A.P. Chekhov

An essay based on the work on the topic: The future in the play by A.P. Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard".

The play "The Cherry Orchard" was written by Chekhov in 1904 - in the last year of the writer's life. She was perceived by the reader as the creative testament of a talented satirist and

damaturge. One of the main themes of this play is the theme of the future of Russia, associated with

her with the images of Petya Trofimov and Anya - the daughter of Ranevskaya. Covering this topic, Chekhov

simultaneously raises a number of other problems in the play that are characteristic of the entire Russian

literature in general. These are the problems of fathers and children, a man-doer, love and suffering.

All these problems are intertwined in the content of The Cherry Orchard, which consists in the farewell of the new, young Russia with its past, in its aspiration for tomorrow's I, a bright day. The image of Russia is embodied in the very title of the play "The Cherry Orchard". "All Russia is our garden," Chekhov says through the lips of his hero. And, indeed, the cherry orchard for Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev is a family nest, a symbol of youth, prosperity and a former graceful life. The owners of the garden love it, although they do not know how to preserve or save. Ranevskaya, with tears and tenderness, says about her estate: "l love this house, without

cherry orchard, I do not understand my life, and if you really need to sell, then sell me along with the garden. "But for Ranevskaya and Gaev, the cherry orchard is a symbol of the past.

Such ardent movements of the soul and noble impulses bring these two images closer together. They symbolize hope and a better future. It is with their lives that we associate Chekhov the future of Russia, it is to them that he puts his own thoughts into their mouths. Despite the fact that the estate is sold, and axes are already knocking in the garden, the author believes that "new people will come and plant new gardens," there is nothing more beautiful in the world. "

"The Cherry Orchard" is the great creation of Chekhov, who put comedy on a par with drama and

a tragedy that raised her to an unattainable height.

Essay on literature.

Here it is - an open secret, the secret of poetry, life, love!
I. S. Turgenev.

The play "The Cherry Orchard", written in 1903, is the last work of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, completing his creative biography. In it, the author raises a number of problems characteristic of Russian literature: the problems of fathers and children, love and suffering. All this is united in the theme of the past, present and future of Russia.

The Cherry Orchard is the central image that unites heroes in time and space. For the landowner Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev, the garden is a family nest, an integral part of their memories. They seem to have grown together with this garden, without it they "do not understand their life." To save the estate, decisive actions are needed, a change in lifestyle - otherwise the magnificent garden will go under the hammer. But Ranevskaya and Gaev have become unaccustomed to any activity, are impractical to the point of stupidity, unable to even seriously think about the impending threat. They betray the idea of ​​a cherry orchard. For the landowners, he is a symbol of the past. Firs, Ranevskaya's old servant, also remains in the past. He considers the abolition of serfdom a misfortune, and is attached to his former masters as to his own children. But those to whom he devotedly served all his life abandon him to his fate. Forgotten and abandoned, Firs remains a monument of the past in a boarded-up house.

Currently represented by Ermolai Lopakhin. His father and grandfather were serfs of Ranevskaya, he himself became a successful merchant. Lopakhin looks at the garden from the point of view of the “circulation of the case”. He sympathizes with Ranevskaya, but the cherry orchard itself is doomed to death in the plans of a practical entrepreneur. It is Lopakhin who brings the agony of the garden to its logical conclusion. The estate is divided into profitable summer cottages, and "you can only hear how far in the garden they are knocking on a tree with an ax."

The future is personified by the younger generation: Petya Trofimov and Anya, daughter of Ranevskaya. Trofimov is a student struggling to make his way into life. His life is not easy. When winter comes, he is "hungry, sick, anxious, poor." Petya is smart and honest, he understands the difficult situation in which the people are living, he believes in a bright future. "All Russia is our garden!" he exclaims.

Chekhov puts Petya in ridiculous situations, reducing his image to the most unheroic. Trofimov is a "shabby gentleman", an "eternal student" whom Lopakhin always stops with ironic remarks. But the student's thoughts and dreams are close to the author's. The writer, as it were, separates the word from its "carrier": the significance of what is said does not always coincide with the social significance of the "carrier".

