The Three Sisters

By Anton Chekhov

First performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, The Three Sisters probes the lives and dreams of Olga, Masha, and Irina, former Muscovites now living in a provincial town from which they long to escape. Their hopes for a life more suited to their cultivated tastes and sensibilities provide a touching counterpoint to the relentless flow of compromising events in the real world.
In this powerful play, a landmark of modern drama, Chekhov masterfully interweaves character and theme in subtle ways that make the work's climax seem as inevitable as it is deeply moving. It is reprinted here from a standard text with updated transliteration of character names and additional explanatory footnotes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486157528

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian doctor, short-story writer, and playwright. Born in the port city of Taganrog, Chekhov was the third child of Pavel, a grocer and devout Christian, and Yevgeniya, a natural storyteller. His father, a violent and arrogant man, abused his wife and children and would serve as the inspiration for many of the writer’s most tyrannical and hypocritical characters. Chekhov studied at the Greek School in Taganrog, where he learned Ancient Greek. In 1876, his father’s debts forced the family to relocate to Moscow, where they lived in poverty while Anton remained in Taganrog to settle their finances and finish his studies. During this time, he worked odd jobs while reading extensively and composing his first written works. He joined his family in Moscow in 1879, pursuing a medical degree while writing short stories for entertainment and to support his parents and siblings. In 1876, after finishing his degree and contracting tuberculosis, he began writing for St. Petersburg’s Novoye Vremya, a popular paper which helped him to launch his literary career and gain financial independence. A friend and colleague of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Ivan Bunin, Chekhov is remembered today for his skillful observations of everyday Russian life, his deeply psychological character studies, and his mastery of language and the rhythms of conversation.

Book preview

Act I

In PROZOROV’S house. A sitting-room with pillars; behind is seen a large dining-room. It is midday, the sun is shining brightly outside. In the dining-room the table is being laid for lunch.

OLGA, in the regulation blue dress of a teacher at a girl’s high school, is walking about correcting exercise books; MASHA, in a black dress, with a hat on her knees, sits and reads a book; IRINA, in white, stands about, with a thoughtful expression.

OLGA. A year since father died last May the fifth, on your name-day, Irina. It was very cold then, and snowing. I thought I would never live, and you were in a dead faint. And now a year has gone by and it does not affect us, and you are wearing a white dress and look happy. [Clock strikes twelve. ] And the clock struck just the same way then. [Pause.] I remember that there was music at the funeral, and they fired a volley in the cemetery. A general in command but few people present. Rain and snow.

IRINA. Why recall it?

BARON TUZENBAKH, CHEBUTYKIN and SOLYONI appear by the table in the dining-room, behind the pillars.

OLGA. It’s so warm to-day that we can keep the windows open, though the birches are not yet in flower. Father was put in command of a brigade, and he rode out of Moscow with us eleven years ago. I remember perfectly that it was early in May and all Moscow was blooming. It was warm too, everything in sunshine. Eleven years, and I remember everything as if we rode out only yesterday. Oh God! When I awoke this morning and saw all the light and the spring, I was homesick.

CHEBUTYKIN. Will you take a bet on it?

TUZENBAKH. Don’t be foolish.

MASHA, lost in a reverie over her book, whistles softly.

OLGA. Don’t whistle, Masha. How can you! [Pause.] I’m always having headaches from having to go to the High School every day and then teach till evening. Strange thoughts come to me, as if I were aged. And really, during these four years I have been feeling as if every day had been drained from me. And only one desire grows and gains in strength. . . .

IRINA. To go away to Moscow. To sell the house, leave all and go to Moscow. . . .

OLGA. Yes! To Moscow, and as soon as possible.

CHEBUTYKIN and TUZENBAKH laugh.

IRINA. I expect Andrey will become a professor, but still, he won’t want to live here. Only poor Masha must go on living here.

OLGA. Masha can come to Moscow every summer.

MASHA is whistling gently.

IRINA. Everything will be arranged, please God. [Looks out of window.] It’s nice out to-day. I don’t know why I’m so happy: I remembered this morning that it was my name-day, and I suddenly felt glad and remembered my childhood, when mother was still with us. What beautiful thoughts I had, what thoughts!

OLGA. You’re all radiance to-day, I’ve never seen you look so lovely. And Masha is pretty, too. Andrey wouldn’t be bad-looking, if he wasn’t so stout; it does spoil his appearance. But I’ve grown old and very thin, I suppose it’s because I get angry with the girls at school. To-day I’m free. I’m at home. I haven’t got a headache, and I feel younger than I was yesterday. I’m only twenty-eight. . . . All’s well, God is everywhere, but it seems to me that if only I were married and could stay at home all day, it would be even better. [Pause.] I should love my husband.

