“Cherry orchards were not the main thing on the minds of most Russians in 1904, when Anton Chekhov’s play was premiered. Since the turn of the century there had been a growing feeling in Russia that things could not go on as they were doing.”
Anton Chekhov was a Russian novelist and playwright. Chekhov was not considered a political writer, but his play ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ written a year before his death at the hands of tuberculosis, was a significant political play. Chekhov was famous for the use of trees in his work, and ‘The Cherry Orchard’ by title is no exception. Russia was a backwards country at the turn of the 20th century, mainly because it had failed to industrialise at the rate of other European powers. Therefore it was not surprising that the century old regime of the Romanov Dynasty, or Tsardom, was coming to an end.
Chekhov’s play is about a wealthy family of landowners. At the head of this family is Ranyavskaya, played in the rendition I went to see at The National Theatre by Zoe Wanamaker. Although this family was once extremely wealthy, and had many serfs (slaves) working on their land, the Emancipation Of The Serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1961 led to great economic decline for once prosperous landowners. Therefore it is not surprising that a new social class of merchants, essentially Capitalists, became wealthy. The capitalist in this play is called Lopakhin and although he has tremendous affection towards the family for which his ancestors once worked, he manages to buy the land they own and ruthlessly cuts down the symbolic cherry orchard.
The play is about an entire landowning class in early 20th century Russia. These people had to make a decision of whether to accept the way things were going and attempt to modernise, or to sit back and pretend nothing was happening, closing their eyes to the inevitable future. In this sense I think the cherry orchard is a metaphor for the wealth of a dying social class, they attempt to hold on to what they have because of its nostalgic value but in the end it is brutally taken away from them.
An interesting character for me is an intellectual called Petya Trofimov, who prefers to continuously study and travel rather than settle down, and whose monologues represent the communist mentality which saw Tsardom overthrown in 1917. Trofimov exclaims adamantly that the only way Russia can advance is through “extraordinary, unremitting labour,” and that it is the workers of Russia who own the land because it is the land they work on. The idealism expressed by Trofimov is similar to that of the Bolshevik party, who under the guidance of Lenin (and more notably Stalin) transformed Russia into a great economic power in less than half a century.
People adapting to great social change is a theme evident throughout modern literature. For example Tennessee William's plays, 'The Glass Menagerie' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire', both have characters who struggle to become accustomed to the post-WWII rising industrial class. Blanche is a dillusional character in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' whose loss of her family estate in Belle-Reve has forced her to abandon her Southern comforts and join her sister in New Orlean's. Blanche's clash with the powerful Polish immigrant Stanley is a representation of the struggle between old Southern ideals and the modern industrial reality. In conclusion 'The Cherry Orchard' shows a great change in social climate which is a recurrent theme in modern literature.
