Chekov's Cherry Orchard

While Chekov has grown from one of my adored and favorite playwrights to a more shadowed admiriable playwright, I still love The Cherry Orchard.  Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are probably the only two Chekovian plays that I hold dear in my heart, and the only two of his plays that actually taught me a lot about societal conventions and unrequited love.  The themes that I love in Chekov's Cherry Orchard pertain to mortality, love, society, and holding onto the past.  Death is mentioned quite a lot in this play, especially when it comes to the main character of Lubov.  Her dead son and husband haunt her thoughts and plague the past memories of the family's beloved cherry orchard.  Even towards the end of the play we hear the departing relatives describe the estate as, "at the end of it's life."  Just like the shifting social climate, death is inevitable. The entire play is about the death of a way of life.  Even though this play is assosciated with social change, it exudes love from all angles.  Chekov just couldn't write a play without showing the human condition in love of all kinds, unrequited love, love between master and servant, spiritual love, etc.  Lubov's devotion to love adds a great contrast to Trofimov's straight sociological perspective.  The societal climate of Russia at the time is also of great importance in this play.  After the freeing of the serfs in Russia there is this flux period where the servants don't know what to do with themselves and the aristocrats are going nowhere but down!  Trofimov's monologues throughout the play are great commentary for this social confusion.  While Yasha and and Dunyasha are acting high class, poor Fiers is 87 and only knows his servanthood.  It is overall extremely interesting to envision the upperclass society of the time (and even of today's time) dealing with a revolution and a role reversal that acts as a kind of forced atonement for the sins of their aristocractic status.  Losing their cherry orchard was bad enough, but to have a former servant, Lopahkin, buy it at the auction was a brutal but important moment for Lubov to come to terms with the past and the future that awaits her.  Lopahkin's monologue was the true Chekovian moment for me, when he states:
    
LOPAHKIN: The cherry orchard is mine now, mine! [Roars with laughter] My God, my God, the cherry orchard's mine! Tell me I'm drunk, or mad, or dreaming. ... [Stamps his feet] Don't laugh at me! If my father and grandfather rose from their graves and looked at the whole affair, and saw how their Ermolai, their beaten and uneducated Ermolai, who used to run barefoot in the winter, how that very Ermolai has bought an estate, which is the most beautiful thing in the world! I've bought the estate where my grandfather and my father were slaves, where they weren't even allowed into the kitchen. (3.151)
This monologue is one of the most interesting dramatic moments in the play. This divided allegiance Chekhov creates is what makes me love this play.  Chekov really knows how to strike a cord about social change and how real people deal with it.  But would this play be considered a problem play?  Or would it be called a realist piece?  I'm not sure.