‘When you read a novel this kind of thing seems so trite and obvious…’
(The youngest of the three sister, Masha Prozorov, accurately commenting on this play)

‘Nothing ever works out as you want it.’
(Olga summing up the plays miserable defeatism)

Characters

The play represents snapshots, at roughly one year intervals, of the three sisters, their brother, their partners and friends, as their lives slowly unfurl in ways they never expected…

The Prozorov family

Introducing the three Prozorov sisters. Their parents are dead and they live in a house in a provincial town with their brother, Andrew. They were born and brought up in Moscow but moved to this (unnamed) provincial town (population about 100,000, p.182) eleven years ago when their father, Colonel Prozorov, ‘got his brigade’. The father who moved them there died one year ago.

Andrew is clever and aims to become an academic but also laments his laziness. Their father drove all the children hard (‘inflicted education on us’), forcing them to learn modern languages but, since his death, the pedal’s been taken off the gas. Apart from anything else, Andrew’s put on a lot of weight. In the first act Andrew declares his love for a local young lady, Natalia (Natasha). Natasha is 28, gauche and awkward: the sisters mock her for her clumsy dress sense (‘downright pathetic’, p.180).

Olga is the oldest Prozorov sister and assumes the role of matriarchal head of the family although she’s only 28. She’s a spinster and so, inevitably, wishes she had married. Olga is, also inevitably, a teacher at the high school, where she frequently fills in for the headmistress whenever he’s absent.

Maria (Masha) is the middle sister, 23 at the beginning of the play. She married her husband, the dull pedantic Latin teacher at the local high school, Kulygin, when she was 18 and just out of school. After five years of marriage she has, inevitably, grown tired of her husband. (Chekhov wrote this part for his wife, the Moscow Art Theatre actress Olga Knipper.)

Irina is the youngest sister and the play opens with celebrations of her ‘name day’ (she is turning 20) which is the pretext for half a dozen other characters to visit the household, mainly a bunch of soldiers from the local barracks, being:

The soldiers

Aleksandr Vershinin (42) – Lieutenant colonel who’s just been appointed head of the artillery battery. He knew the girls’ father in Moscow and reminds them that when they were little they called him the ‘Lovesick Major’. He is married to his second wife who’s mentally unstable and regularly talks about killing herself.

Baron Nikolaj Tuzenbach (29) – A lieutenant in the army and not handsome, Tuzenbach often tries to impress the youngest sister, Irina, whom he has loved for five years.

Captain Vasily Solyony – irritating man who continually makes bad jokes, keeps quoting refrains from songs, teases the other soldiers, sprinkles scent on his chest and hands.

Dr Ivan Chebutykin – 59-year-old army doctor, Chebutykin starts off as a fun, eccentric old man who enjoys his position as family friend. He is all courtesy and hand kissing, boasts of his own idleness, always has a newspaper stuffed in his pocket.

Minor characters

Ferapont – Doorkeeper at the local council offices, Ferapont is comedy deaf (‘eh?….what?…what d’ye say?’). Also given to blurting out random facts, usually about Moscow.

Anfisa – An elderly family retainer and former nurse, Anfisa is 81 years old and has worked forever for the Prozorov family. Natasha begins to despise her for her feebleness and threatens to throw her out but Olga rescues her, taking her to live at Olga’s teacher’s flat.

Unseen characters

The play has several important characters who are talked about frequently but never seen onstage. These include Protopopov, head of the local council and Natasha’s lover; Vershinin’s suicidal wife and two daughters; Kulygin’s beloved superior the headmaster of the high school, and Natasha’s children (Bobik and Sofia).

Act 1

It’s 5 May, one year since their father died and, coincidentally, Irina’s name-day. The three sisters are sitting together and quickly give their backstories: Olga is marking her pupils workbooks and complains about being exhausted by long hours teaching at the school, while Irina has woken up in a wonderful mood on this lovely sunny day!

Family friends – the soldiers Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Captain Solyony, along with old Dr Chebutykin – walk in very casually. Irina, in her naive gushing way, praises the joy of honest work; Tuzenbach quickly establishes his hobby horse, which is that a great avalanche is coming which will sweep away all their rottenness and boredom (and, indeed, there was to be a revolution 4 years after the play was produced).

Dr Chebutykin boasts about how idle he is, never read a book since he left university, only ever reads the newspapers and pulls one out of his pocket.

Masha announces she’s going home to her boring husband, says she is so depressed, kisses Irina through her tears of unhappiness. This triggers Olga who starts crying.

Dr Chebutykin re-enters with a soldier carrying a silver samovar which he presents to Irina as a birthday present. This is, apparently, a crass gift so Irina, Olga and the soldiers all mock it. Chebutykin responds with self pity: ‘I’m an old man, a lonely, insignificant old man.’

