This was my first interaction with Chekhov, and with Russian literature, and it was a pleasing one albeit with a less than perfect English translation.
I can only speak to the tone of the play and of its characters. My Russian history is lacking so I cannot, in this essay, respond to Chekhov's interaction with his day. However, I plan to read more and gain more understanding of his context in 1903.
The Cherry Orchard is a story of the changing from one era to another, one class to another, one way of thinking about the world to another.
With the quickest of summaries, the play centers on Madame Lyubov as an aristocrat stuck between keeping her past in her possession, the cherry orchard, but walking straight into bankruptcy or selling it in auction but losing her connection to the past.
I was most interested in the contrast of the responses to the change of an era. That of the younger and the older.
The younger generation, and the one gaining prominence in the new system, is all too willing to overthrow the older and they seem to have progress and education on their side but they do not know how to respond and empathize as they ought.
The older generation seems to be the only one that recognizes the sadness and the pain of the change. They, perhaps, see the virtue of the progression but they seem to observe things as they are. Change? Yes. Reasonable? Possibly. But painful and uprooting? Certainly.
Every change is a response to something in the past. Usually an unjust something or a broken something. Sometimes the disadvantaged become the advantaged and take excesses just as the previous advantaged, whom they just overthrew, did originally.
It seems that Chekhov only gave us two major responses to change: yearning for the past or uncritically welcoming the future. (There was the butler who was the epitome of complacent indifference or ignorance)
Every period of history has actions and systems with the flashes of brilliance and blemishes of evil. When we move from one to the next we carelessly throw out a thing in its entirety, demonizing all of it, rather than reforming the bad and making even better what exists.
Perhaps that is the curse of history: to abandon a flawed system or state for a differently flawed system or state, shouting against past injustices while being blind to the present maladies propped up by our current favored system.
For my part, I want to know the entirety of something. I don't want to follow along just because it is popular. I want to see a thing in its context and evaluate it fairly. It is too easy to take a position because it is the majority's position. Often that is also less painful. But I would rather take the longview knowing truth may not fit into the popular idea at any given time.
For my reading I felt stuck in the middle of the characters, wondering what good they were throwing away as they welcomed the new and also desiring proper remedies for the problems they experienced.
Instead of losing the cherry orchard in vain nostalgia, I would have had the protagonist use the cherry orchard for good.