The Cherry Orchard

by

Anton Chekhov

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin Character Analysis

A middle-class neighbor of Madame Ranevsky, Lopakhin is the child of peasants who has recently made his way in the world and acquired quite a bit of wealth. When Lopakhin was a boy, Madame Ranevsky showed him kindness on several occasions when he suffered at the hands of his drunkard of a father—now, Lopakhin attempts to repay her kindness by helping her strategize to keep a hold on her family’s ancestral home and sprawling estate. To do so, though, Lopakhin says, the beautiful and expansive (but valueless) cherry orchard must be cut down and parceled off into plots of land that can be rented out to the emergent members of the middle class. Ranevsky will not hear of this idea, no matter how many times Lopakhin tries to force her to see that it is the only way to survive. Ultimately, it is Lopakhin himself who purchases the estate at auction—his glee at having secured such a valuable and coveted parcel of land despite Ranevsky’s obvious suffering shows how self-absorption, greed, and blind ambition are not failings exclusive to the often-oblivious aristocracy.

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin Quotes in The Cherry Orchard

The The Cherry Orchard quotes below are all either spoken by Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin or refer to Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Social Change Theme Icon
).
Act 1 Quotes

MADAME RANEVSKY: Cut down the cherry orchard! Excuse me, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. If there is one thing that’s interesting, remarkable in fact, in the whole province, it’s our cherry orchard.

LOPAKHIN: There’s nothing remarkable about the orchard except that it’s a very big one. It only bears once every two years, and then you don’t know what to do with the fruit. Nobody wants to buy it.

GAYEF: Our cherry orchard is mentioned in Andreyevsky’s Encyclopaedia.

[…]

FIRS: In the old days, forty or fifty years ago, they used to dry the cherries and soak ‘em and pickle ‘em, and make jam of ‘em, and the dried cherries…

GAYEF: Shut up, Firs.

FIRS: The dried cherries used to be sent in wagons to Moscow and Kharkof. A heap of money! The dried cherries were soft and juicy and sweet and sweet-smelling them. They knew some way in those days.

MADAME RANEVSKY: And why don’t they do it now?

FIRS: They’ve forgotten. Nobody remembers how to do it.

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

GAYEF: Do you know how old this cupboard is, Lyuba? A week ago I pulled out the bottom drawer and saw a date burnt on it. That cupboard was made exactly a hundred years ago. What do you think of that, eh? We might celebrate its jubilee. It’s only an inanimate thing, but for all that it’s a historic cupboard.

[…]

GAYEF (touching the cupboard): Yes, it’s a wonderful thing… Beloved and venerable cupboard; honor and glory to your existence, which for more than a hundred years has been directed to the noble ideals of justice and virtue. Your silent summons to profitable labor has never weakened in all these hundred years. (Crying.) You have upheld the courage of succeeding generations of our human kind; you have upheld faith in a better future and cherished in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness. (A pause.)

Related Characters: Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin, Simeonof Pishtchik
Page Number: 9-10
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2 Quotes

LOPAKHIN: Excuse me, but in all my life I never met anybody so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike! I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold, and you don’t seem to understand what I say.

MADAME RANEVSKY: Well, what are we to do? Tell us what you want us to do.

LOPAKHIN: Don’t I tell you every day? Every day I say the same thing over and over again. You must lease off the cherry orchard and the rest of the estate for villas […]

MADAME RANEVSKY: Villas and villa residents, oh, please… it’s so vulgar!

GAYEF: I quite agree with you.

LOPAKHIN: I shall either cry, or scream, or faint. I can’t stand it! You’ll be the death of me. (To GAYEF.) You’re an old woman!

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

FIRS: I’ve been alive a long time. When they found me a wife, your father wasn’t even born yet. And when the Liberation came I was already chief valet. But I wouldn’t have any Liberation then; I stayed with my master. (A pause.) I remember how happy everybody was, but why they were happy they didn’t know themselves.

LOPAKHIN: It was fine before then. Anyway they used to flog ‘em.

FIRS (Mishearing him): I should think so! The peasants minded the masters, and the masters minded the peasants, but now it’s all higgledy-piggledy; you can’t make head or tail of it.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Page Number: 22-23
Explanation and Analysis:

LOPAKHIN: I should like to know what your opinion is of me?

TROPHIMOF: My opinion of you, Yermolai Alexeyitch, is this. You’re a rich man; you’ll soon be a millionaire. Just as a beast of prey which devours everything that comes in its way is necessary for the conversion of matter, so you are necessary too.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

(They all sit pensively. Silence reigns, broken only by the mumbling of old FIRS. Suddenly a distant sound is heard as if from the sky, the sound of a string breaking, dying away, melancholy.)

MADAME RANEVSKY: What’s that?

