The Cherry Orchard and the Rise of Bolshevism Essay example -- Anton C

The crimson Orchard and the Rise of Bolshevism Anton Chekhov uses The Cherry Orchard, to openly present the decline of an aristocratic Russian family as a microcosm of the rapid decline of the old Russia at the end of the nineteenth century--but in like manner provides an ominous foreshadowing of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in the disparate ideals of his lineaments, Trofimov and Lopakhin, provided unintentionally. The Gayev family and their plight is intended as a symbolic microcosm of the fall of the gentry in society at large. Though the merchant Lopakhin is presented as the character who holds values of the new, post-aristocratic age, the student Trofimov espouses the semipolitical sentiments that will ultimately replace twain the aristocratic class and the new commercial class. Chekhovs presenting Lopakhin as a broach of the new social order is undermined by the lines and role he gives to Trofimov, and the reason discounts the importance of the then-emerging revolut ionaries. Yet the play reveals a major reason wherefore Communism ultimately received very little support from the gradual-minded in-between class, which lead to a bloody revolution and totalitarian regimes for a dangerous range of a century. It is this insight which provides contemporary critiques of socialist movements with a lesson rough human nature -- a lesson that serves to show that Communism and other forms of ideological socialism have never been workers movements, even if the movements temporally address workers political demands. Chekhov relies on several devices to proclaim to his audience that the changes taking place atomic number 18 not merely personal for the profligate Gayev family, but are part of an inevitable social evolution. Through these devices, Chekh... ... young revolutionaries who eventually seized Russia. Though the playwright dismisses the importance of these ideas, he offers a contrast of them with those of the bourgeoisie that explains wher efore Russian Communism arrived through a bloody revolution and without middle-class support, and why for over seventy years of this century the world had to live with the results of the revolution. whole works Cited Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard. 1903. Jacobus 792-815. ----. Letter to K.S. Stanislavsky. Jacobus 816. Jacobus, Lee, ed. The Bedford Introduction To Drama. 3rd ed. Boston Bedford Books, 1997. Levite, Allan. Guilt, Blame, and Politics. San Francisco Stanyan Press, 1998. Pritchett, V.S. Chekhov A kernel Set Free. New York Random House, 1988. Simmons, Ernest J. Chekhov A Biography. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1962.