Change

Certainly Chekhov had the same attitude toward mutability that led Cary to exclaim in a letter, "Change itself is my country" (Joyce Cary:  The Comedy of Freedom, p. 1).  That is the attitude that made Chekhov insist that The Cherry Orchard should be treated as "light comedy," much to the annoyance of his producers at the Moscow Art Theater, who wanted to produce it as "a serious drama of Russian life" (Plays, p. 29).  The Cherry Orchard is about a group of people caught at a time of dramatic change in their lives.  Some welcome it, some resist it, and some do both at once.  They respond to the change ineptly, making themselves look as foolish as they really are; but most of them manage to adjust to the change reasonably well and at the end are ready to get on with the business of living the rest of their lives.  The play is "serious" only to people who wish to deplore the fact that cherry orchards do not last forever, who wish to complain that it is not fair, not just.  But Chekhov, like Cary and James and all other comic artists, knew perfectly well that the truly horrible fate for any human being would be to live in a world that did not change.  A cherry orchard is a very small price to pay for release from the trap of what you are into the freedom of what you might become, even if it turns out, as it usually does, that what you become is not very different from what you were.  (Galligan, Comic Vision in Literature, pp. 178-9)