It was our learned essay-writing (“En’sha”) teacher in high school who introduced me to Anton Chekhov’s last play. , to be more accurate.To Chekhov the emancipation of serfs and its consequential demise of aristocracy were historical necessities, not catastrophes. Dr. Chekhov’s diagnosis and prescription were evident in the following lines, expressed by Trofimov – ‘the eternal student’ – to Mme. Ranevskaya’s daughter,
“All Russia is our orchard. The earth is so wide, so beautiful, so full of wonderful places. Just think, Anya. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and all your ancestors owned serfs, they owned human souls. Don’t you see that from every cherry-tree in the orchard, from every leaf and every trunk, men and women are gazing at you? If we’re to start living in the present isn’t it abundantly clear that we’ve first got to redeem our past and make a clean break with it? And we can only redeem it by suffering and getting down to real work for a change.”
Do we need a second opinion? Well, maybe for those still looking for that forgotten recipe.
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If anything, the post-election protests of 2009 re-introduced “the element of hope and the possibility of social improvement” – a Chekhovian concept – that had been missing in our earlier discourse. More than ever, our historical experiment with the religious form of patriarchy appears just that – an experiment.