Anya is seventeen years old. Youth for Chekhov is not only an age sign. He wrote: "... that youth can be considered healthy, which does not put up with the old order and ... fights against them." Anya received the usual upbringing for nobles. Trofimov had a great influence on the formation of her views. The character of the girl contains sincerity of feelings and mood, spontaneity. Anya is ready to start a new life: to pass the exams for the gymnasium course and break ties with the past.

In the images of Anya Ranevskaya and Petya Trofimov, the author has embodied all the best features inherent in the new generation. It is with their lives that Chekhov connects the future of Russia. They express the ideas and thoughts of the author himself. In the cherry orchard, there is the clatter of an ax, but young people believe that the next generations will plant new gardens, more beautiful than the previous ones. The presence of these heroes strengthens and strengthens the notes of cheerfulness sounding in the play, the motives of the future beautiful life. And it seems - not Trofimov, no, it was Chekhov who took the stage. “Here it is, happiness, here it is, coming closer and closer ... And if we don’t see it, we don’t know it, then what is the trouble? Others will see him! "

The play "The Cherry Orchard" was published at the very beginning of the 20th century and is a kind of final work of A.P. Chekhov. In this work, he most vividly expressed his reflections on the past, present and future of Russia. He was able to masterfully show the real situation in society on the eve of the first revolution and the changes that have taken place in the country. As one well-known critic used to say, the main character of the play is actually time. Almost everything depends on it. Throughout the entire work, the author focuses on the transience and ruthlessness of time.

The action of the play "The Cherry Orchard" is developing in the family estate of the former noblemen Ranevskaya and Gaev. The plot of the comedy is connected with the sale of this estate for the debts of the owners. And along with him will go under the hammer and the blossoming marvelous garden, which is the personification of beauty and the desire for a better life. The play intertwines the lives of the past and the present generation. The main characters, the owners of the estate, belong to the old times. They could not get used to a new life after the abolition of serfdom. Ranevskaya and Gaev live one day. For them, time has stopped. They do not understand that if they do not act, they will lose everything.

Ranevskaya also loves to waste money, despite the fact that she has almost no money left. And to the proposal of the merchant Lopakhin to make summer cottages out of the garden and make money on this, so as not to lose the estate, both Ranevska and Gaev respond negatively. As a result, they lose both the garden and the estate. In this act, you can see the carelessness, not practicality and unwillingness of the owners to make any efforts. However, another driving force was their heightened sense of beauty. They simply could not cut down the garden, in which every leaf was a reminder of a happy childhood.

New time is represented by young characters. First of all, this is the businesslike merchant Lopakhin, who himself grew up under the tutelage of Ranevskaya. His ancestors used to wear "muzhiks" with the owners of the estate. And now he got rich and bought the estate himself. In the person of Yermolai Lopakhin, the author portrayed the emerging bourgeoisie, which replaced the nobility. With his diligence, practicality, ingenuity and enterprise, he managed to firmly establish himself in modern society.

In addition to Lopakhin, the new generation is represented by Petya Trofimov and Anya - people who want to work for the good of society in order to atone for the sins of inactive ancestors. Petya Trofimov is twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, but he is still learning. He was nicknamed "the eternal student". This character demonstrates a heightened sense of justice, philosophizes a lot about how everything should be, but at the same time little acts. He scolds the nobility for idleness and sees the future behind the bourgeoisie. Petya encourages Anya to follow him, as he is sure of a happy future. Although he encourages to work, he himself is not capable of creation.

The future of Russia remains uncertain in Chekhov's play. He does not give a specific answer for who this future is and what will happen next. It is only clear that the writer sincerely hoped that the coming century would be fruitful, and that people would finally appear who could grow a new cherry orchard as a symbol of the eternal renewal of life.