LOPAKHIN: I don’t know. It’s a lifting-tub given way somewhere away in the mines. It must be a long way off.

GAYEF: Perhaps it’s some sort of bird… a heron, or something.

TROPHIMOF: Or an owl…

MADAME RANEVSKY (shuddering): There’s something uncanny about it!

FIRS: The same thing happened before the great misfortune: the own screeched and the samovar kept humming.

GAYEF: What great misfortune?

FIRS: The Liberation.

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 3 Quotes

MADAME RANEVSKY: Who bought it?

LOPAKHIN: […] I bid nine thousand more than the mortgage, and got it; and now the cherry orchard is mine! Mine! (Laughing.) Heaven’s alive! Just think of it! The cherry orchard is mine! Tell me that I’m drunk; tell me that I’m off my head; tell me that it’s all a dream! […] If only my father and my grandfather could rise from their graves and see the whole affair, how their Yermolai, their flogged and ignorant Yermolai, who used to run around barefooted in the winter, how this same Yermolai had bought a property that hasn’t its equal for beauty anywhere in the whole world! I have bought the property where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed into the kitchen. I’m asleep, it’s only a vision, it isn’t real… ‘Tis the fruit of imagination, wrapped in the mists of ignorance. […] Come everyone and see Yermolai Lopakhin lay his axe to the cherry orchard, come and see the trees fall down! We’ll fill the place with villas; our grandsons and great-grandsons shall see a new life here […] Here comes the new squire, the owner of the cherry orchard!

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Barbara
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 4 Quotes

LOPAKHIN: In the spring I sowed three thousand acres of poppy and I have cleared four thousand pounds net profit. […] So you see, I cleared four thousand pounds; and I wanted to lend you a bit because I’ve got it to spare. What’s the good of being stuck up? I’m a peasant… As man to man…

TROPHIMOF: Your father was a peasant; mine was a chemist; it doesn’t prove anything. (LOPAKHIN takes out his pocket-book with paper money.) Shut up, shut up… If you offered me twenty thousand pounds I would not take it. I am a free man; nothing that you value so highly, all of you, rich and poor, has the smallest power over me; it’s like thistledown floating on the wind. I can do without you; I can go past you; I’m strong and proud. Mankind marches forward to the highest truth, to the highest happiness possible on earth, and I march in the foremost ranks.

LOPAKHIN: Will you get there?

TROPHIMOF: Yes. (A pause.) I will get there myself or I will show others the way.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

ANYA (in the doorway): Mamma says, will you stop cutting down the orchard till she has gone.

TROPHIMOF: Really, haven’t you got tact enough for that?

(Exit TROPHIMOF by the hall.)

LOPAKHIN: Of course, I’ll stop them at once. What fools they are!

(Exit after TROPHIMOF.)

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Anya (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Cherry Orchard PDF

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin Quotes in The Cherry Orchard

The The Cherry Orchard quotes below are all either spoken by Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin or refer to Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Social Change Theme Icon
).
Act 1 Quotes

MADAME RANEVSKY: Cut down the cherry orchard! Excuse me, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. If there is one thing that’s interesting, remarkable in fact, in the whole province, it’s our cherry orchard.

LOPAKHIN: There’s nothing remarkable about the orchard except that it’s a very big one. It only bears once every two years, and then you don’t know what to do with the fruit. Nobody wants to buy it.

GAYEF: Our cherry orchard is mentioned in Andreyevsky’s Encyclopaedia.

[…]

FIRS: In the old days, forty or fifty years ago, they used to dry the cherries and soak ‘em and pickle ‘em, and make jam of ‘em, and the dried cherries…

GAYEF: Shut up, Firs.

FIRS: The dried cherries used to be sent in wagons to Moscow and Kharkof. A heap of money! The dried cherries were soft and juicy and sweet and sweet-smelling them. They knew some way in those days.

MADAME RANEVSKY: And why don’t they do it now?

FIRS: They’ve forgotten. Nobody remembers how to do it.

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

GAYEF: Do you know how old this cupboard is, Lyuba? A week ago I pulled out the bottom drawer and saw a date burnt on it. That cupboard was made exactly a hundred years ago. What do you think of that, eh? We might celebrate its jubilee. It’s only an inanimate thing, but for all that it’s a historic cupboard.

[…]

GAYEF (touching the cupboard): Yes, it’s a wonderful thing… Beloved and venerable cupboard; honor and glory to your existence, which for more than a hundred years has been directed to the noble ideals of justice and virtue. Your silent summons to profitable labor has never weakened in all these hundred years. (Crying.) You have upheld the courage of succeeding generations of our human kind; you have upheld faith in a better future and cherished in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness. (A pause.)

Related Characters: Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin, Simeonof Pishtchik
Page Number: 9-10
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2 Quotes

LOPAKHIN: Excuse me, but in all my life I never met anybody so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike! I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold, and you don’t seem to understand what I say.

