Cherry Orchard (1904) is considered Chekhov's dramatic masterpiece. The last of the four great plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard), he wrote it at the age of forty-four, as he was dying of consumption. He subtitled it a comedy -- even though Stanislavsky, the director of the premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, thought otherwise. This lovely, lyrical work is set on the estate of Lyubov Andreeva Ranevskaya, an impoverished landowner who is unable to face the necessity of selling her estate in order to avoid bankruptcy. Tenaciously, she clings to the images of the past and her idyllic childhood, evoked by the beauty of the estate, the charm of the nursery where she and her brother spent happy early days, the loveliness of the grounds and the river, and -- above all --the magic of the cherry orchard. In the end, inevitably, the estate is auctioned off to the Lopakhin, son of a serf who had once served in Ranevskaya's household, and Lyubov and her family depart, scattererd to various destinations and to uncertain futures. This haunting, beautiful play is set against the backdrop of the enormous changes in Russian history at the time (the 1890s and early 1900s), when the landed gentry was fading, the forces of industrialism were on the rise, the peasants and emanicipated serfs were migrating off the land and into the cities, the seeds of anarchy and revolution were growing among the intelligentsia -- indeed, a time when the entire society was eroded. Written in 1904, one year before the first Russian Revolution, The Cherry Orchard contains Chekhov's stunning vision of Russia's past, present and future, and prophesizes the cataclysmic changes to come.