was also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the
Artists' Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of
provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters
by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it
seems well-nigh intolerable.

"Uncle Vanya" followed "The Three Sisters," and the poignant truth of
the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched
his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was
afterward published.

"The Cherry Orchard" appeared in 1904 and was Tchekoff's last play. At
its production, just before his death, the author was feted as one of
Russia's greatest dramatists. Here it is not only country life that
Tchekoff shows us, but Russian life and character in general, in which
the old order is giving place to the new, and we see the practical,
modern spirit invading the vague, aimless existence so dear to the
owners of the cherry orchard. A new epoch was beginning, and at its dawn
the singer of old, dim Russia was silenced.

In the year that saw the production of "The Cherry Orchard," Tchekoff,
the favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi declared to be
comparable as a writer of stories only to Maupassant, died suddenly in
a little village of the Black Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks
before in the hope of recovering his lost health.

Tchekoff, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in
haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly
trivial conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere
of the Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read,