[Chekhov] uses farce as a satiric device, to alienate us from a character so that we will not become too sympathetically involved with his spurious self-pity or melancholy posturing.

In the climactic scene of The Cherry Orchard, Gayev recites the following hymn to the Great Mother Goddess:

Oh, glorious Nature, shining with eternal light, so beautiful and yet so indifferent to our fate… you whom we call Mother, uniting in yourself both Life and Death, you live and you destroy.…

Gayev's speech is followed by an embarrassed silence "only broken by the subdued muttering of Feers. Suddenly a distant sound is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away." In the stage directions for the scene, the trees of the cherry orchard are contrasted to man-made trees, telegraph poles:

A road leads to Gayev's estate. On...