Past, present and future in the play by A. Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard"

The play "The Cherry Orchard" was written by A. P. Chekhov in 1904. For Russia, this time is associated with the emerging global changes. Therefore, the main themes of this work were the death of a noble nest, embodied in the victory of an enterprising merchant-industrialist over the obsolete Ranevsky and Gayevs, and the theme of the future of Russia, associated with the images of Petya Trofimov and Anya. The entire content of the play consists in the farewell of young, new Russia to the past, with an obsolete way of life and in the country's aspiration for tomorrow, for unknown distances.

The Russia of the obsolete past is represented in the play by the images of Ranevskaya and Gaev. The cherry orchard is dear to these heroes as a memory, as memories of childhood, youth, prosperity, of their easy and graceful life. The noble nest for A.P. Chekhov is inextricably linked with the center of culture. And therefore, in the noble estate presented by the author, we first of all see a cultural nest. Ranevskaya is the soul of a beautiful home, its mistress. That is why people are constantly drawn to her, despite all her vices and frivolity. The hostess returns, and the house immediately comes to life, even those who seem to have left its walls forever come to it. Ranevskaya and Gaev are very upset because of the loss of their beloved garden, but it was they who, with their misunderstanding of life, ruined it, gave it up under the ax. With her inability to deal with the present, her frivolity and lack of will, the hostess brought the estate to complete ruin, to the sale of the estate at auction. In order to somehow save the estate, Lopakhin, an enterprising merchant-industrialist, offers a real way out of this situation - to break a cherry orchard for summer cottages. And although the hostess sheds rivers of tears over her deplorable situation, exclaiming that she cannot live without him, she nevertheless refuses Lopakhin's offer to save the estate. She hopes for the unlikely help of a rich Yaroslavl aunt, thereby rejecting a real plan to save her position. Ranevskaya, the options for the sale or lease of garden plots seem offensive and unacceptable. For the owners of the house, such an exit means betrayal of themselves, their habits, life values, ideals. And so they tacitly reject Lopakhin's proposal and go to meet their social and life collapse. The sufferings of Ranevskaya and Gaev are completely sincere, although they take some farcical form. Ranevskaya's life is not devoid of drama: her husband dies, her little son dies tragically, her lover leaves her. Lyubov Andreevna admits that she is unable to fight her feelings even when she realizes that she has been deceived by her beloved. She is completely focused on her own experiences, detached from other people's experiences and suffering. She talks about the death of her old nanny just over a cup of coffee. And her brother, Leonid Andreevich Gaev, is much smaller than his sister. He is a pitiful aristocrat who squandered his entire fortune.

The estate is put up for auction, and Lopakhin himself turns out to be the buyer. The estate was sold, the former owners of the house were overtaken by an irreparable loss. But, as it turned out, there is no trouble for the mistress of the cherry orchard. Ranevskaya is not experiencing any drama about this. She returns to Paris to her ridiculous love, to which, apparently, she would have returned anyway, despite all her loud words about the impossibility of living far from her homeland. Ranevskaya does not experience any serious experiences, she can easily move from a state of anxiety, concern to a cheerful and carefree revival. It happened this time too. She quickly calmed down about the loss that befell her and even made a confession: "My nerves are better, it's true." For the former owners of the estate and their entourage - Ranevskaya, Varya, Gaev, Pishchik, Charlotte, Dunyasha, Firs - their usual life ends with the death of the cherry orchard, and what will happen next is very uncertain. And although they continue to pretend that nothing has changed, this behavior seems ridiculous, and in the light of the current situation, even stupid and unreasonable. The tragedy of these people is not that they lost the cherry orchard, went bankrupt, but that their feelings became very crushed.

The present is presented in the play by the image of the successful merchant-industrialist Lopakhin. Among the Russian merchants of the late nineteenth century, people appeared who clearly did not correspond to the traditional concept of merchants. The duality, inconsistency, and internal instability of these people are vividly conveyed by A.P. Chekhov in the image of Lopakhin. This person is rather strange and unusual. The inconsistency of this image is especially acute also because the position in his society is extremely ambiguous.

