Three Sisters

“When I woke up today, everything in the world suddenly seemed so clear to me, and now I know how to live. People have to work, they have to labor, whoever they are, and in the work itself is meaning, purpose, joy.”

Irina’s insistence upon romanticizing labor indicates that she holds the naïve perspective of someone who has never worked in her life. She imagines that she would be happier to work for her living rather than to live in leisure, a notion that suggests that she is unaware of the monotony and physical toll of labor. The scene indicates that she is just bored and does not understand what it means to be forced to work to survive.

“I’ve never done anything either. I haven’t lifted a finger since I left school. I’ve never read a book. Only newspapers.”

As a doctor, Chebutykin should be reading and learning for the sake of his patients and the constantly evolving practice of medicine. Given that he is in his 60s, this comment suggests that he has not read anything to update his practices in 30 or 40 years. Chekhov is commenting on educated people, particularly doctors like himself, who rest on their laurels rather than constantly pursuing knowledge.

“When they called me the ‘lovesick major’ I was still young enough to be in love. Not anymore.”

It is not clear whether Vershinin’s youthful lovesickness was for the woman he ultimately married, but his disillusionment about love nonetheless gives him common ground with Masha. Both characters married their spouses when they were young and idealistically put their respective partners on pedestals. However, Vershinin now sees love as a form of youthful idealism, and when he and Masha fall in love with each other, they both manage to recapture that sense of youthful optimism, heedless of the impossibility of a lasting romantic connection with one another.

“Can you believe I’ve already begun to forget what she looks like? That’s how we’ll be remembered: we’ll be forgotten.”

Masha’s bitter assessment of the family’s significance in history is designed to be comically bleak. The characters debate this issue throughout the play, wondering whether their lives have purpose. However, the play also suggests that being forgotten is also freeing, as it allows them to live for themselves and indulge their own selfish desires. For example, Masha’s affair with Vershinin is quite self-indulgent, and in the end, Kulygin insinuates that he knows about the affair and chooses to forget about it as if it never happened.

“ANDREY. Our father made me learn English, just one part of his oppressive education. After he died, I started putting on this weight, I think my body just let itself go after all that education. Thanks to our father, we know French, German, and English, and Irina knows Italian. For all the good it does us.

MASHA. Knowing three languages in a town like this is useless, like having an extra finger. Most of what we know is pointless.”

The Prozorov siblings are highly educated because their father wanted to prepare them for lives that were larger than the small town in which they now live. Andrey, for instance, was meant to become a scholar. However, as the siblings continue to languish in obscurity, they begin to see their extensive education as superfluous rather than recognizing that they have the tools to leave the town. Their education has become a burden that weighs them down and reminds them of all that they have failed to achieve.

“You know, yesterday, from sunrise to sunset, I was working. And now today I feel so happy.”

Kulygin’s insistence on his own satisfaction and happiness is often portrayed as obliviousness to the unhappiness around him. Ironically, he ultimately achieves what Irina claims to desire: contentment through work. However, Kulygin’s optimism is a choice. He enjoys his job as a teacher, and he opts to not see his wife’s disdain for him. Kulygin also refuses to join everyone else in the family as they wallow in misery, and the question remains as to whether Kulygin is a fool, or if he is the cleverest of them all.

“I don’t have to work tomorrow, but I’ll go in anyway. It’s boring here. (Pause) Life’s crazy, isn’t it? Life is crazy. I picked up this book today out of boredom. My old university lectures. My God, I’m the secretary of the local district council—the same council that Protopopov chairs—and the best thing I can hope for is to be made a full member! A member of the local district council, who dreams every night that I’m a professor at Moscow University, this renowned genius, a Russian hero.”

Andrey, like his sisters, has heaped his dreams and belief in his own potential on Moscow. Certainly, remaining in town has limited his possibilities, as there is only so much he can achieve there. And since he has married Natasha and had a child, they provide even more of an excuse to stay. It’s easier to see his unachieved dreams as lost potential rather than to have tried and failed.

“You can sit in a huge restaurant in Moscow and nobody knows you and you don’t know anyone and you don’t feel alone. Here, everyone knows you and you know everyone and you’re a total stranger. A total stranger. Lonely.”

Considering that Andrey hasn’t been to Moscow in eleven years, meaning that he was likely a child there, his belief about whether one feels like a stranger there is based on an idea of Moscow that he and his sisters have constructed in their minds. Certainly, being alone in a city is isolating, a feeling that is often amplified by sitting in a crowd. Andrey is lonely in their small town because he feels unseen and misunderstood. Even marriage and fatherhood have pressed him into an identity that contradicts how he sees himself.

