THE CHERRY ORCHARD Anton Chekhov
TROFIMOV. All Russia is our orchard. The earth is so wide, so beautiful, so full of wonderful places. (Pause) Just think, Anya. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and all you 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? Don’t you hear their voices? Owning living souls, that’s what has changed you all so completely, those who went before and those alive today, so that your mother, you yourself, your uncle - you don’t realize that you’re actually living on credit. You’re living on other people, the very people you won’t even let inside your own front door. We’re at least a couple of years behind the times. So far we haven’t got anywhere at all and we’ve no real sense of the past. We just talk in airy generalizations, complain of boredom or drink vodka. But 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 some real work for a change. You must understand that, Anya.
act two
