The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov
Ranevskaya comes home to a Russian estate about to be auctioned, turns down the merchant Lopakhin's practical scheme to save it, and lets the orchard go to the man whose father was a serf on the property. Chekhov wrote it in 1903; it was published by Znaniye and premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1904. He called it a comedy and was unhappy that Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy. The link is the Penguin Classics volume of five plays in Peter Carson's translation, not a single play edition.
Why you should read this
This is the play that pulled modern drama away from tidy, event-driven plots and toward psychological realism, where what characters say sits at an angle to what they feel. A cornerstone for tracing the shift from nineteenth-century to modern theatre.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1904
- Themes
- DramaLiterature