Enter Vershinin, the new battery commander. When he mentions he’s from Moscow, the homesick sisters excitedly crown round, as he remembers, all those years ago, coming to visit their father, and remembers the three little sisters, and they enthusiastically revive their memories, turns out they even lived on the same road, Old Basmanny Road, and Olga and Masha start crying (as usual).

Someone mentions their dead mother and Masha laments that she’s already starting to forget what she looked like which prompts Vershinin to a bit of cheap philosophising, pointing out that everything they think important will pass away and be forgotten. Tuzenbach counters that maybe later generations will look back and find their lives admirable, after all there are no longer torture and executions etc (they will be revived by the Bolsheviks in just 16 or so years’ time).

Enter Andrew who the sisters praise for his ability on the violin, and at making picture frames, but then tease for being in love. Every time he opens his mouth Vershinin talks philosophically about the future:

VERSHININ: In two or three hundred years life upon this earth will be beautiful beyond our dreams…’ (p.182)

Tuzenbakh picks up on this and says they all need to work for this better future. (In his history of Russia Orlando Figes comments on a recurring feature of Russian culture being its belief in utopias here on earth, whether the peasants dreaming of owning their own land or intellectuals dreaming of a free society. That’s why even pre-revolutionary literature sounds the same as communist exhortations to build a better future, because it’s a thread that runs through Russian culture no matter what the political system. This thread occurs in several Chekhov plays.)

Enter Kulygin, the senior assistant master at the local school who Masha married when she was young and impressionable. he establishes his crushingly boring character by presenting Irina with a history of the school over the last 50 years which he has written. It includes a list of every pupil who’s passed through it in the previous 50 years! Irina points out that he already gave her this as a present, at Easter. Unfazed, Kulygin turns to offer it to Vershinin.

Kulygin delivers a pedantic schoolteacher lecture about how summer is coming, they’ll soon have to take up the carpets and take down the curtains. He puts his arm round Masha and tells everyone his wife loves him, but Masha irritatedly frees herself and moves away. When he reminds her they’re due to attend a little party at the headmaster’s later in the day Masha irritatedly says she’s not going.

Everyone goes through to the back room for lunch, leaving Irina and Tuzenbakh alone so that he instantly declares his love for Irina. She is so young and fresh, he says he feels a tremendous zeal for life, to work and struggle and this is mixed up with his love for her.

But Irina bursts into tears. A little incomprehensibly she says that life is like weeds strangling the three sisters. What’s wrong is they ‘don’t know the meaning of work’. An odd thing to say seeing as how Olga is exhausted by her work.

Enter Natasha wearing a bright green sash, to the horror of all the other female characters.

The big birthday lunch starts with the characters swapping chit-chat. Notable that all this irritates Andrew whose main wish is to be left alone.

Enter the minor characters second lieutenants Vladimir Rodé, who is given the habit of rolling his r’s, and Alexei Fedotik, who is given the hobby of photography i.e. he’s always snapping whatever situation he finds himself in.

Someone notices there are 13 at the table, they joke that this means someone at the table is in love. When Dr Chebutykin jokingly mentions Natasha’s name she gets up and runs out the room, followed by Andrew. He tells her how much he loves her and how happy she makes with the characteristically bluntness, with the straightforward statement which is so typical of Chekhov:

ANDREW: I feel so wonderful, my heart is so full of love and joy. (p.189)

He kisses her and tells her he wants to marry her.

Act 2

It’s a year later. Andrew and Natasha have gotten married and had a baby, Bobik, which Natasha endlessly fusses over. Since the scene is the same as Act 1, clearly Andrew and Natasha are living in the Prozorov family home. As the act opens it’s 8 o’clock at night. We find out in quick succession that Irina has now got a job, working at the post office, that Natasha is harsh on the servants, that it’s the carnival and some revellers have been invited to the house which Natasha inevitably disapproves off since it might upset precious Bobik.

Natasha goes on to say that Bobok ought to have Irina’s room and Irina move in to share with Olga. In other words, Natasha is trying to take over running the Prozorov household and Andrew is too weak/scared of upsetting her, to intervene. Natasha leaves, the old servant Ferapont enters. He’s brought some papers from the council which triggers Andrew to give us his backstory, in that characteristically Chekhov way: this is that all his brave fantasies about becoming a university professor in Moscow, ‘a distinguished scholar, the pride of Russia!’ have been crushed and he’s ended up becoming secretary to the county council and his highest ambition is to be allowed onto the council itself.

He ponders the way that, if he were in Moscow he could drop into a restaurant for dinner and not know anybody there but somehow still feel part of the swing of things, whereas here in this provincial town, if he goes to a restaurant he knows everyone and everyone knows him but he still feels out of it.

He can tell old Ferapont all this because Ferapont is deaf and doesn’t actually hear him, instead telling some inconsequential stories told by a recent contractor from Moscow to the council.

Andrew stretches and exits to be replaced by Masha and Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin. They are a bit flushed from a night out. She repeats the story that she married her husband when young and still scared of him. They both lament how boring this provincial town is, how everyone here is fed up with their wife, with their house, with their estate and with their horses. Moan moan moan.

Then Vershinin moans about his unstable wife, they had an argument this morning, and ends up telling Masha he has no-one but her, ‘You’re a wonderful marvellous woman, I love you love you love you’.

While Vershinin is prattling on Irina and Baron Tuzenbakh enter at another door. He is telling Irina how much he loves her, how he loves to walk her home from work every evening, how he’ll do it for the next ten or twenty years if she’ll let him. But Irina ignores him because she is tired. We know this because, with Chekhovian lack of subtlety she says it six times.

The two couples spot each other and start a general conversation. Irina complains that working at the post office is not at all the intellectual adventure she romantically envisioned but just tiring drudgery (welcome to the world, baby). Irina and Masha share the news that Andrew has started going to some gambling club with the doctor and is losing heavily.

The doctor enters, combs his beard, sits and takes out a newspaper and the other characters laugh at this stereotypical behaviour.

At a loose end Vershinin and Tuzenbakh start off on their familiar hobby horse, the world of the future which will bring in a new and happy life. As per my citing of Orlando Figes’ point about the  ubiquity of utopian thinking in Russian culture:

VERSHININ: Two or three hundred years, or a thousand years if you like – it doesn’t really matter how long – will bring in a new and happy life. We’ll have no part in it of course, but it is what we’re now living for, working for, yes suffering for. We’re creating it and that’s what gives our life its meaning and its happiness too… (p.197)

The good life is always round the corner. Of course this is the deep Russian mentality which the communists exploited throughout the Soviet era. Just one more five-year plan, comrade! All these sacrifices we’re making are for the future, it is people of the future who will benefit from our misery, our sacrifices, our starving and gulags and imprisonment. So:

VERSHININ: Our business is to work and go on working and our distance descendants will have the happiness that’s going…I won’t have it but my children’s children may. (p.197)

Anyway, Tuzenbakh completely disagrees. Forget all this ‘happiness in the far future’ stuff. our job is to be happy today! What if he’s happy right now! Masha enters with a third point of view which is life is meaningless without a point or purpose.

MASHA: What’s the point of it all?…Man must have a faith or be trying to find one otherwise his life just doesn’t make any sense…Either you know what you’re living for or else the whole thing’s a waste of time and means less than nothing. (p.198)

This is, maybe, the existentialist frame of mind which dominated so much continental thought and literature in the twentieth century but is obviously wrong. It is nostalgic for ‘faith’, it believes there’s a God-shaped hole in our hearts etc etc. But if there is no God and never was one and all faiths are psychological fantasies, then better to live in truth, face and overcome and be happy with who we are and the world we live in and the conditions on which we live in it (frailty, contingency, illness, accident) and so make the best of every day. Freud’s view in his little essay on transitoriness.

After reaching no conclusion, as discussions like this never can because there is no conclusion to an unnecessary question, to a question framed using invalid concepts (God, faith, meaning) the conversation collapses into general banter with the doctor inconsequentially pointing out facts in his newspaper, the junior officer Fedotik has brought Irina a box of crayons. He shows her a different type of patience (with cards). Servants bring in a samovar to prepare tea… It’s more like a youth club than a family home, the way in each scene this main room fills up with ten or more characters.

The room disintegrates into people saying things to themselves, continuing their hobby horse lines of thought, dialogue criss-crossing over others… Vershinin  has another bit of gloomy philosophising:

VERSHININ: We have no happiness. There’s no such thing. It’s only something we long for. (p.200)

But the psychological basis of this view is revealed seconds later when he is handed a note which has been sent from his daughter to say his wife has taken poison again so he has to go in a rush, just time to tell Masha what a splendid marvellous woman she is…Leaving Masha in a filthy mood because she is in love with a man who is tied to a maniac, which explains why she (Masha) now wanders round the room losing her temper with everyone, telling off the servant Anfisa and scrambling the cards Irina was playing patience with.

Tuzenbakh carries a decanter of brandy over to Solyony and says they must make it up but Solyony says there’s no ‘it’ to make up before admitting that he’s alright when with one other person but in larger company feels tense and comes out with boorish and rude comments.

Tuzenbakh announces to several people that he’s resigning his commission because he wants to work, to do good honest work, he bets peasants sleep like logs after a good day’s labour. What an idiot. The Tolstoy view that authenticity is down among the mindless labouring peasants.

Solyony and the doctor get into a pointless argument about escalopes and shallots.

Tuzenbakh, Andrew and Solyony get into a pointless argument about how many universities Moscow has.

Tuzenbakh sits at the piano and starts to play a waltz, Masha dances by herself singing made-up words.

God these people really need to get lives.

As if to confirm that view Natasha enters and tells them they’ve all got to go because her baby Bobik is ill. Also it is announced that the promised carnival revellers will not now be coming to the house – for the sake of the baby, of course. All the other characters say goodbye and make various exits, all grumbling about Natasha, some saying it’s her that’s ill, mentally ill.

Leaving just Andrew and Dr Chebutykin who have obviously made a plan to go to a gambling club again tonight. Chebutykin admits that he was always in love with Andrew’s mother. Andrew takes this with surprising indifference because what he really wants to say is that marriage is rubbish (it’s clear that after just one year he’s had enough of small-minded but bossy Natasha). Yes but loneliness is a terrible thing, Chebutykin replies.

They exit whereupon there’s knocking at the hall door. It’s the carnival revellers who were promised a reception here. Irina tells the maid Anfisa to tell them there’s nobody home. At that moment Solyony enters, is surprised the carnival revellers are being turned away but, finding Irina by herself, takes the opportunity to tell her how much he loves her, ‘My happiness! My joy!’ (p.205) Unsurprisingly Irina very coldly tells him to shut up and go away, at which Solyony says he shall have no rival.

SOLYONY: By God I mean it, if there’s anybody else I’ll kill him! (p.205)

Enter Natasha with candle checking all the doors are shut. She imagines her husband is in his room reading so doesn’t look in, then encounters Irina and Solyony.

Natasha takes this opportunity to suggest to irina that she vacates her room and moves in with Olga to make way for precious Bobik. This is such an outrageous suggestion that Irina doesn’t at first understand her and then the doorbell goes. The maid comes to tell Natasha that it’s the leader of the council, Protopopov. Natasha switches from trying to ease Irina out of her room to giggling girlishly that Protopopov has come to take her for a spin in his sleigh and skips out. It’s pretty obvious that Natasha is infatuated with / having an affair with Protopopov.

Enter the oldest sister, tired Olga, and the boring schoolmaster Kulygin, obviously arriving from work, and they quickly tell us it’s because they’ve been attending a school meeting. When they quiz Irina, Irina says she’s too tired to talk. Olga announces that she feels ill with fatigue. Vershinin comes in, says his wife has stabilised after her latest suicide attempt and invites Kulygin to go somewhere with him but Kulygin completes the trio of characters saying he’s too tired.

Well, since there’s no party (the carnival people being turned away) both Vershinin and Kulygin say they’ll be off then, and take their leave of the two sisters (Olga and Irina).

Olga heads to bed leaving Irina alone onstage just long enough for Natashe to re-emerge with her outdoor clothes on and obviously off for a spin, a snog and maybe something more with Protopopov.

When she’s gone there’s only Irina onstage, with the weight of all these issues on her shoulders:

• the wife of her brother, Andrew, is being unfaithful to him
• in despair Andrew has taken to staying out late and gambling away the family patrimony
• her older sister (Olga) is a sad old spinster
• her second sister (Masha) is bored of her dull husband and wants to have an affair with Vershinin but Vershinin is tied to his suicidal wife and two daughters
• she, Irina, is loved by dashing (if not handsome) Tuzenbakh but is the subject of unwanted attentions from the vile Solyony

It’s no wonder, then, that she ends the act with the play’s well-known refrain:

IRINA: [alone on stage, with intense longing]: Moscow, Moscow, Moscow!

Act 3

About a year later in Olga and Irina’s room – a clear sign that Natasha is taking over the household, as she asked them to share a room so that Bobik could have a separate room.

But we’re thrown straight into a high stress situation. it’s 3 in the morning, there’s a fire raging in the town, red from the fire can bee seen through the windows along with the sound of fire engines in the road outside.

People are running in and out in panic. Old Anfisa wants clothes for people who’ve taken refuge with them which turns out to be a lot of people: ‘the Kolotilin girls’ as well as the entire Vershinin household, Baton Tuzenbakh, the doctor, Fedotik. Obviously Olga and the nanny, Anfisa, both complain of being tired out.

Natasha enters and is only concerned that a) her beloved children are sleeping safely and b) tell-tale sign of self-absorbed narcissistic women everywhere, checks herself in the mirror and worries that she’s put on a bit of weight. In the middle of a huge fire and crisis when people are dying.

With similar selfishness she spots the 80-year-old servant Anfida sitting down and says How dare she sit in here presence? and orders her out. This, Natasha’s cruelty and the harsh words, make Olga cry which makes Natasha soften to her and kiss her. But they are mutually incomprehensible. Natasha thinks Anfisa is too old to work and so should be sent back to her village; Olga says she has served the family loyally for 30 years and so should be allowed to stay at which Natasha loses her temper and tells Olga that she runs the household.

Kulygin comes in with more news of the fire and to announce that he is, of course, tired out. These characters all need to take more exercise and multivitamin pills!

Enter the doctor who’s got very drunk. He talks to himself morosely, lamenting that he’s forgotten everything he ever knew about medicine and the other day, Wednesday, killed a woman. He hates himself, says he’s barely even human.