TUZENBAKH. [To SOLYONI.] I’m tired of listening to the rot you talk. [Entering the sitting-room.] I forgot to say that Vershinin, our new lieutenant-colonel of artillery, is coming to see us to-day. [Sits down to the piano.]

OLGA. That’s good. I’m glad.

IRINA. Is he old?

TUZENBAKH. Oh, no. Forty or forty-five, at the very outside. [Plays softly.] He seems rather a good sort. He’s certainly no fool, only he likes to hear himself speak.

IRINA. Is he interesting?

TUZENBAKH. Oh, he’s all right, but there’s his wife, his mother-in-law, and two daughters. This is his second wife. He pays calls and tells everybody that he’s got a wife and two daughters. He’ll tell you so here. The wife isn’t all there, she does her hair like a flapper and gushes extremely. She talks philosophy and tries to commit suicide every now and again, apparently in order to annoy her husband. I should have left her long ago, but he bears up patiently, and just grumbles.

SOLYONI. [Enters with CHEBUTYKIN from the dining-room. With one hand I can only lift fifty-four pounds, but with both hands I can lift 180, or even 200 pounds. From this I conclude that two men are not twice as strong as one, but three times, perhaps even more. . . .

CHEBUTYKIN. [Reads a newspaper as he walks. ] If your hair is coming out . . . take an ounce of naphthaline and half a bottle of spirit . . . dissolve and use daily. . . . [Makes a note in his pocket diary.] When found make a note of! Not that I want it though. . . . [Crosses it out. It doesn’t matter.

IRINA. Ivan Romanovich, dear Ivan Romanovich!

CHEBUTYKIN. What does my own little girl want?

IRINA. Ivan Romanovich, dear Ivan Romanovich! I feel as if I were sailing under the broad blue sky with great white birds around me. Why is that? Why?

CHEBUTYKIN. [Kisses her hands, tenderly.] My white bird. . . .

IRINA. When I woke up to-day and got up and dressed myself, I suddenly began to feel as if everything in this life was open to me, and that I knew how I must live. Dear Ivan Romanovich, I know everything. A man must work, toil in the sweat of his brow, whoever he may be, for that is the meaning and object of his life, his happiness, his enthusiasm. How fine it is to be a workman who gets up at daybreak and breaks stones in the street, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster, who teaches children, or an engine-driver on the railway. . . . My God, let alone a man, it’s better to be an ox, or just a horse, so long as it can work, than a young woman who wakes up at twelve o’clock, has her coffee in bed, and then spends two hours dressing. . . . Oh it’s awful! Sometimes when it’s hot, your thirst can be just as tiresome as my need for work. And if I don’t get up early in future and work, Ivan Romanovich, then you may refuse me your friendship.

CHEBUTYKIN. [Tenderly.] I’ll refuse, I’ll refuse. . . .

OLGA. Father used to make us get up at seven. Now Irina wakes at seven and lies and meditates about something till

Reviews for The Three Sisters

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The play, written in 1900, tells the story of the Prozorov family. Three sisters, Olga, Maria, and Irina Prozorova and their brother Andrei, are living in the Russian countryside. Olga works and cares for her family. Maria is married, but falls in love with the visiting Colonel Vershinin. Irina is the youngest, an idealistic girl who believes she find her love in Moscow. Andrei has aspirations to become a professor and has fallen for a local girl, Natasha, of whom his sisters do not approve. The characters debate the meaning of life, the possibility of attaining happiness and more all while dreaming of a better life in Moscow. The first Act is full of hope and possibility, but as the play progresses and the characters’ lives begin to stagnant, that optimism diminishes. It’s a sad story, no one really gets a happy ending, but the dialogue throughout the story is so beautiful. There’s also a lot of humor worked into the writing. It speaks to Chekhov’s talent that every scene isn’t somber. At the end they are all left wanting something, wishing for more knowledge and a better life. BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. I hope I get a chance to see it performed someday. There are few plays I’ve read that show the drama of a crumbling family quite so eloquently. “When we are dead, men will fly in balloons, change the fashion of their coats, will discover a sixth sense, perhaps, and develop it, but life will remain just the same, difficult, full of mysteries and happiness. In a thousand years man will sigh just the same, ‘Ah, how hard life is,’ and yet just as now he will be afraid of death and not want it.”“I think man ought to have faith or ought to seek a faith, or else his life is empty, empty. . . . To live and not to understand why cranes fly; why children are born; why there are stars in the sky. . . . You've got to know what you're living for or else it's all nonsense and waste.” 