Ermolai Lopakhin is the son and grandson of a serf. Ranevskaya's words to the boy beaten by his father are forever engraved in his memory: "Don't cry, little man, he will heal before the wedding ..." He feels like an indelible stigma from these words: "Little man ... My father, it is true, was a man, and here I am in a white vest, yellow shoes ... and if you think about it and figure it out, a peasant is a peasant ... ”Lopakhin suffers deeply from this duality. He cuts down the cherry orchard, and it may seem that a rude, uneducated merchant is destroying beauty without thinking about what he is doing, just for the sake of his own profit. But in fact, he does this not only for profit and not for her. There is another reason, much more important than your own enrichment - this is revenge for the past. He cuts down the garden, knowing full well that this is "an estate better than which there is nothing in the world." But by doing so, he hopes to kill the memory, which, against his will, constantly reminds him that he is a "man" and that the ruined owners of the cherry orchard are "gentlemen." He, by any means, with all his might, wants to erase this line separating him from the "masters". He is the only character who appears on stage with the book, although he admits that he still did not understand anything about it. In Lopakhino, the features of a predatory beast are visible. Money and power acquired with it cripple his soul. "I can pay for everything!" , - he declares. At the auction, Lopakhin finds himself in the grip of the merchant's passion, and it is here that the predator wakes up in him. It is in the excitement that he becomes the owner of the cherry orchard. And, despite the requests of Anya and Ranevskaya herself, he cuts down the garden even before the departure of its previous owners.

Lopakhin's tragedy lies in the fact that an impassable abyss lies between his thoughts and actions. Two people live and fight in it: one - "with a fine, tender soul", the other - "a predatory beast". The author's remarks help us to take a closer look at the ambiguity of Lopakhin's character. At first he leads a calm business conversation about the course of the auction, he is happy with his purchase, even proud of it, and then suddenly he himself is embarrassed, treats himself with bitter irony. It is characterized by ups and downs, constant changes. His speech can be emotional and amazing: "Lord, you gave us huge forests, vast fields, deepest horizons, and living here, we ourselves must be truly giants ..." He has aspirations, he cannot live only in the world of profits and cash, but he does not know how to live otherwise. He exclaims: "Oh, if only all this would pass, our awkward, unhappy life would sooner change somehow ...". And right there we hear, as it were, the words of a completely different person: “There is a new landowner, the owner of the cherry orchard! I can pay for everything! " In Lopakhin, completely contradictory qualities, a strange combination of softness and rudeness, intelligence and bad manners, coexist at the same time, hence his deepest tragedy.

Young people are presented as deeply unhappy in the play. Twenty-seven-year-old Petya Trofimov considers himself "above love", although it is precisely this feeling that he lacks. He is an idealist and a dreamer, the reason for his disorder in life is precisely defined by Ranevskaya: "You are not above love, but simply, as our Firs says, you are a fool." Only Anya believes in his beautiful appeals, but her youth excuses her. She, by virtue of the same early age, has the most vague and rosy idea of ​​the future. She agrees to go with Petya to Moscow, to fully follow his advice. The other characters in the play simply laugh and mock him. Trofimov and Anya are even to some extent happy with the sale of the garden, in their opinion, this gives them a chance to start a new life and grow their own garden. What future awaits this youth, we do not know from the play. A.P. Chekhov has always been far from politics. But we, who know about subsequent events in Russia, Petya's words, his dreams of a completely new life, and Anya's fervent desire to plant another garden, all of this leads us to more serious conclusions about the essence of Petya Trofimov's image. This passive dreamer and idealist may in the future turn out to be a person who has made dreams of equality, fraternity and justice come true. These young people are full of hope, experiencing an unprecedented surge of strength and full of an uncontrollable desire to work for the good of others.

The play "The Cherry Orchard" became the final piece in the work of A. P. Chekhov. This is the past, present and future of Russia.