Just as in the previous acts the other characters drift in, Irina, Tuzenbakh, Vershinin. Tuezanbakh is in civilian dress and praises the soldiers for saving the day and the town. He says people are suggesting a concert to raise money for people who’ve lost their homes and says Masha must play at it.

Out of nowhere the doctor drops a valuable clock he’d been looking at and it smashes to pieces. Irina says it belonged to their mother but drunk Chebutykin rambles on saying what if he didn’t drop it what if they just think he did, what if he doesn’t exist, what if none of them exist. then changing tack he blurts out that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov and they all pretend not to notice, before exiting.

There’s a pregnant pause which Vershinin breaks by leaping in to describe his actions earlier that night namely grabbing his children out of their house and the flames came closer. In his fanciful way, he wonders how much more his children will have to witness in their lives. (Well, if they’re 5 in 1901 they’ll witness Russia being trounced in the war with Japan, the 1905 revolution, the outbreak of war in 1915, the two revolutions in 1917, the Bolshevik coup and then the civil war lasting till 1922 or 3, millions dead from war, civil war and famine, then Bolshevik dictatorship leading to the collectivisation famines in the early 30s, the rise of the gulags and Stalin’s terror state, then the German invasion of 1941. Quite a lot, then.)

Continuing his theme he says that ‘in two or three hundred years’ people will lead wonderful lives…

Fedotik comes in to tell them his house has burned to the ground and he’s lost all his possessions, guitar, camera, everything.

Solyony enters but Irina tells him he can’t come in. He sprinkles himself with scent and Verishinin takes him into the dining room.

Tuzenbakh tells everyone how tired he feels before going on to kiss Irina’s hand and wishing she would come away with him. He reminds he how happy and optimistic she was on her name day i.e. the first act, but how somehow all the energy and optimism has been crushed. Rashly, he tells her that he would give his life for her.

Masha, exhausted of course, tells him to shut up and go away. This triggers her husband, Kulygin to tell her how much he loves her and has lovey every day of their seven years of marriage, but as schematically as in a masque or allegory she replies:

KULYGIN: I’m happy, happy, oh so happy.
MASHA: I’m bored, bored, oh so bored. (p.216)

Kulygin exists, leaving the Three Sisters alone.

Masha tells her sisters that Andrew has mortgaged the house and given the cash to his horrible wife but all four of them own the house so it’s unfair. Irina laments that Andrew’s gone to seed, lost all his ambition, once he wanted to be a professor but now he’s delighted just to get a place on the council. And his wife is having an affair with the head of the council, Protopopov, the whole town is laughing at him behind his back but he’s the only one who doesn’t know. It’s all too much for her and Irina bursts into tears.

IRINA: What’s become of everything, where’s it all gone? Where is it?… Life is slipping away, it will never, never come back again and we shall never get to Moscow… (p.217)

Once she naively looked forward to ‘work’ but after working at the post office she now works for the town council and hates it. She’s 23 and she’s shrivelled up, she’s thin and old. She’s sinking into a bottomless pit of despair. Why hasn’t she killed herself?

Olga, the spinster, advises Irina to marry, marry Baron Tuzebakh, he’s not very good looking but he’s a good man. Admittedly they were all upset when he resigned his commission from the army and turned up wearing civilian clothes – they just brought out how ugly he is.

Irina replies that she’s been waiting till they move back to Moscow, convinced she’ll meet her true love there. But now she’s coming to realise that was all a fantasy.

Masha takes the opportunity to confess that she’s fallen head over heels in love with Vershinin but Olga refuses to listen. Masha laments that life is not like a novel. In real life you discover that nobody knows anything and you have to find your own way through.

Enter Andrew in a bad mood and telling off Ferapont who’s only brought a message from the firemen asking if they can lay a hose through their garden to the river. Andrew realises it’s just the Three Sisters and suggests they have it out, this is an opportunity for them to tell him what their complaint is against him.

Masha goes out and Olga and Irina say they’re both too tired but Andrew insists on continuing. He delivers a massive monologue clearly fighting against his own bad conscience. Firstly, he insists his wife Natasha is a fine honourable woman and he loves her and he doesn’t know what they’ve got against her and demands they give her the respect she’s owed. Secondly, he thinks they somehow disapprove of the way he never became the university professor he wanted to be but he’s on the town council now and very proud of being a councillor and it’s an important job. Thirdly, he admits he’s mortgaged the house and used the money released to pay off his gambling debts which had reached 35,000 roubles but…but… the three sisters had annuities awarded them while he had no income, so…so…

Obviously he’s looking for their approval and forgiveness but neither Olga nor Irina say anything so he walks out.

The last piece of dialogue is Irina telling Olga that ‘their’ regiment is due to leave town. Oh what will they do without their soldiers, the only friends they have? As to Tuzenbakh, yes, alright, she’ll marry him.