MADAME RANEVSKY: Well, what are we to do? Tell us what you want us to do.

LOPAKHIN: Don’t I tell you every day? Every day I say the same thing over and over again. You must lease off the cherry orchard and the rest of the estate for villas […]

MADAME RANEVSKY: Villas and villa residents, oh, please… it’s so vulgar!

GAYEF: I quite agree with you.

LOPAKHIN: I shall either cry, or scream, or faint. I can’t stand it! You’ll be the death of me. (To GAYEF.) You’re an old woman!

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

FIRS: I’ve been alive a long time. When they found me a wife, your father wasn’t even born yet. And when the Liberation came I was already chief valet. But I wouldn’t have any Liberation then; I stayed with my master. (A pause.) I remember how happy everybody was, but why they were happy they didn’t know themselves.

LOPAKHIN: It was fine before then. Anyway they used to flog ‘em.

FIRS (Mishearing him): I should think so! The peasants minded the masters, and the masters minded the peasants, but now it’s all higgledy-piggledy; you can’t make head or tail of it.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Page Number: 22-23
Explanation and Analysis:

LOPAKHIN: I should like to know what your opinion is of me?

TROPHIMOF: My opinion of you, Yermolai Alexeyitch, is this. You’re a rich man; you’ll soon be a millionaire. Just as a beast of prey which devours everything that comes in its way is necessary for the conversion of matter, so you are necessary too.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

(They all sit pensively. Silence reigns, broken only by the mumbling of old FIRS. Suddenly a distant sound is heard as if from the sky, the sound of a string breaking, dying away, melancholy.)

MADAME RANEVSKY: What’s that?

LOPAKHIN: I don’t know. It’s a lifting-tub given way somewhere away in the mines. It must be a long way off.

GAYEF: Perhaps it’s some sort of bird… a heron, or something.

TROPHIMOF: Or an owl…

MADAME RANEVSKY (shuddering): There’s something uncanny about it!

FIRS: The same thing happened before the great misfortune: the own screeched and the samovar kept humming.

GAYEF: What great misfortune?

FIRS: The Liberation.

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Leonid Andreyitch Gayef (speaker), Firs Nikolayevitch (speaker)
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 3 Quotes

MADAME RANEVSKY: Who bought it?

LOPAKHIN: […] I bid nine thousand more than the mortgage, and got it; and now the cherry orchard is mine! Mine! (Laughing.) Heaven’s alive! Just think of it! The cherry orchard is mine! Tell me that I’m drunk; tell me that I’m off my head; tell me that it’s all a dream! […] If only my father and my grandfather could rise from their graves and see the whole affair, how their Yermolai, their flogged and ignorant Yermolai, who used to run around barefooted in the winter, how this same Yermolai had bought a property that hasn’t its equal for beauty anywhere in the whole world! I have bought the property where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed into the kitchen. I’m asleep, it’s only a vision, it isn’t real… ‘Tis the fruit of imagination, wrapped in the mists of ignorance. […] Come everyone and see Yermolai Lopakhin lay his axe to the cherry orchard, come and see the trees fall down! We’ll fill the place with villas; our grandsons and great-grandsons shall see a new life here […] Here comes the new squire, the owner of the cherry orchard!

Related Characters: Madame Lyubof Andreyevna Ranevsky (speaker), Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Barbara
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 4 Quotes

LOPAKHIN: In the spring I sowed three thousand acres of poppy and I have cleared four thousand pounds net profit. […] So you see, I cleared four thousand pounds; and I wanted to lend you a bit because I’ve got it to spare. What’s the good of being stuck up? I’m a peasant… As man to man…

TROPHIMOF: Your father was a peasant; mine was a chemist; it doesn’t prove anything. (LOPAKHIN takes out his pocket-book with paper money.) Shut up, shut up… If you offered me twenty thousand pounds I would not take it. I am a free man; nothing that you value so highly, all of you, rich and poor, has the smallest power over me; it’s like thistledown floating on the wind. I can do without you; I can go past you; I’m strong and proud. Mankind marches forward to the highest truth, to the highest happiness possible on earth, and I march in the foremost ranks.

LOPAKHIN: Will you get there?

TROPHIMOF: Yes. (A pause.) I will get there myself or I will show others the way.

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

ANYA (in the doorway): Mamma says, will you stop cutting down the orchard till she has gone.

TROPHIMOF: Really, haven’t you got tact enough for that?

(Exit TROPHIMOF by the hall.)

LOPAKHIN: Of course, I’ll stop them at once. What fools they are!

(Exit after TROPHIMOF.)

Related Characters: Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin (speaker), Anya (speaker), Peter Trophimof (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cherry Orchard
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis: