At the end of The Cherry Orchard, the orchard is cut down in order. Reprinted from a standard edition, this inexpensive well-made volume invites any lover of theater or great literature to enter the world of Madame Ranevsky, Anya, Gayef, Lopakhin, Firs, and the other memorable characters whose hopes, fears, loves, and general humanity are so brilliantly depicted in this landmark of world drama. The Cherry Orchard focuses on the themes of change, identity, money, work, love, and freedom. The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov Translated by Julius West Set a few decades after the abolishment of serfdom by Tsar Alexander II in 1861, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is about an aristocratic family that is unable to prevent its beloved estate from being auctioned off. Chekhov's family had lost its home to repossession in 1876, and this may have. Some critics have said that it is a play about nothing more than a wealthy family that loses its beloved cherry orchard and estate to a man of the rising middle class. In this and other plays he developed the concept of 'indirect action,' in which the dramatic action takes place off stage and the significance of the play revolves around the reactions of the characters to those unseen events. The Cherry Orchard is a play about the passing of an era. While the subject and the characters of the work are, in a sense, timeless, the dramatic technique of the play was a Chekhovian innovation.

The play also functions as a magnificent showcase for Chekhov's acute observations of his characters' foibles and for quizzical ruminations on the approaching dissolution of the world of the Russian aristocracy and life as it was lived on their great country estates.

Since that time it has become one of the most critically admired and performed plays in the Western world, a high comedy whose principal theme, the passing of the old semifeudal order, is symbolized in the sale of the cherry orchard owned by Madame Ranevsky. The play is in many ways an elegy for an old Russia that was in the process of dying at the turn of the century, with the new Russia powerless to be born.

The Cherry Orchard was first produced by the Moscow Art Theatre on Chekhov's last birthday, January 17, 1904. The Cherry Orchard was the last play Anton Chekhov wrote before his untimely death, in 1904.

The cherry orchard book