The Cherry Orchard
             The Misunderstood Comedy Essay
            
             When the first production of The Cherry Orchard was performed on stage in Moscow, there was a significant difference of opinion between the author and directors. Chekhov strongly faulted the director's interpretation that the play should be preformed as a tragedy and insisted that what he had written was a comedy. The famous philosopher Aristotle defined a comedy as "an imitation of characters of a lower type who are not bad in themselves but whose faults possess something ludicrous in them." The misinterpretation of The Cherry Orchard could be mainly due to a misunderstanding of the comic character. A "comic" character is generally supposed to keep an audience in fits of laughter, but this does not always have to be so. The sympathy and compassion the main character's in The Cherry Orchard bring out in the reader should not blind them to the fact that they are virtually comic characters. For example what character could be more ludicrous then a "typical" patrician like Gayev ,whose main characteristics according to Chekhov were "suavity and elegance," turning to his sister and demanding that she should choose between him and a footman like Yasha? And is not the fact that Gayev became a "bank official" ludicrous, particularly since it is made quite clear to the reader that he would not be able to hold a job for even a month? Not to mention the love affair of Lyubov, ludicrous from it's beginning to it's tragic end? In a letter to his wife Chekhov wrote that "nothing but death could subdue a woman like that." He also wrote that he saw Lyubov as "tastefully, but not gorgeously dressed; intelligent, very good natured, absent minded; friendly and gracious to everyone, always a smile on her face.(Bloom 1999)" Is this the outward appearance of a women who by the end of Act II has "lost her life," or in other words thrown it away on trifles? It is this that forms the ludicrous or com...