The Cherry Orchard summary

Our story begins at dawn on a cold day in May, in the nursery of the Ranevsky estate. Though warm and comfortable, the room has long been vacant of children. The estate’s owner, Madame Ranevskaya, has just returned from a five-year sojourn in Paris. Her brother, Gayev, and her two daughters, Anya and Varya, are there to welcome her home. 

It’s a joyful reunion – the family hasn’t come together like this for many years. But a cloud hangs over the occasion; the once-grand Ranevsky family has fallen on hard times and can barely afford the upkeep on the estate. If they don’t find some money soon, they’ll have to sell both the house and the huge cherry orchard which has become its symbol. 

We soon meet one possible savior: Lopakhin, a prosperous businessman whose parents were serfs – unfree peasants – on this very estate. Lopakhin represents the new Russia. After the emancipation of serfs in 1861, he went to Moscow to seek his fortune in the country’s new industries. He found it, too – today, he’s a millionaire. A pragmatic businessman, Lopakhin proposes a simple and radical plan to save the estate: the family should demolish the cherry orchard and build lucrative summer cottages for city folk to vacation in. 

Madame Ranevskaya and Gayev firmly reject this plan. It’s not just their distaste for the grubby business of letting out cottages that holds them back. For them, the orchard is much more than land; it’s a cherished emblem of the family’s heritage and memories. They are, in short, nostalgic about the simpler, better age in which they grew up. 

For aristocrats, the past really was a better time. Their estates had been sustained by forced labor. After the emancipation of serfs, those estates began to flounder. Like so many blue-blooded Russians, Madame Ranevskaya’s solution to the dire economic situation in which her family found itself was to pretend it didn’t exist. She spent her rapidly dwindling fortune as lavishly as her parents had and ignored the ominous signs of decay around her. 

ANALYSIS

Chekhov’s narrative draws attention to the ironic fate of Russia’s aristocratic families in the early twentieth century – their dependence on the social classes they had previously looked down upon. Lopakhin represents the polar opposite of the Ranevsky family. As the son of serfs, he embodies the peasant class long exploited by the aristocracy. And as an industrialist, he represents the new class that was rapidly undermining the privileges and political power of the nobility – the bourgeoisie, middle-class industrialists whose wealth was earned rather than inherited. 

The first act of Chekhov’s play thus sets the stage for the struggle that will unfold – a clash between old and new, nostalgia and zeal for the future, romanticism and pragmatism. The cherry orchard, in all its grandeur and beauty, stands at the heart of this conflict, a symbol of an era facing the inexorable tides of change.