The Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard is the last play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, written in 1903 and first published by Znaniye in 1904, appearing as a separate edition later that year in Saint Petersburg; it opened on 17 January 1904 at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavski. Chekhov described the play as a comedy, with some elements of farce, though Stanislavski treated it as a tragedy, and directors have struggled with its dual nature ever since; it is often identified as one of Chekhov's four outstanding plays, along with The Seagull, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and revolves around an aristocratic Russian landowner who returns to her family estate, including its large and well-known cherry orchard, just before the estate is auctioned to pay the mortgage, dramatizing the socioeconomic forces at work in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century.