Essay text:

A.P. Chekhov wrote his last play The Cherry Orchard in 1904, shortly before his death. In this work, the author expressed his keen sense of imminent change. Gone is the 19th century. The remnants of feudal relations and the noble way of life are becoming a thing of the past. I go broke and go to other owners of the noble nests. What is new born in a cleared place?
New in the play is personified by three people: Petya Trofimov, Anya and Lopakhin. Moreover, Petya and Anya are clearly opposed to Lopakhin. Who o ^ and, eҭi people, and what to expect from them?
Petya Trofimov is an eternal student, he is twenty-seven years old, he cannot complete the course, he was expelled from the university twice. The author does not specify why for academic failure or for politics. He has a keen sense of justice. In the play, he acts as a whistleblower. His actions are words. He says to Anya: ... your grandfather, great-grandfather and all your ancestors were serf-owners who owned living souls, and really from every cherry in the garden, from every leaf, from every trunk, human beings do not look at you, can you really not hear voices. .. However, it seems that no one takes him seriously. The words shabby gentleman somehow by themselves stick to him like a label. His role is unenviable, it resembles the role of a jester who is allowed to tell the truth.
But the destructive criticism of the existing foundations is in itself not productive; a positive program for the reorganization of society is needed. Let's see what Petya offers. He says: After all, it is so clear that in order to start living in the present, you must first redeem our past, put an end to it, and you can redeem it only by suffering, only by extraordinary labor. What does Petya mean when he talks about suffering? Maybe this is the suffering that revolutions, civil wars bring? Most likely, he repeats without deep awareness the words that in those pre-revolutionary years were in great use in the intellectual and semi-intellectual environment. Destructive rhetoric has grown into a destructive ideology. It seemed that as soon as we put an end to the obsolete hateful foundations of society, the whole of Russia would become a garden. And again looming before the heroes is the eternal Russian question What to do ?.
Petya encourages to work, but he himself is not capable of creating. There is labor to collect stones (for building) and there is labor to scatter stones (destroying).
Only one Anya agrees with Petya, shares his views. She considers exploitation immoral, she herself wants to work to provide for herself and her mother and through labor to become useful to society. Her plans are simple: to pass the exam for the gymnasium course, then study and work.
Here is her naive idea of ​​happiness: We will read on autumn evenings, read many books, and a new, wonderful world will open before us ...
What awaits Petya and Anya in the future? Did Petya graduate from university? What will he become? Probably, he will build schools and hospitals, and may gradually and imperceptibly turn into Ionych. Will Anya find her place in life? And what place will it be? Will she teach children? Or serve high art in the theater? Or maybe she will find her happiness in love, in family, in motherhood?
However, back to the play. Both Petya and Anya do not accept the existing order of things and want to change it, despite the obvious inconsistency, their position is undoubtedly moral, they are sincere in their desire for good to people and are ready to work for this.
We know how little time they have left, only thirteen years. What we do not know: how their life will turn out after the revolution, which they are willingly or unwillingly approaching.
But there is a person who is satisfied with the existing order. This is the merchant Lopakhin. The author's attitude to such people was formulated by Petya Trofimov, who told Lopakhin: I, Er-molay Nikolaevich, as I understand it: you are a rich man, you will soon be a millionaire. This is how, in terms of metabolism, a predatory animal is needed, which eats everything that comes into its own way, and so is it. Coming from peasants (his father was a serf with Ranevskaya's grandfather and father), he did not receive an education, he lacks culture. Gaev calls him a boor and a fist. But Lopakhin is a representative of the active part of society, he does not talk about the need for work, he works: ... I get up at five o'clock in the morning, work from morning to evening, well, I always have money of my own and others' ... The plan of salvation he proposed the estate seems real. He believes that by dividing a cherry orchard into plots and renting them out, you can earn income. It is noteworthy that as a result of the auction, the garden was transferred to Lopakhin.
What is the future of Lopakhin? Probably, having become even more rich in the years remaining before the revolution, he will contribute to the economic prosperity of Russia, become a philanthropist, and will use his own money to build schools and hospitals for the poor.
So who is the future? For Petya and Anya or for Lopakhin? This question could have been purely rhetorical if history had not provided Russia in our time with a second attempt to resolve it. Will the active Petya and Anya come? And when will the educated, highly cultured and moral Lopakhin appear?

The rights to the composition "The future in the play The Cherry Orchard" belong to its author. When citing material, it is necessary to indicate a hyperlink to