In The Cherry Orchard, language is hardly shared by the characters. The merchant Lopakhin explains what the family must do in order to save their estate, but they cannot understand him. As the catastrophe nears, they expend themselves in useless dialogue calculated to distract them from reality. Even the student Trofimov, who expresses … Chekhov's own hopes for an ideal future, is an "eternal student" who knows nothing of life and whose high-sounding words are perhaps ludicrous. He says of his relationship with Anya:

What most clearly distinguishes the content of The Cherry Orchard from its predecessors is that it has by far the simplest of Chekhov's plots. The play's 'shape' is no more than a straight line, which passes through the threat to the estate, ineffectual attempts to save it, the sale, and the dispersal of the family. It is the simplest and also the least dramatic of...