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The two stars are more for the recording than the story content. I had trouble following the story because it's a play, meant to be seen not only heard, so it was difficult keeping track of the characters (especially the men) and grasping when the scene changed. Also, the quality of the recording is poor: some voices come through loudly, others are so quiet. It's as if there was a mic in the middle of the stage so voices directly under it are picked up, but not those on the periphery. And I'm quite sure that on the 3rd CD the director or sound editor's voice is included, telling one of the sisters that her scream is too sharp, and she says "Okay" and repeats the last couple of lines. How sloppy!
I should read or see the play instead.

[wonderperson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent Russian Miserable Git Theatre.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very much a slice of life drama, but it's a life that I can't particularly identify with. It's supposed to be a "classic" but I just didn't get that much out of it.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At first this play could be entitled Noisy Idiots--it's all very blustery and endearing, and certainly just the kind of warmth and din you'd want on entering the theatre on a January day in Russia in 1901--but you do settle in for some sub-School for Scandal-type proceedings, hijinx in any case. The sisters are bored--bien. Olga is a spinster, Masha is married and bored, Irina is pretty as a sugared confection and doesn't love any of the local notables and gots to get to Moscow where rela life will begin. Bien, bien. Their brother Andrei is a big-thought-thinker whose status as the baby of the family has long since shaded into awwardness with the outside world, itself browning into misogyny. And then the soldiers come to town. It's a setting rich with promise--everone's so desperate for something to happen that you know when it does they're gonna milk it. X is gonna turn her nose up at Y, who will be overheard speaking to Z by A, who owes money to B, who is in love with C and her barbed tongue, bien, bien, bien! And everyone leaves a little warmer after "visiting with the Prozorovs," as the Russians were (are?) prone to saying they were doing when they went to see this play. Everybody yells, everybody laughs, the inevitable romantic misunderstanding is defused before anyone gets more than a scare.Except, just as real family life is never as jolly as it seems over the Thanksgiving table or what have you, things are gonna fall apart for our favourite family (the ones whom we wish we could actually visit, all alone in our big house in the winter with nobody but Sergei and Katya and the children and old "Auntie" Lidia Ivanovna in her room on the top floor. If they seem like such a shockingly real family to me with my how-much-poorer twenty-first-century web of one father, one mother, one sister, and one (beautiful!) niece, imagine the shock of recognition for their compeers).And I am a deeply ignorant fellow, but I don't kow of an earlier example of dramatic family fallapart that feels so real. No fated Greekness, none of that deep French cynicism about the meaningful life, no arbitrary Shakespearean event leading to mutual assured destruction among all the characters (too heroic to ever live anyway, of course). These Russians are, as they always are, the first and best existentialists, all looking for one reason to stop yelling and feel calm in their limitedness and their mortality, even amid the endless steppe (one aspect of Irina's ever-awaited return to Moscow is no doubt to avoid looking out into that perfect dark).The point of the family is to keep each other going under unbearable circumstances (BY WHICH WE MEAN LIVING, MAN, JUST LIVING), which means absorbing each other's yelling, caprices, cynicisms. In this family, they're doing a great job--you watch them do it and it makes you love them, delightful self-absorbed Irina, sardonic yet deeply loving Masha, sorrowful and strong strong strong Olga--until the soldiers arrive with their brave/stupid/pointlessly selfdestructive need to scratch at the thin human veneer over the hinterland's dark maw. That is, two of our three destroyers are Vershinin, the "philosopher" (a luxury impossible, irresponsible, criminally culpable, in these circumstances, on the ragged frontline of the bourgeois world!) and Solyony (who I think may actually believe he's dealing with the same black-rye-soul stuff that makes the other characters yell, may not recognize that his father was the wolf or the North Wind or, I dunno, Shiva). But three sisters still outweighs two destroyers--it's when their brother marries Natasha that the critical mass becomes unbearable. Amid so much richly realistic human fellowship and strife, she's the only one with whom it's impossible to sympathize--the provincial petty-bourgeois climber, ruthlessly fighting her way into the manor house, that outpost of metropolitan legitimacy. She is reprehensible, and the sisters--distracted by the soldiers, her horsemen--don't have the stomach. And she usurps them, and the last homely house is destroyed.But it doesn't burn, even though the village does--Chekhov is too sophisticated, too matter of fact for that cheap symbolism. The play ends with the little pas a deux of Chebutykin: "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter"--and Olga--"If we only knew, if we only knew!" That's still our problem, expressed so mundanely but so hauntingly. How can you bear what is when there's also a what could be? A what could have been?We do know one thing: contrary to Vershinin's much-expressed hope, life is not gonna become "easier and brighter"; the whole play abuses him, who on the surface seems its romantic hero. Or at least, if utopia is really out there, it's far, far beyond the horizon--the play ends in the revolutionary year 1905, and on his 300-year timeline one wonders how many Russians will be here to see the world in which the yelling soul is soothed. If we only knew, if we only knew!