[The first production of] The Cherry Orchard was not a success. The press was, on the whole, favorable, but the reviewers were not enthusiastic, and both the production and the acting were criticized. As to the play, the consensus appeared to be that it was no great thing; the theme was dated; the vein had been worked to death. The play was taken to be a portrayal of the passing of the old order. Nobody suggested that there was anything in the least funny about this. Nevertheless Chekhov persisted in his notion that Stanislavsky had ruined his comedy by playing it tragically. On April 10, he wrote [to his wife] Olga: "Why is it that my play is persistently called a drame in the posters and newspaper advertisements? Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky see in my play something absolutely different from what I have written, and I am willing to stake my word that neither of them has read it through attentively even once. Forgive me, but I assure you that this is so."
The Cherry Orchard, which dramatizes the lives of a group of "job-lots," people whose sense of isolation and futility is perhaps most forcefully expressed in the ambivalent, Villonesque "Je ris en pleurs" feelings of Madame Ranevsky, is widely admired for the psychological realism of its characterizations and for the theatrical effects it achieves by subtle employment of mood and atmosphere. To use another line from Villon, who, like the characters in The Cherry Orchard, lived in an agonizingly transitional age, the play as a whole seems to be saying: "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"
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