Anton Chekhov – The Cherry Orchard

Theme: Loss, transition, and the passage of time amid the decline of a social class.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard presents the death of a world not through explosive climax, but through a quiet, almost bureaucratic slipping-away. Through Michel Foucault’s philosophy, this theatrical masterpiece becomes a study in historical subjectivity, the ethics of self-care in times of systemic change, and the emergence of new discourses of power and temporality.

Foucault teaches that history is not a linear progress, but a field of ruptures, breaks, and forgotten epistemes. The cherry orchard, in this context, is a non-discursive monument—a structure of memory and identity that no longer fits within the economic rationality of the new era. For Madame Ranevskaya and her family, the orchard signifies a time when identity was rooted in land, aesthetic sentiment, and noble lineage. Yet now, the orchard’s value lies only in its exchangeable potential, its capacity to be subdivided and monetized. This reveals a Foucauldian shift: from truth regimes based on tradition and affect, to those governed by biopolitical efficiency and economic rationality.

Characters like Lopakhin, the merchant who buys the estate, embody this new power. He is not merely a “climber”—he is a figure shaped by disciplinary capitalism, who internalizes the norms of productivity, ownership, and utilitarian value. His rise is not revolutionary but normative; he becomes a subject through mastery of the new discourse, not through ethical rebellion. Meanwhile, Ranevskaya remains bound by older discourses—of tragic femininity, emotional indulgence, and noble self-abnegation—which now appear irrelevant, even absurd.

According to The Care of the Self, ethical subjectivity requires individuals to actively shape their lives like works of art. But in The Cherry Orchard, none of the characters fully achieve this. They are either paralyzed by nostalgia (Ranevskaya), reduced to mechanical repetition (Gayev), or complicit in the emerging normalcy (Lopakhin). The “care of the self” is lost in the fog of disorientation, for no one has reconstituted their ethical practice in light of the historical rupture.

Foucault’s notion of the “desubjectification” of the aristocratic self resonates here. The fall of the estate is not only economic—it is metaphysical. A mode of being, one that linked time, identity, and land, disappears without drama. The final sound—an axe on a distant tree—is not merely agricultural. It is an epistemic cut.

The orchard, in the end, is not mourned as a tree. It is mourned as a mirror that once reflected an order where people knew their place. The tragedy is not personal—it is ontological.