41 I have chosen a quotation from Longfellow (from his Psalm of Life) to indicate the hackneyed nature of the Professor’s remark. In the original Russian, Serebryakov quotes a proverb, “He who bears a grudge should have an eye plucked out.”
42 A troika consists of three horses harnessed together; the two harnessed by straps or traces to the outside shafts are called trace horses.
43 The Russian, My otdokhnyom, connotes, “We shall breathe easily” and is connected etymologically to words such as dushno, used by characters to say they are being stifled. The literal English translation, “We shall rest,” with its harsh dental ending, fails to convey Sonya’s meaning sonically or spiritually.
THREE SISTERS
At the urging of the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov set out to write them a play. With specific actors in mind for given roles, and mindful, too, of the Art Theatre’s strengths, Chekhov spent more time in the composition of Three Sisters than on any of his earlier dramas. He was especially anxious to cut out superfluities in monologues and provide a sense of movement.
Unfortunately, when the Art Theatre actors heard the author read the play for the first time, in October 1900, they were sorely disappointed. “This is no play, it’s only an outline” was the immediate reaction. Chekhov sedulously reworked all of it and in the process added many striking touches. The ironic counterpoint of Tusenbach’s and Chebutykin’s remarks in Acts One and Four, most of Solyony’s pungent lines, Masha’s quotation from Ruslan and Lyudmila about the curved seashore were added at this stage. It is amazing to think that only in revising the play did Chekhov decide to leave Masha on stage for the final tableau. He sat in on the early rehearsals and insisted that a colonel be in attendance to instruct the actors in proper military deportment; he personally orchestrated the fire-bell sound effects for Act Three. He put the greatest emphasis on that act, which, he insisted, must be performed quietly and wearily.
Three Sisters opened on January 31, 1901, with Stanislavsky as Vershinin, Olga Knipper as Masha, and the young Vsevolod Meyerhold as Tusenbach. Although many critics were put off by the play’s seeming hopelessness and what struck them as vague motivation in the characters, the production was acclaimed by the public. “It’s music, not acting,” asserted Maksim Gorky.1
The writer Leonid Andreev attended the thirtieth performance, despite a friend’s warning that its effect would be suicidally depressing. Quite against expectation, he found himself totally drawn into the play by the middle of Act One. No longer appraising the scenery or the actors, he became convinced that “the story of the three sisters . . . is not a fiction, not a fantasy, but a fact, an event, something every bit as real as stock options at the Savings Bank.” By the end, he, with the rest of the audience, was in tears, but his dominant impression was not pessimistic. For Andreev, the residual effect, the pervasive mood, the play’s basic “tragic melody” was a yearning for life. “Like steam, life can be compressed into a narrow little container, but, also like steam, it will endure pressure only to a certain point. And in Three Sisters, this pressure is brought to the limit, beyond which it will explode, — and don’t you actually hear how life is seething, doesn’t its angrily protesting voice reach your ears?”2
This reaction was due in part to the play’s early run coinciding with student riots. Consequently, the characters’ aspirations were identified with topical political protest. It was due as well to the theater’s remarkably veristic production and its careful transmission of mood. Eventually, theatergoers would say not that they were going to the Art Theatre to view Three Sisters but that they were “paying a call on the Prozorovs.” Chekhov’s technique provided the premise for this illusion of reality.
This is the first time Chekhov employs a broad canvas devoid of exclusively foreground figures — no Ivanovs, not even Treplyovs or Vanyas. The sisters must share their space, in every sense, with Natasha, Tusenbach, and Solyony. There are no more soliloquys: almost never is a character left alone on stage. Andrey must pour out his discontents to deaf Ferapont, and Masha must proclaim her adulterous love to the stopped-up ears of her sister Olga. Têtes-a-têtes are of the briefest: no more Trigorin spinning out a description of a writer’s career or Astrov explicating maps to a prospective paramour. Vershinin and Tusenbach spout their speeches about work and the future to a room full of auditors.
Those rhetorical paeans have been cited as Utopian alternatives to the dreary provincial life depicted on stage. True, the men who formulate them are ineffectual, with no chance of realizing their “thick-coming fantasies.” But the monologues do work as a meliorative element. Unable in a play to use the narrative to offer a contrasting vision, Chekhov must put into the mouths of his characters visions of an improved life. The imagery of birds of passage, birch trees, flowing rivers sounds a note of freshness and harmony that highlights all the more acutely the characters’ inability to get in touch with the spontaneous and the natural. The cranes are programmed to fly, “and whatever thoughts, sublime or trivial, drift through their heads, they’ll go on flying, not knowing what for or where to.”
The most blatant call for an alternative is the sisters’ recurrent plaint, “To Moscow, to Moscow!” Almost from the play’s premiere, critics wondered what was stopping the Prozorovs from buying a ticket to the big city. Moscow is an imaginary site, envisaged differently by each character. Andrey sees it not only as a university town but as the site of great restaurants, while for old Ferapont it marks the locale of a legendary pancake feast. Vershinin gloomily recalls a grim bridge and roaring water there, Solyony has invented a second university for it, and Olga looks back to a funeral. No clear image emerges from the medley of impressions, so that Moscow remains somewhere over the rainbow, just out of sight.
Because the sisters are fixated on this distant point, commentators and directors have regularly inflated them into heroines. Too frequently, the play is reduced to a conflict between three superwomen and a ravening bitch: the sensitive and high-strung Prozorov sorority can be no match for the ruthless life force embodied in Natasha, and so they succumb, albeit preserving their ideals. This common interpretation is not borne out by a close examination of the play, which Chekhov said had four heroines. As the Romanian critic Jovan Hristic has shrewdly noted, the three of the title are “true spiritual sisters of Hedda Gabler, who corrupt everything around them by dint of thinking themselves superior.”3 The analogy works on several levels, from the military upbringing (Masha’s scorn of civilians is bitter) to the ultimate downfall, engineered partly by an instinctual bourgeoise (Natasha for Thea Elvsted), second-rate academics (Andrey and Kulygin for Tesman), and inept idealists (Vershinin and Tusenbach for L0vborg). Like Hedda, the three sisters are at variance with their environment, which, for them, represents common vulgarity.
The play maps the town’s encroachment on their lives, as Olga becomes embedded in the educational hierarchy, Irina turns into a cog in the civil bureaucracy, Andrey a fixture on the County Council, and Masha a recalcitrant faculty wife. By the last act, the stage direction informs us that their backyard has become a kind of empty lot, across which the townsfolk tramp when necessary. It is the next step after the fire, when the townsfolk invaded their home and bore off their old clothes. And, of course, Natasha’s depredations and that of her lover and the town’s de facto head, the unseen Protopopov, began earliest of all.