Extract

All Russia is our garden.

The axes are already sharpened before the curtain rises. A family returns to its beloved estate, the orchard white with spring blossoms, and cannot bring itself to do the one thing that would save it. Anton Chekhov wrote this final play in 1904 while dying of tuberculosis, composing what he insisted was a comedy though its first audiences wept. The landowners drift through rooms full of memory, making speeches instead of decisions, while the former serf's son counts the days until he can buy the land and fell the trees. Every character is sympathetic. Every character is failing. Russia's old order dissolves not with a revolution but with the sound of a breaking string, distant and sad, fading into silence.