[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 is a play which represents an attitude to life under stress and a way of life in transition. The orchard itself summarizes the hopes and regrets, the desires and ideals of this way of life. Just as the orchard with the town on the horizon epitomizes all Russia, so the play in its structure at once encompasses the range of social class from landowner to domestic serf, and brings the past hard against the future in its three or four generations. It achieves in its design as wide a statement as a naturalistic play could hope to do.
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