IRINA: He’s a very good man and I will marry him, I will, I will, only do let’s go to Moscow. We must go, please! There’s nowhere in the world like Moscow. Let’s go, Olga, do let’s go!

Act 4

Act 4 is set in the garden of the Prozorovs’ house with the verandah just on the right. The regiment is leaving and our guys are saying their farewells. Tuzenbakh, Irina, Kugylin are saying farewell to Rodé and Fedotik who keeps telling everyone to stand still so he can photograph them. And then with a few more farewells, they part and walk away.

Dr Chebutykin announces he’ll be going with them but only for a year or so at which point he’ll retire and come back here to live off his pension.

Now the soldiers have gone Irina asks what was this fracas in town the night before involving Tuzenbakh. Tuzenback refuses to discuss it and walks off across the lawn and into the house so Kulygin tells Irina that objectionable Solyony encountered Tukenbakh on the boulevard, started picking on him until the Baron insulted him.

Irina shudders at the thought. She announces that she’s marrying Tuzenbakh tomorrow and then they’re moving to ‘the brick works’ [that Tuzenback is going to manage?] while she starts work as a teacher at the school and, she hopes, a New Life will begin. Although we, the audience, know that of course it won’t…

Irina has finally resigned herself to never going to Moscow so she’s going to stay here and make the best of it. But she does find it hard in the big house now that Olga’s been made headmistress of the high school and lives on the premises. But when she finally made up her mind to say Yes to Tuzenbakh she felt a revival of that old urge to work, work, work and now she’s almost looking forward to the future.

Masha appears to share with Dr Chebutykin how she feels that all their hopes have come to nothing. She was in love with Verishin but he’s leaving today and she’ll be back to being lumbered with boring pedantic Kulygin.

Andrew has been seen pushing a pram (with another baby in it?) presumably a symbol of his fall from the high ambition of becoming a world-renowned professor. Now he comes over and in turn asks about the incident on the boulevard the night before. Dr Chebutykin gives us a staggeringly significant new detail which he failed to mention earlier, when Irina was around, which is that when Tuzenbakh insulted Solyony, the latter challenged him to a duel and … that it’s scheduled to happen just about now, in the woods across the river (which we can see painted on the backdrop of the scenery). A duel!

Masha and Andrew all take it very lightly that the man their sister is engaged to is about to fight a duel. Instead of rushing to stop it or call the cops Andrew just feebly says it’s all very immoral. In a further development we learn that the duellists have requested Dr Chebutykin to attend on them!

Masha is disgusted with all this talk so walks away leaving Andrew to confide to Dr Chebutykin that he loves his wife, he loves her dearly, but sometimes he really doesn’t like her, she’s so bossy and vulgar. the doctor gives him the advice to put on his hat, pick up his stick set off walking and walk and walk and walk and never come back.

Enter Solyony and two of his seconds backstage. Solyony spots the doctor, walks over and tells him it’s time to go to the duel and they leave. Enter Irina and Tuzebakh. He tells her he just has to pop into town to, er, see some friends off. She knows he’s lying but wonders why (so she’s more or less the only character who doesn’t know about the duel). He tells her how much he loves her, that he’s loved her for five years, that she gets more beautiful every day…just a shame she doesn’t love him.

Irina cries and says yes, she doesn’t love him, she’s never loved anyone. Her heart feels like a grand piano that’s locked and nobody can find the key. I supposed it’s a scene of great poignancy because the audience strongly suspects Tuzenbakh is going to his death while his half-hearted fiancée knows nothing. He wants to say something mighty and significant, to sum up his love of life and her, but all he can think of is to ask her to ask one of the servants to put some coffee on for when he gets back.

Now, something has to fill the time it’s going to take Tuzenbakh to go and get in a boat, be ferried across the river to the forests beyond, find his way to the duelling place etc and so Chekhov gives Andrew, alone onstage, a massive speech asking where did it all go wrong leading into a long description of how awful this town is, how everyone is like everyone else, bored out of their minds, and are bringing up children who will be bored to death in turn. (Of course we latecomers know that Russians born around 1900 were fated to have anything but a boring life.)

The retainer Ferapont enters with some papers to sign so there’s some more business with reading anc complaining about these, before Andrew tries to cheer himself up by adopting the Verishin strategy of imagining what life will be like for his heirs two or three hundred years in the future. Hopefully their lives will be completely different.

He works himself up into such a state that Natasha leans out the window and yells at him to shut up. Which in turn wakes up baby Bobik who starts to cry and she turns her yelling indoors to tell him off etc. Stage business to cover Tuzenbakh’s journey to the duelling place.

Even more business follows when a couple of travelling musicians wander onstage and start performing. Olga tells the ancient nanny Alfisa to give them some money, which she does and they move on. This allows Anfisa to explain that although Natasha’s kicked her out of the house Olga has found a nice little crib for her at the school, so her story’s ending happily.