“Tell me why the brilliant Russian mind is so depressed. Why?”

Vershinin is commenting to Masha on a general sense of ennui and dissatisfaction that he believes to exist equally among civilians and the military men whom Masha holds up as superior. The characters debate this question throughout the play but remain unable to decide whether their suffering has purpose. Chekhov ultimately suggests that the “brilliant Russian mind” has the intelligence to both perceive suffering and imagine a life without suffering, but it remains ultimately unable to achieve such a life.

“I have to get another job, ’cause the telegraph office is not for me. This wasn’t what I wanted. This wasn’t my dream. It’s just work, no poetry, no soul, no meaning.”

Irina has discovered what most people who work already know: that labor is not automatically a magical, fulfilling, or enlightening experience. In this scene, she is finally beginning to realize that work requires forfeiting one’s autonomy for the majority of the day. It is a means to an end for the sake of survival, not a passing fancy. Later in the play, Irina is excited to take a job as a teacher even though Olga’s experience suggests that teaching will prove just as exhausting as any other job.

“What about it? They’ll fly; they’ll wear funny clothes; they might develop a sixth sense; nothing will be different. Life will always be hard and mysterious and have the occasional happy day. A thousand years from now, people will still say ‘life is hard’ and they’ll still be afraid to die.”

To Vershinin’s suggestion that they all imagine what life will be like in two or three centuries, Tusenbach asserts that regardless of the way the circumstances of life might change, human nature will always remain the same. His tone in this exchange takes on a bleak and defeated quality, and he opines that there will be no answers to their current questions about the meaning of life, for people in any era will always suffer and struggle.

“There is no happiness. Not now, not ever. And that’s okay, that’s the way it is. All we have to do is work. And then work some more. And happiness is for those who come after us.”

This moment in the play suggests that Vershinin is a martyr to his own unhappiness. Like Masha, he is trapped in a miserable marriage during a time when divorce is rare. His affair with Masha is therefore ill-fated from the start, for he is always under the shadow of his obligation to his wife and children. Vershinin is willing to accept his unhappiness if he can believe that it will have meaning for future generations who will find happiness due to his sacrifice.

“ANDREY. I’m not playing tonight anyway. I’ll just sit and watch. Hey, I can’t breathe. What should I do about not being able to breathe?

CHEBUTYKIN. You’re asking me? I don’t remember, Andrey. I don’t know.”

Given Andrey’s growing pile of gambling debts, Chekhov makes it clear that Andrey will not actually sit and watch rather than play. Gambling is Andrey’s outlet for his deep dissatisfaction with his increasingly domestic life. Additionally, Chebutykin’s reaction to Andrey’s question is designed to be simultaneously comical and tragic, for his incredulous tone upon exclaiming “You’re asking me?” clashes with his position as a doctor, while also foreshadowing the dire effects of his incompetence in the medical field.

“I think we should help the poor anyway. It’s the responsibility of the wealthy. […] Why do you insist on keeping that old woman? I don’t understand. […] She serves no purpose. She’s a peasant, and she belongs in the village. It’s just perversity. I like my house to show some order! There’s really no use for superfluous people.”

Natasha is a local girl who gains access to the upper class with her marriage to Andrey. However, despite her lower-class origins, she takes to aristocratic life immediately, commandeering the house as her own and manipulating the sisters into obeying her wishes. Even Natasha’s supposed belief in charity is quickly revealed to be hypocritical, as she feels pious in suggesting that they raise money but is disgusted by the continued presence of Anfisa in the house. A fundraiser for fire victims would be as much a social event as it would be a charity, and Natasha has no intention of sharing the wealth and status that she has won.

“Hell with all of them. They think I’m a doctor. Think I can treat the sick. I know absolutely nothing. I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew. I don’t remember anything. […] Last Wednesday, I treated a woman and she died. And it was my fault. Yes. Twenty-five years ago I could have saved her life. Now I don’t remember anything. Nothing. Maybe I’m not a person. I just look like one: hands, legs, head. Maybe I don’t even really exist. I just think I do. I just think I walk, I eat, I sleep. (Starts to weep) If only I didn’t exist.”

No matter how many times Chebutykin admits that he doesn’t remember his medical training, no one listens or shares his concerns. Instead, they all continue to expect him to practice medicine. This ongoing difficulty foreshadows the fate of Tusenbach, whom Chebutykin will fail to save after the duel. In Act IV, Chebutykin notes that he has one more year to serve as an army medic before he can retire, and his comment is meant to imply that he will likely cause the deaths of additional patients.

