Chekhov The Cherry Orchard Reading Order

Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904), his last play and arguably his greatest, is the masterwork of a tradition in which nothing happens and everything changes. The Ranevskaya family returns to their ancestral estate — centred on an orchard of famous beauty — which must be sold to pay debts. The practical solution is obvious: sell the orchard, build summer cottages. But the family cannot act. They talk, weep, reminisce, make love, and play billiards while the auction date approaches and passes and the axes begin to fall. Chekhov insisted it was a comedy; Stanislavski played it as a tragedy; audiences have been arguing ever since, which is precisely the point. The Cherry Orchard is about the passing of an entire social world — the gentry class that produced Russian literature — and about the inability of human beings to do anything about their own dissolution.