52 pages • 1 hour read
Anton ChekhovThree Sisters
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1901A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Worrying about the Meaning of Life
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of death, gun violence, and attempted suicide.
Throughout the play, the dialogue continually returns to the question of whether life has meaning and what that meaning might be. The characters’ philosophizing about the subject arises during moments of idle conversation, particularly among those who are the most educated and discontented. These musings are a luxury of both the upper class and the unencumbered soldiers who are occupying the town during peacetime, for they all have the privilege of education and the copious free time to converse idly while they wait for the working class to serve them lunch or bring them tea. However, these conversations also carry a tone of urgency as the characters are keenly aware of birthdays, death, and other marks of time’s passage. In particular, the three sisters are rudderless: stuck in the ennui of having no purpose in life. They worry about aging and about the vanishing opportunities to define themselves and find meaning in their own lives. The sisters and Andrey are a cache of idle talent and skills, for although they speak several languages and play musical instruments, they do not have the grand lives that such tools and skills are meant to facilitate, and their small-town lifestyle does not allow them to fully experience the aristocratic pursuits that they have been trained to embrace and enjoy. The four siblings’ existential dissatisfaction is most powerfully expressed in their eternal longing to return to a version of Moscow that no longer exists. Although they are certain that the move is the crucial step toward finding and fulfilling their purpose, they never take that step because the longing itself has become their meaning. Without their endless pining for Moscow, they would have no other sense of identity.
Without the prospect of returning to Moscow, the characters find other matters to serve as a facsimile for purpose. In the first act, Irina, feeling bright and optimistic on her birthday, announces that labor is the secret to happiness and resolves to work in order to improve her life. However, in the second act, Irina takes a job and is disappointed to find nothing profound in labor, which exhausts her and erodes her sense of human decency rather than providing her with answers to her philosophical questions. Irina later hopes to find more meaning in teaching, although Olga’s experience as a teacher and then headmistress indicates that such a job is grueling and often thankless. When Tusenbach chimes in to romanticize work with Irina, he comments that he has never done any work in his life. With these various exchanges, Chekhov creates a tragically comical situation, for there is an element of absurdity to hearing the idle upper class speak with such wonder about the concept of work. They ultimately fail to understand that for most people, including those who are employed in their house, labor is a necessity to survive, not a luxury or a diversion.
As the conversation about the meaning of life progresses over the course of the play, Vershinin wonders what their lives will mean to people in the future, and even Tusenbach wonders, “We suffer in so many ways, but that’s a sign, right, that we’re developing morally, as a society?” (18) The suffering of this privileged group becomes both tragic and comical, for although their sadness and despair are authentic, the triviality of their pampered lives implies that they have never really known true hardship. By contrast, Anfisa, who has worked for the family for many years and is now facing the possibility of being fired by Natasha, could tell them about the life-or-death suffering amongst the working class.
As the well-to-do characters persist in the belief that their suffering is doing something good for the future, they find a reason to continue wallowing in their dissatisfaction. However, they must also struggle with the possibility that life is meaningless, for even people who are loved must inevitably die and be forgotten in the march of time. The play also suggests that people die frivolously, as does Chebutykin’s patient, who dies due to the doctor’s incompetence. Similarly, Tusenbach is killed in a pointless duel that he ought to have refused, and after Chebutykin fails to save Tusenbach, he decides that it doesn’t matter if people live or die. This sentiment adds a challenging truth to the discussion about the meaning of life, implying that life is begun and ended by arbitrary, meaningless circumstances. At the end of the play, the sisters embrace each other and decide that the point is to simply live, but they still agonize over their many unanswered questions. As Olga states in the last line of the play, “If we could know. If we could only know” (86).
The Pressures of Love, Longing, and Loneliness
According to Olga, who is notably unmarried, “A woman doesn’t marry for love; she marries for duty” (62). Olga longs for marriage (any marriage, even to a much older man), but none of the marriages in the play are happy, even if the couples once seemed to be well-matched. For instance, Masha married Kulygin at the age of 18, right after graduating from the school where he teaches. To a young girl fresh from high school, Kulygin seemed to be an impressive authority figure and a scholar. However, as Masha has aged and matured, she has lost her awe of him. Likewise, when Vershinin was younger and still courting his wife, he was constantly teased by other soldiers who called him the “lovesick major” (16), and this moment suggests that he was utterly devoted to his future wife. But now, a decade and two children later, Vershinin abhors his wife and regrets choosing her to mother his children. He describes her as pretentious; she is always philosophizing and is prone to frequent suicide attempts that he interprets as desperate bids for his attention. Notably, Vershinin never acknowledges her potential misery as the frequently abandoned mother of his children, even though her own anguish is reflected in the reports of her desperate behavior. Although Vershinin’s wife never appears onstage, Chekhov uses Andrey’s relationship with Natasha to show the deterioration of a marriage over time. The decline begins in the dysfunctional seeds of the relationship, for Andrey rebelliously marries Natasha against the will of his sisters. Thus, within a few years, Andrey becomes exceedingly unhappy and trapped in his marriage. These highly fraught dynamics combine in such a way as to demonstrate that each character is lonely, isolated, and alienated, regardless of marital status.
