ABSTRACT
‘The Cherry Orchard’ is to be welcomed for its own sake, though it is possible no doubt, as Mr. Tyrone Guthrie suggests in a programme note, to see it as a parable. It was born of a time when the characteristics which Chekhov describes in a particular group seemed so nearly the national characteristics that for many onlookers the estate slipping out of the hands of Madame Ranevska became a symbol of Russia itself. This chance symbolism did not, however, account for the place which the play took among the masterpieces of the Russian theatre. That place it owes to the strength and delicacy with which it at one and the same time offers up futility to laughter and utters a spiritual protest - the protest of futility against itself and against all the devils of frustration which are the cause of its being.
