The eating at these events, a metaphor for shared experience, disintegrates as the play proceeds. Act One has ended with the cast gathered around the table, regaling themselves with roast turkey, apple pie, and too much vodka. The odd men out were Natasha and Andrey, furtively conducting their romance at a remove from the teasing family. In Act Two, however, Natasha is now seated at the festive board, criticizing the table manners of others and withholding tea; Solyony has eaten up all the chocolates. Once she gains a foothold, the indiscriminate feeding ends. Vershinin goes hungry.
The fire in Act Three is a real coup de theatre: physical danger, mass hysteria and crowd movement, though kept offstage, have forced the characters into their present situation, both locally and emotionally. Like Andreev’s image of steam rising in a boiler, they gradually are forced upward into the compressed space beneath the eaves. Even though the conflagration does not singe the Prozorov house, it creates this thermodynamic effect. Exhausted or drunk, in some way pushed to an extreme by the calamity, the characters pour out their feelings and then leave. It is the most hysterical of all the acts and the most confessional. To no avail does Olga protest, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening!” Unlike purifying fires in Ibsen and Strindberg, this blaze leaves the sisters uncleansed, as their world is rapidly being consumed. Amidst the desolation, they are simply charred.
Once again, Chekhov constrains his characters to come in contact by preventing privacy. One would expect the bedroom of an old-maid schoolmarm and a young virgin to be the most sacrosanct of chambers, but a concatenation of circumstances turns it into Grand Central Station, from which intruders like Solyony and Chebutykin must be forcibly ejected. The space is intimate, just right for playing out personal crises; but the secrets are made to detonate in public. The doctor’s drunken creed of nihilism, Andrey’s exasperation with his wife, Masha’s blurting out of her adultery become public events.
Or else the private moment is neutralized by submersion in minutiae. Masha makes up her mind to elope with Vershinin. Traditionally, this would be a major dramatic turning point, the crux when the heroine undergoes her peripeteia. Here, the decision is muffled by plans for a charity recital, Tusen-bach’s snoring, and other people’s personal problems. The chance tryst offered by the fire trivializes Masha’s and Vershinin’s love because it projects it against a background of civic crisis. Even their love song has been reduced to “trom-tom-tom,” humming a theme from an operatic aria. What is crucial to some characters is always irrelevant or unknown to others, much as the seagull had been. As Chebutykin says, “It doesn’t matter.” Chekhov, however, does not insist on the impossibility of values and communication; he simply believes that the attribution of value is hard for myopic mortals to make.
The last act adjusts the angle of vantage. There is very little recollection in it, but a good deal of futile straining toward the future. A brief time has elapsed between Act Three, when the regiment’s departure is offhandedly mentioned, and Act Four, when it takes place. The departure is so abrupt an end to the sisters’ consoling illusion that they cannot bring themselves to allude to the past. Henceforth they will be thrown on their own resources. The play had begun with them lording it over the drawing room, but now they are cast into the yard. Olga lives at the school, Masha refuses to go into the house, Andrey wanders around with the baby carriage like a soul in limbo. Food has lost its ability to comfort. The Baron must go off to his death without his morning coffee, while Andrey equates goose and cabbage with the deadly grip of matrimony. Each movement away is accompanied by music: the regiment leaves to the cheerful strains of a marching band, the piano tinkles to the cozy domesticity of Natasha and Protopopov, and the Doctor mockingly sings “Tarara boom de-ay.” The bereft sisters standing in the yard are made to seem out of tune.
The final tableau, with the sisters clinging to one another, intoning “If only we knew, if only we knew,” has been played optimistically, as if the dawn of a bright tomorrow did lie just beyond the horizon. But Olga’s evocation of time to come has lost the rosy tinge of Vershinin’s and Tusenbach’s improvisation. Like Sonya’s threnody in Uncle Vanya, it is whistling in the dark, predicting a void that must be filled. The disillusionment of the four hours’ traffic on the stage and the four years’ passage of time has aged the sisters but not enlightened them. They still, in William Blake’s words, “nurse unacted desires.” The music-hall chorus Chebutykin sings had lyrics (which would have been known to everyone in the original audience): “I’m sitting on a curbstone / And weeping bitterly / Because I know so little.” The implied mockery shows Olga’s “If only we knew” to be an absurd wish. Chekhov’s antiphony of Olga and Chebutykin carols the impossibility of such awareness, and the need to soldier on, despite that disability.
NOTES
1 Maksim Gorky, Sohranie sochineniya (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk SSR, 1958), XXVIII, 159.
2 Leonid Andreev, “Tri sestry,” Polnoe sohranie sochineny (St. Petersburg: A. F. Marks, 1913), VI, 321–25.
3 Jovan Hristic, Le théätre de Tchékhov, trans. Harita Wybrands and Francis Wybrands (Lausanne: L’Äge d’homme, 1982), p. 166.
THREE SISTERS
Tpи cecтpы
A Drama in Four Acts
CAST OF CHARACTERS 1
PROZOROV, ANDREY SERGEEVICH
NATALIYA IVANOVNA, his fiancee, afterwards his wife
OLGA
his sisters
MASHA
IRINA
KULYGIN, FYODOR ILYICH, high school teacher, Masha’s husband
VERSHININ, ALEKSANDR IGNATYEVICH, Lieutenant Colonel, battery commander
TUSENBACH, NIKOLAY LVOVICH, Baron, Lieutenant
SOLYONY, VASILY VASILYEVICH, Staff Captain
CHEBUTYKIN, IVAN ROMANOVICH, army doctor
FEDOTIK, ALEKSEY PETROVICH, Second Lieutenant
RODÉ,2 VLADIMIR KARLOVICH, Second Lieutenant
FERAPONT, messenger for the County Council,3 an old timer
ANFISA, nanny, an old woman of 80
The action takes place in a county seat.4
ACT ONE
In the Prozorovs’ home. A drawing-room with columns, behind which a large reception room can be seen. Midday: outside it’s sunny and bright.5 In the reception room a table is being set for lunch.
OLGA, wearing the dark blue uniform of a teacher at a high school for girls,6 never stops correcting students’ examination books, both standing still and on the move. MASHA, in a black dress, her hat in her lap, sits reading a book. IRINA, in a white dress, stands rapt in thought.