
about and praise a system of economic mobility. Still, they cannot see the contradiction in the
situations of those around them that have no opportunity to improve their standing or are
criticized for attempting to do so. In other cases, the play erects ironic moments, where the
power in a given scene comes from a combination of two different images. For example, in Act
II, Madame Ranevsky complains loudly about how she cannot control her money, while in the
same breath she allows Yasha, the most untrustworthy character, to pick up her spilled purse.
The fact that she is able to talk about her weakness and neglect the safety of her money in the
same breath indicates that, despite her complaints, she is still blind to much of her problem.

Social Change and Progress

Several characters address the potential difference between social change and social progress.
Firs and Trophimof are two of them. Both question the utility of the Liberation. As Firs notes, it
made everyone happy, but they did not know what they were happy for. Firs himself is living
proof of this discrepancy: society has changed, but his life, and the lives of countless others, have
not progressed. Both characters insinuate that the Liberation is not enough to constitute progress;
while it was a necessary change, it was not enough to bring mankind to the idealized future
Trophimof imagines. The play leaves the impression that while change has come, there is more
work to be done.

Independence, Liberation, and Freedom

This play deals with the theme of independence in many different ways. Fundamentally, it
demands that we ask what it is to be free. What with the Liberation, The Cherry Orchard deals
with independence in a very concrete way: shortly before the beginning of the play, much of
Russia's population was not free. The play's characters demonstrate the different degrees of
freedom that result from the Liberation. On opposing ends of this question are Lopakhin and
Firs. One man has been able to take advantage of his liberation to make himself independent; the
other, although he is technically free, has not changed his position at all and is subject to the
whims of the family he serves, as he has always been. The difference in their situation
demonstrates the observations of many Russians of the time: officially liberating a group of
people is not they same as making them free if you do not also equip them with the tools they
need to become independent, i.e, resources such as education and land.

Trophimof, the play's idealist, offers one definition of freedom for the audience to consider when
he declines Lopakhin's offer of money. According to Trophimof, he is a free man because he is
beholden to no one and nothing more than his own concept of morality. His observations seem
accurate in light of other forms of non-freedom in the play. Madame Ranevsky, for example, is
not free in a very different way from Firs. She has enough assets to be able to control her own
destiny, but she is a slave to her passions, spending extravagantly and making poor decisions in
romance, and therefore cannot follow a higher moral code as Trophimof does. What with the
combination of economic circumstances and the bizarre weaknesses of the characters, the play
therefore suggests that there are two sources which control freedom and the lack thereof:
economics, which comes from without, and control over oneself, which comes from within.

Inevitability of change
The major theme is the inevitability of change. Because of her financial situation as a widow,
Lyobov cannot save the cherry orchard, her childhood home. Ironically, when the estate is
auctioned, it is purchased by Lopahin. He used to be a slave at the orchard, but after he won his
freedom, he became a successful merchant, who could afford to purchase the estate.
Symbolically, the sale of the cherry orchard shows that the old order must give way to the new.

Love
Love is another theme that is woven throughout the play. Besides the romance of Lyobov and
her lover in Paris, Varya becomes interested in Lopahin, and Trofimov is attracted to Anya. In
addition, there is the affair between Yasha and Dunyasha. None of the romantic relationships
really comes to a happy ending. Lyobov's lover grows gravely ill in Paris, and she returns to care
for him. Anya only wants to be friends with Trofimov, so he returns to study at the university.
Lopahin is going away on business for several months without ever asking Varya to marry him.

The Struggle Over Memory

In The Cherry Orchard, memory is seen both as source of personal identity and as a burden
preventing the attainment of happiness. Each character is involved in a struggle to remember, but
more importantly in a struggle to forget, certain aspects of their past. Ranevsky wants to seek
refuge in the past from the despair of her present life; she wants to remember the past and forget
the present. But the estate itself contains awful memories of the death of her son, memories she
is reminded of as soon as she arrives and sees Trofimov, her son's tutor. For Lopakhin, memories
are oppressive, for they are memories of a brutal, uncultured peasant upbringing. They conflict
with his identity as a well-heeled businessman that he tries to cultivate with his fancy clothes and
his allusions to Shakespeare, so they are a source of self-doubt and confusion; it is these
memories that he wishes to forget. Trofimov is concerned more with Russia's historical memory
of its past, a past which he views as oppressive and needing an explicit renunciation if Russia is
to move forward. He elucidates this view in a series of speeches at the end of Act Two. What
Trofimov wishes Russia to forget are the beautiful and redeeming aspects of that past. Firs,
finally, lives solely in memory—most of his speeches in the play relate to what life was like
before the serfs were freed, telling of the recipe for making cherry jam, which now even he can't
remember. At the end of the play, he is literally forgotten by the other characters, symbolizing
the "forgotten" era with which he is so strongly associated.

Modernity Vs. the Old Russia

A recurrent theme throughout Russian literature of the nineteenth century is the clash between
the values of modernity and the values of old Russia. Modernity is here meant to signify Western
modernity, its rationalism, secularism and materialism. Russia, especially its nobility, had been
adopting these values since the early eighteenth century, in the time of Peter the Great. But much
of late nineteenth-century Russian literature was written in reaction to this change, and in praise
of an idealized vision of Russia's history and folklore. Western values are often represented as
false, pretentious, and spiritually and morally bankrupt. Russian culture by contrast—for
example, in the character of Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, himself a
representative of the old landowning nobility, or Tatyana in Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
—is exalted as honest and morally pure.

The conflict between Gayev and Ranevsky on the one hand and Lopakhin and Trofimov on the
other can be seen as emblematic of the disputes between the old feudal order and Westernization.
The conflict is made most explicit in the speeches of Trofimov, who views Russia's historical
legacy as an oppressive one, something to be abandoned instead of exalted, and proposes an
ideology that is distinctly influenced by the Western ideas such as Marxism and Darwinism.