Because the institution and dissolution of marriage remained largely under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church, divorce and annulment were rarely granted in early 20th-century Russia. Moreover, only the male spouse could petition for divorce or annulment at all, regardless of which spouse might be the wronged party in issues that might incite a desire to separate, such as infidelity or severe abuse. Notably, beating one’s wife was legal as long as no serious injury was inflicted, and women were often forced to marry. Therefore, extramarital affairs became frequent fodder for drama.
Affairs are a symptom of longing, and this emotion characterizes most of the people and relationships in the play. Vershinin and Masha long for each other and have an affair, while Andrey futilely longs for the scholarly life he has always imagined for himself. Tusenbach longs for Irina, who decides to marry him while acknowledging that she cannot return his love. Even so, Irina longs to find genuine love for herself, and this desire suggests that their marriage would have followed the pattern of infidelity when she eventually found love with someone else.
Although Solyony longs for Irina as well, he responds to her rejection by swearing to destroy her future happiness by killing other suitors. Chebutykin longs for the sisters’ mother, although she is long dead and was never his. Olga longs for marriage, despite the warning signs around her that marriage isn’t ideal. Kulygin dotes on Masha and longs for her, and he is even willing to wait quietly for her affair to end so that he can attempt to reclaim her affections. Most importantly, the three sisters and Andrey all long for Moscow, but their longing is only a useful escape if the city remains an unrealized goal, for if they were forced to live with the reality of what they long for, they would only find more dissatisfaction. Thus, the characters’ various longings are often rendered comical and frivolous. Even so, their very longing gives them purpose and defines them. For this reason, the characters wallow in their longing while avoiding the steps necessary to satisfy it.
The Decay of the Aristocracy
At the turn of the 20th century, Russia was in the midst of serious political upheaval under the rule of Tsar Nicholas II, the last Romanov tsar, during the years that would eventually lead to the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Russia was an autocracy, in which the tsar had absolute power, and the tiers of class hierarchies had been strictly defined by feudalism since the 12th century. A system of serfdom that developed in the mid-16th century turned most peasants into serfs who were controlled by Russian landowners, and their lives were little different than those of enslaved people. In fact, when enslavement was abolished in 1723, enslaved people were summarily recategorized as serfs. About 23 million serfs were controlled by private landowners, about 18 million by the state, and nearly a million by the tsar. When serfdom was fully abolished in 1892, former serfs were still at a distinct disadvantage, and the nobility also remained in place. Tsar Nicholas II, who came to power in 1894, held on to the autocracy but divided the enormous country into 50 provinces, each of which was governed by a District Council like the one on which Andrey serves under Protopopov. In the early 1900s, about 80 percent of Russia’s population was of the peasant class, and the upper classes, like the Prozorovs, still lived in luxury as the aristocracy. Except for the military class, these hierarchies were inherited, making upward mobility difficult at best.
The Russian Revolution would be spurred by class inequality and resulted in the execution of the tsar and the establishment of communism. Amidst the roiling unrest that would lead to the revolution, Chekov makes fun of the aristocracy. One of the major objectives of the Moscow Art Theatre at the time was to make theater itself accessible to the working class. Thus, Chekhov plays upon the fact that his intended audience would find Irina’s naïve romanticizing of labor to be comical, and her unpleasant discovery that work is not actually fun or profound becomes equally absurd. The characters’ lamentations about their vague dissatisfaction and the emptiness of their lives indicate that the wealthy are so far removed from the woes of the working class that they must fabricate their own unhappiness. For example, Masha weeps on Irina’s birthday simply because only a few officers come to the house now as opposed to the 30 or 40 that would have attended while their father was alive. Likewise, Andrey, who might have been a professor and a respected scholar, is now stuck as a mediocre bureaucrat on the District Council under an unlikeable and incompetent leader—Protopopov—who is also sleeping with Andrey’s wife. The aristocrats, like Tusenbach, also throw their lives away in duels over abstract concepts like honor and love. As is illustrated by Olga’s constant nostalgia, their best days are over. The military is leaving town, and they will go to work and be useful because, in Russia, the days of the bloated, inert, useless upper classes are numbered.
Related Titles
By Anton Chekhov
