SOURCE: "The Goddess of Love and the Tree of Knowledge: Some Elements of Myth and Folklore in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard," in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, Spring 1982, pp. 66-77.

In the following essay, the critics argue that "archetypes from myth and folklore" inform The Cherry Orchard and exert significant influence on its plot.

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.…¹

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...