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All Russia is our orchard. The land is vast and beautiful, there are many marvellous places in it.

Think, Anya, your grandfather, great grandfather and all your ancestors were serf masters, they owned living souls, and do not human beings look out at you from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from every branch, do you not hear their voices?

To own living souls, it has corrupted you all, those living in the past and now, so that your mother, you yourself, your uncle do not recognise that you are living in debt, at somebody else’s expense, at the expense of those people who you would not even allow over your doorstep...

We have fallen behind at least two hundred years, we have nothing, no intelligible relationship with our past, we only philosophize, complain about boredom or drink vodka.

It’s so obvious that to begin to live in the present we must first redeem the past, and we can redeem it only by suffering, only by exceptional and unremitting labour. Remember that, Anya.

- Anton Chekhov, 1904

“In Russia itself, Chekhov’s drama fell out of fashion after the revolution, but it was later incorporated into the Soviet canon. The character of Lopakhin, for example, was reinvented as a hero of the new order, rising from a modest background to eventually possess the gentry’s estates...”

“One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov’s plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” and pointed out similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: “the same nice people, the same utter futility.”

https://bookstorecafe.gr/en/anton-chekhov/