Review - Note Form

The struggle over memory

• Memory gives a sense of identify and prevents the attainment of happiness.

• The characters struggle to remember and forget parts of their past. The orchard represents both their pasts and happiness

• Conflict, confusion, self doubt, allusion

Modernity vs the old Russia

(a recurrent theme throughout Russian literature of the nineteenth century is the clash between the values of the old Russia)

• The selling of the orchard could also be a metaphor for the hacking and destroying of the old Russia. For many russians the thought of a new modern, westernised Russia was frightening and offensive because to them the old Russia was so deep within there roots, therefor you could say that the orchard represents the old Russia (happiness, togetherness, pure, unselfish) and the cutting down of the orchard was the transition that Russia made.

• Modernity is meant to signify western modernity , its rationalism, secularism and materialism. Russia, had been adopting these values since the early eighteenth century.

• Western values are often represented as false, pretentious and spiritually and morally wrong so for those of old Russia, accepting the changes must have been extremely infuriating.

• Internal and external conflicts, past and present.