“Eden is that old-fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.” ~Emily Dickinson
“We shall never find / That lovely land / Of might-have-been” ~Ivor Novello
“Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is,” Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend. “A writer must be as objective as a chemist.”[1] Chekhov saw his creations as an unadulterated, ruthless, but also poetic catalog of details. The audience might moralize, but he would not. His play, The Cherry Orchard, was meant as just such a faithful, painstaking representation of an all-too-ordinary and not particularly edifying situation in Russia before 1917: a profligate and insolvent noble family forced to sell its property, along with its eponymous cherry orchard.
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