Enter Verishin who’s also leaving with the regiment and wants to say a private goodbye to Masha which is going to be difficult into the always hyper-busy Prozorov household. Olga asks him if they’ll ever meet again and he simply replies, No.

Masha enters and they have a short heart-breaking parting with a long kiss then lots of tears, then she won’t let him go but he extricates himself and hands her over to Olga. Kulygin enters, he saw some of this but tells Masha he forgives her and now they can go back to the old way of living which is, somehow, absolutely crushing.

Masha sings to herself the little song about a green boat which she has sung at moments of crisis throughout the play and that’s when a shot is heard in the distance.

The triviality continues. Masha’s anguish is made unbearable by the complete reasonableness and forgiveness of her husband who pulls out a fake moustache and beard he confiscated off a boy in class. Now he puts it on to make them laugh and Masha laughs then bursts into hopeless sobbing again. All her hopes for life have been utterly crushed.

Natasha arrives on the scene and it is clear how she has totally defeated the Prozorov family. She bosses everyone around, tells the maid to push the pram, criticises Kulygin for wearing the silly beard, says the minute Irina leaves the house she’s going to move Andrew into her room so he can scrape away on his violin and first thing she’s going to do is have the beautiful avenue of trees chopped down (anticipating the massacre of trees in The Cherry Orchard). She criticises Irina for dressing so plainly which, of course, reverses the sisters’ chiding of Natasha for dressing so gaudily at the start of the play.

They hear a military band in the distance as Dr Chebutykin enters in a hurry. He goes up and whispers in Olga’s ear. She says, No no it can’t be true. Irina begs to know and Chebutykin quite brutally tells her Tuzenbakh’s just been killed in a duel before wandering off, sitting down, taking out a paper and delivering his trademark line, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter anyway’ and then humming his stupid song’, Tarara boom di-ay.’

Now you might have expected a world-shattering howl of anguish and a long speech about the Injustices of Life but in fact Irina starts to weep quietly and just says, ‘I knew it’. Instead all three sisters are given a kind of collective last word as they speak in sequence, almost inn unison, almost with a musical effect.

And what they say is oddly, eerily cool and unmoved, a kind of vision of philosophical passivity, of how they must commit themselves to hard work and how this will bring about a better future. Did Chekhov in the slightest believe this or is it just a trope to thread throughout the play and, here, to end it with i.e an entirely aesthetic strategy? Or is is designed to convey the puzzlement, the bewilderment at life’s imponderability of the three sisters?

MASHA: Oh, listen to the band! They’re all leaving us and one has gone right away and will never never come back , and we shall be left alone to begin our lives again. We must go on living, we must.
IRINA: [puts her head on Olga’s breast]: What is all this for? Why all this suffering? The answer will be known one day and then there will be no more mysteries left, but till then life must go on, we must work and work and think of nothing else. I’ll go off alone tomorrow to teach at a school and spend my whole life serving those who may need me. It’s autumn now and it will soon be winter, with everything buried in snow, and I shall work, work, work.
OLGA [embraces both her sisters]: Listen to the band. What a splendid, rousing tune, it puts new heart into you, doesn’t it? Oh, my God! In time we shall pass on forever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were. But our sufferings will bring happiness to those who come after us, peace and joy will reign on earth, and there will be kind words and kind thoughts for us and our times. We still have our lives ahead of us, my dears, so let’s make the most of them.
[The music becomes fainter and fainter. KULYGIN, smiling cheerfully, emerges from the house with a hat and coat while ANDREW continues to push the pram with Bobik in it.]
CHEBUTYKIN: [singing softly]: Traraboomdeay, ley’s have a tune today. [Reads the newspaper.] None of it matters. Nothing matters.
OLGA: If we could only know, oh if we could only know!

Fates

Olga will continue as an unmarried head teachers.

Masha will continue to be unhappily married to Kulygin.

Irina has said she wants to persevere as a teacher.

Natasha is mistress of the family home, in charge of everything.

Andrei is stuck in his marriage with two children, unwilling and unable to do anything for his wife or himself.

The characters describe themselves

As I’ve pointed out it’s a trick or trait of Chekhov that, rather than have the audience deduce how they’re feeling from their dialogue or actions, he always has his characters declare it in the most straightahead, bluntest kind of way. Strikes me as the opposite of subtle:

IRINA: I’m in such a good mood, I don’t know why. (p.172)

MASHA: I’m down in the dumps today, I feel so depressed… (p.175)

VERSHININ: I’m more pleased than I can say, I really am. (p.177)

Similarly, he has them just come out and describe their backstories or situations with equal lack of subtlety:

VERSHININ: I have a wife and two little girls, my wife is in poor health… (p.183)

KULYGIN: My name is Kulygin and I teach at the local high school, I’m a senior assistant master. (p.183)

KULYGIN: I’m happy today. I’m on top of the world. (p.184)

RODÉ: I teach gymnastics at the high school here. (p.188)

Leave me alone

MASHA: Don’t talk to me then…leave me alone. (p.200)

ANDREW: Leave me alone, for heaven’s sake, leave me alone. (p.229)

Characters in all Chekhov’s plays continually ask to be left alone but no-one does leave them alone. Nobody can escape. They seem to live in these households of eight or so people who are constantly prying and spying and commenting on each others’ behaviour. The effect is very claustrophobic. They seem to be walking demonstrations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known epigram that hell is other people.

