“Silence sets in, and all you can hear is how far in the garden they knock on wood with an ax,” Chekhov’s cherry orchard, as you know, was cut down long ago. People who remembered how “cherries were dried, soaked, pickled, jam was cooked ... and, it used to be, dried cherries were sent by carts to Moscow and Kharkov,” went to another world. Crosses over their graves decayed into dust in the middle of the last century.