“Imagine that, that you play like a dream and there’s not one single person to appreciate it.”

Tusenbach, who has no romantic interest in Masha nor any reason to give her undeserved praise, realizes that he is the only person who truly appreciates her impressive talent on the piano. According to Irina, Masha has not touched a piano in three or four years, making it yet one more talent among the Prozorov siblings that has been left to wither. Even with Tusenbach’s suggestion that Masha play, Kulygin notes that he must ask the headmaster if it would be appropriate, thereby stifling her talent and subjugating it to the whims of his boss.

“A woman doesn’t marry for love; she marries for duty.”

Olga persuades Irina to marry Tusenbach, because although Irina doesn’t love him, she likes and respects him, which Olga feels is enough. Irina had conflated her desire for love with her desire for Moscow, convincing herself that she would find love there. Olga’s advice comes from her own regrets that she never married, and she shares her desperation and anxiety with Irina. However, the play also contains the unspoken suggestion that if Irina were to ask Masha, who married too young, she would receive different advice.

“IRINA. Until we meet again.

FEDOTIK. No, it’s just good-bye. We’ll never see each other again.”

Fedotik’s response is humorously blunt and very realistic, standing as the precise opposite of the platitudes that are expected in these situations. He clarifies that even if they do see each other again, they will be different people and therefore strangers. Fedotik takes a photo to remember everyone, but even his farewell to Tusenbach, a former fellow soldier, has a sense of finality.

“When are they going to stop with that racket? Will our house ever get quiet?”

Throughout the play, Andrey has been criticized as antisocial because he hides in his room to read or play the violin instead of welcoming guests. The sisters have lamented the silence that will befall the town when the soldiers leave, but Andrey has been waiting for quiet. Soon, he will be alone in the house with Natasha and their children, and it is implied that he also hopes to escape the noise of his sisters’ disappointment in him.

“Brother, I’m leaving tomorrow. We may never see each other again. So here’s my advice: Put on your hat, grab your walking stick, and go. Go away. And don’t look back. And the farther you go, the better.”

Andrey has said several times to multiple people that he is miserable, but he comforts himself by looking toward an illusory future in which matters improve. Chebutykin is the only one who listens and speaks plainly in return, and he bluntly advises Andrey to escape because his current circumstances will not magically improve over time.

“My love. Five years have gone by since I fell in love with you, but it still feels new to me, and you’re even more beautiful to me now. I’ll take you with me tomorrow. We’ll work. We’ll become rich. My dreams will come true. You will be happy. But there is the one thing, just the one problem. You don’t love me.”

There is not one happy, equal romantic relationship in the play, and Tusenbach and Irina are no exception, even before his death prevents their marriage. Irina has decided to treat marriage as a matter of practicality. Rather than waiting for love, she will marry in order to avoid growing too old to be marriageable. Tusenbach’s choice to take part in the duel, which he isn’t required to do as a civilian, is a romantic gesture that causes him to die for Irina. However, his death is ultimately purposeless, for Irina had already chosen him, with or without love.

“As bad as the present feels, though, I can feel a little better when I think about the future. It seems easier, more free, and I can picture a time when me and my kids are finally free of laziness, free from roast goose and cabbage, naps after dinner, and borrowing money.”

Andrey is telling Ferapont, who cannot hear him, about his desperate hope for a future that makes up for his present misery. He has repeated variations of this litany to others and has even received sound advice from Chebutykin, but he tells Ferapont his thoughts because he doesn’t want to be heard and advised. He doesn’t want to see pity or skepticism in the eyes of others who know that he will never have a happy future unless he changes his life. He’s trying to convince himself that the future will be better.

“This time tomorrow, there won’t be a single soldier left. You’ll all be just memories. And we’ll have to start learning a new life. (Pause) Nothing turns out the way you plan. I never expected to be the headmistress. And now I’m the headmistress. So there goes Moscow.”

Rather than taking control of their own choices, Olga and her sisters behave as though life is happening to them. Olga claimed that she didn’t want to be headmistress, but she allowed herself to be persuaded to take the job. She also declares their dream of Moscow to be dead as if there is no possibility of ever leaving her job. The Prozorovs prefer that Moscow remain an unattainable dream because if they ever returned to the city, they would be disappointed with its reality and would have nothing left to strive for.