There is a sense in which, to him, life remains a game, a diversion, a series of moves where the outcome isn’t especially important (as his casual approach to finding a solution to the family’s financial trouble reveals).īut what makes The Cherry Orchard such a rich and enjoyable piece of drama is the faint hint of the absurd in such details, so that they simultaneously operate on a symbolically true, but also borderline farcical, level. Other symbolic touches are easier to decipher: Gaev’s obsession with miming billiards and describing tricky moves in the game is symptomatic of the sort of life he has led: unlike Lopahin and other (former) serfs, he has enjoyed a life of leisure and hasn’t had to work hard for a living. As Pennington and Unwin note, this is a comic moment, but it is comic because it foreshadows later twentieth-century plays by Pinter and Beckett, being almost proto-absurdist in its tone. He walks onstage after everyone else has left, quietly muttering about how life has left him by. Simultaneously, the landed aristocracy declined. A middle class rose to power, peopled by industrialists, businessmen, merchants, and other professionals, creating a new bourgeois consciousness. By the same token, Ranevskaya, for all her attachment to the house and the cherry orchard, nevertheless leaves it at the end having forgotten Firs, her loyal servant, leaving him behind on his own. 'The Cherry Orchard' takes place during this period of difficult shifts, which required an intense ability to adapt to new modes of living.
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