The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904)

Lopakhin has done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is mercy: lease the orchard for summer cottages and the estate is saved, the family keeps its home. He says it plainly, again and again, the son of a serf who once worked this very ground now offering to rescue the people who owned his father. They smile, change the subject, and let the orchard go to auction, where he buys it himself. Chekhov called this a comedy, and it is, in the way that watching someone fail to catch a falling cup is a comedy; Gaev makes a tender oration to a hundred-year-old bookcase while the ground sells out from under him. What the play knows so exactly it hurts is how a whole world ends: not in catastrophe but in delay, in pleasant talk, in everyone waiting for something else to happen. Then a far-off string snaps in the air, the axes find the trees, and the house goes quiet.