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The Cherry Orchard and the Rise of Bolshevism Essay

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The Cherry Orchard and the Rise of Bolshevism

Anton Chekhov uses The Cherry Orchard, to openly present the decline of an aristocratic Russian family as a microcosm of the rapid decline of the old Russia at the end of the nineteenth century--but also provides an ominous foreshadowing of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in the disparate ideals of his characters, Trofimov and Lopakhin, however unintentionally. The Gayev family and their plight is intended as a symbolic microcosm of the fall of the aristocracy in society at large. Though the merchant Lopakhin is presented as the character who holds values of the new, post-aristocratic age, the student Trofimov espouses the political sentiments that will ultimately replace both the …show more content…

The most prominent of these symbols is the sound of a snapped string that occurs twice in the play. That this symbolizes the end of the Russian aristocracy is obvious; after all, it is the one unrealistic device in the largely realistic Cherry Orchard. Also, the elderly servant Firs informs everyone that similar sounds were heard when the serfs were emancipated in the previous social upheaval. Characters' reactions to the sound in Act II are telling. True to his being the archetypal modern man, the merchant Lopakhin is unfazed. The sound comes from "somewhere very far away" (804), he says. Since he is naturally destined for the new Russia, recognizing the sound is not important for him; he is already living in the new age.

The symbolism of the string snapping is even more clear at the end of Act IV, when old Firs is left alone to die. The stage directions state that, after the sound of a "snapped string dying mournfully away" is heard, "[a] stillness falls, and nothing is heard but the thud of an ax on a tree far away in the orchard" (815). With the orchard (the status of aristocracy) in the hands of Lopakhin (the new commercial class), the old days are forever gone. All that is left to hear is the destruction of the orchard as the new class builds its world from the remains of the old. However, in 1917, the Bolsheviks would succeed in altering Russia in a more lasting way, and this small revolution would be subsumed by Communism.

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