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"When someone has been sick for a long time, everybody in his household, deep inside, wishes him to be dead," Anton Chekhov recorded in one of his last notebooks (Polnoe, Sochineniia 17.38). Chekhov's short life span (1860-1904) coincided with what Philippe Aries describes as a transition from one cultural view of death to another.2 Chekhov died at a time when death was becoming increasingly "medicalized" by being relocated from private homes to hospitals and various hospices, thus being treated as "invisible" and "denied." This concept of death (as something that "turns [one's] stomach [ . . . ] like the biological acts of man") has been prevalent ever since the end of the nineteenth century and defines our relationship with death nowadays (Aries 563 and 569). Aries's analysis might throw light on the allegedly ruthless scene from Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard (1903). In this play, the owners hear their beloved orchard being destroyed and are made aware of its end. Why didn't the new owner, Lopakhin, have enough tact to wait until they were all gone? Because being tactful was not an issue: the resolution of the play was not as cruel as many critics seem to imply today. The orchard, like a typical nineteenth-century man, was dying in a familiar setting, surrounded by friends and family. That is also why all attempts to send the old servant Firs to the hospital fail: he is left to die in his masters' house, in full view of the sympathetic theatregoers who have come to know and love him in the course of a three-hour-long performance.
A ceremony reminiscent of final farewells in The Cherry Orchard was organized for Chekhov on January 17, 1904, at the Moscow Art Theatre to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and, more important, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his writing career. Despite Chekhov's protestations (he repeatedly pointed out that the anniversary of his literary career was not due until March 1905), the organizers of the event dragged him onstage during the intermission between acts 3 and 4 of the very first production of The Cherry Orchard. As much as they wanted to shower Chekhov with love and affection, they were equally worried that he was not going to live another year. The...