Sssshhh, there’s somebody coming!

Chekhov’s houses are always very populous and, as someone or other is always declaring inappropriate love to someone else because they’re married or the other person’s married, I noticed the number of times when women (it’s always women) say things like:

MASHA: There’s somebody coming! You’d better talk about something else. (p.194)

And men have to reassure and cajole them:

ANDREW: Oh, they can’t see us, they really can’t. (p.189).

Hyperbole

Three (miserable) sisters:

IRINA: I feel as I’d gone out of my mind.

MASHA: I feel so depressed.

MASHA: Oh damn this life, it’s the absolute limit!

IRINA: Life has been choking us like weeds in a garden.

IRINA: Do you know I dream about Moscow every night? I feel as if I’d gone out of my mind.

OLGA: It really depressed me, actually makes me feel ill.

IRINA: Oh, it’s frightful, absolutely frightful. I’ve had as much as I can take, I just can’t stand it any more.

IRINA: I feel I’m losing touch with everything fine and genuine in life. It’s like sinking down, down into a bottomless pit. I’m desperate.

IRINA: I’m lonely and depressed with nothing to do and I hate my room…

MASHA: I feel I’m going to burst…

MASHA: I’ve made a mess of my life. I don’t want anything now.

Visions of the future

In ‘Uncle Vanya’ Dr Astrov is given a hobby horse subject completely separate from the action namely his concern for the ecology of forests. This gives him something to deliver speeches about for pages and which is, I think, designed to act as a relief from the characters’ obsessive self-centredness.

The same thing, structurally, happens in this play: Baron Tuzenbakh and Vershinin are both given the same talking point which is what life will be like for people in the future and what, looking back, they will think of the people of this time.

These subjects may or may not be relevant or interesting in their own right but, in dramatic terms, they’re part of giving all the characters identifiable, repeating tics or topics:

• Solyonyi and his stupid jokes and splashing scent on himself
• Dr Chebutykin and his pockets full of newspapers, but also his oft-repeated conviction that we aren’t really here and we don’t really exist
• Rodé snapping away on his camera
• Olga telling everyone how tired she is
• Masha forever singing ‘A green boat by a curving shore’
• Irina forever wishing they were off to Moscow

It sets the scene of the debate between Tuzenbakh and Vershinin where the two men propose their opposing points of view about the future, namely in the future everything will be great versus in the future everything will be exactly the same (p.197).

Thoughts

It’s complicated, isn’t it? Once the eight or so key characters are up and running they have all kinds of interactions. Onstage this may well work but, for me, there are two problems:

1. the characters’ personalities are too schematic, they are given 2 or 3 tropes, tics or topics each and then trot them out like robots
2. I suppose they’re put through their paces with admirable inventiveness (the town fire was unexpected) and yet, somehow, it all feels mechanical to me, like the parts of a Swiss watch, beautifully engineered, reliably ticking over, yet somehow pointless

Natasha’s victory

One of the many ways of looking at this complicated narrative is that Natasha wins. The bourgeois Prozorov sisters mocked her dress and manners at the start of the play but by the end Natasha is in complete, unquestioned control. She has outfaced and outwitted them all.

From this perspective the most notable thing about the Prozorov sisters, and four siblings, is how pathetic they are. To quote that great literary critic Donald Trump, they are losers. From this point of view all the rhetoric about work and finer futures and sacrifice and all the rest of it is the self-justifying excuses of people who lose.

Natasha doesn’t need any fancy ideas, she is notably uneducated, she goes with her instinct to dominate and control…and she cleans up, she wins, she triumphs. The triumph of the uneducated but unforgiving and determined working class over the feeble bourgeoisie was to be the subject of Chekhov’s final play – and, maybe, to be played out in the huge stage of Russian history less than a generation later…

Comparison with Waiting for Godot

The sense of stasis, of the characters being stuck in a situation they find hellish, kept reminding me of Waiting For Godot.

ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]

Compare with:

IRINA: I esteem, I highly value the Baron, he’s a splendid man; I’ll marry him, I’ll consent, only let’s go to Moscow! I implore you, let’s go! There’s nothing better than Moscow on earth! Let’s go, Olga, let’s go!

They do not move.

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Credit

Quotations are from the 1980 World’s Classic paperback edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley.

Related links

• Three Sisters in English

Related reviews

• Chekhov reviews
• Russian reviews