Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard highlights a certain emptiness that developed both on the side of the liberated serfs and on the side of the aristocracy after the abolition of serfdom. The clear role and connection that serfdom served to perpetuate has now dissolved and left a void that needs to be filled. However, anxieties remain about how to fill it.

Firs, the old servant of the aristocratic family in The Cherry Orchard is a manifestation of the old days of serfdom and the struggle to adapt to change, as he ironically quips, “I didn’t want my freedom. I stayed on with the master…” Later, he states, “It was like this before the disaster: an owl hooting and the samovar humming and humming.” Gaev asks him what disaster he’s talking about, to which he replies, “Freedom.”

Lyubov Andreevna also speaks of her willing entrapment in terms of her former lover, proclaiming, “He’s a Millstone round my neck, he’s dragging me down with him, but I love my millstone.” She associates a knowingly unhealthy relationship, and the cherry orchard (which is representative of the lavish yet empty pleasures of established aristocracy) with her former position of status within society. Lopakhin, on the other hand, once he has purchased the estate, revels in his liberation. He has bought the estate where his grandfather and father were servants.

The contrasting disdain and exultation pertaining to freedom reflect the hard anxieties about the dying social system that serfdom was. The irony and contrast add a new dimension to a what Thompson, in our texts, calls the most influential governmental social change in human history: the disconnect between separation between culture and law. However, what begins in characters minds as disaster must eventually be reconciled towards the clear progress that comes from social liberation.