SOURCE: "The Three Sisters," in Prefaces to the Experience of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967, pp. 28-36.

[In the following essay, Trilling ruminates on Chekhov's insistence that Three Sisters is a comedy, speculating that when Chekhov maintained "that Three Sisters was a comedy, even a farce, he was not talking to critics or theorists of literature but to actors, and he was trying to suggest what should be brought to the text by those who put it on the stage, a complexity of meaning which the text might not at first reveal."]

Three Sisters is surely one of the saddest works in all literature. It is also one of the most saddening. As it draws to a close, and for some time after Olga has uttered her hopeless desire to know whether life and its suffering have any meaning, we must make a conscious effort if we are not to be overcome by the depression that threatens our spirits. The frustration and hopelessness to which the persons of the drama fall prey seems to be not only their doom but ours as well. For between ourselves and those persons in Three Sisters with whom we sympathize there is remarkably little distance, certainly as compared, say, with the distance that separates us from Lear. Apart from the difference in nationality, nothing stands in the way of our saying that they are much like ourselves and our friends. They are decent, well-intentioned people, not extraordinary in their gifts but above the general run of mankind in intelligence and sensitivity, well enough educated to take pleasure in the arts and to aspire to freedom, the enjoyment of beauty, and the natural development of their personalities, all the benefits to which we give the name of "the good life."

And in fact, apart from their recognizability, these people are made especially easy for us to come close to because Chekhov, in representing them, takes full account of an element of human life that the tragic dramatists were not concerned with. Sophocles and Shakespeare represented life in terms of character and fate. Chekhov proposes the part that is played in our existence by environment. There is nothing that more readily fosters our intimacy with other people than an awareness of the actual and particular conditions in which they live their lives from day to day.

Character, in the sense in which we use it of the creations of the great tragic dramatists, means the way in which a person confronts the things that happen to him, a number of which may come about as a consequence of his characteristic behavior. Fate is the sum of the decisive things that happen to a person, whether as the result of his characteristic behavior, or fortuitously, or at the behest of some transcendent power. Environment signifies those material and social circumstances in which an individual leads his existence, in particular those that make for his well-being or lack of it and that seem to condition his character and fate.

Since all events take place under nameable conditions, environment is an integral element of all dramatic genres, including tragedy. In the story of Oedipus, for example, it is clearly of consequence that Oedipus is king of Thebes, not of Athens, and that he lives as befits a king and not, say, a merchant. But we are not asked to be aware of these circumstances except in a general way. Our imagination of Oedipus in his regal life does not include particularities such as the boring ceremonial a king must endure, the strain of being always in the public eye, his exasperated sense of the frivolity of the innumerable palace servants, whose gossip and petty intrigue are a perpetual nuisance … and so on.

The modern literary imagination almost always conceives environment as adverse, as comprising those material and social conditions of life which constrain and hamper the protagonist and thwart his ideal development and which, more than anything that might happen to him in a sudden dramatic way, make his destiny. The habit of thinking about a human life in relation to its environment is of relatively recent growth. It began, roughly speaking, in the eighteenth century. Since then it has achieved an importance that can scarcely be overestimated.

This sense of the influence of environment on character and fate has deeply changed the traditional way of thinking about morality and politics. It enables us to believe in an essential quality of humanity, about which predications can be made, usually to the effect that it is by nature good, and then to go on to judge whether a particular circumstance in which an individual is placed is appropriate or inappropriate to his essential humanity. It thus serves as a principle of explanation in the personal life, and as a ground of social action. Few people can hear the contemporary phrase "juvenile delinquent" without immediately thinking of the family and neighborhood circumstances—the environment—that fostered the undesirable behavior of the young person. And in our view of ourselves we have learned to give great significance to the conditions of our lives, those that made us what we are and those that keep us from being what we might wish to be.

The awareness of environment is, as I have said, salient in our response to Three Sisters. We are never permitted to forget that the people in Chekhov's play are required to live in a certain way—far from the metropolis, Moscow, in a dreary provincial city; possessing the tastes and desires of a certain social class yet lacking the money to fulfil their expectations of life; bored by and disaffected from their professions. Their desperate unhappiness is not the result of an event, of some catastrophic shock, but, rather, a condition of life itself, the slow relentless withdrawal of all that had once been promised of delight and satisfaction. To catastrophe we can sometimes respond by mustering up our energies of resistance or fortitude, but the unhappiness that Chekhov represents is that of people who, as the environment takes its toll of them, have fewer and fewer energies of resistance or endurance, let alone renovation. It is a state that few of us can fail in at least some degree to know from experience, and our knowledge of it makes us peculiarly responsive to the pathos of Three Sisters. We are not surprised to hear that when the manuscript of the play was read to the members of the Moscow Art Theatre who were to perform it, the company was so deeply moved that many wept as they listened.

Chekhov did not take their tears as a tribute. He told them that they had quite misconceived the nature of Three Sisters, which was, he said, a "gay comedy, almost a farce." This may well be the strangest comment on his own work that a writer ever made. And Chekhov did not make it casually or playfully, as a provocative paradox. He insisted on it. The famous head of the Moscow Theatre, Constantin Stanislavsky, who directed and championed Chekhov's plays, says in his memoirs that he can remember no opinion ever expressed by Chekhov that the author defended so passionately; he held it, Stanislavsky says, "until his dying day" and believed that his play had failed if it was understood otherwise. Yet he was never able to make clear what he meant by this strange idea. Another theatrical colleague, Vladimir Nemirovich Danchenko, who was even closer to Chekhov than Stanislavsky was, tells us that when the actors asked him for an explanation of such a view, he never could advance reasons to substantiate it. To his friends in the theatre it was plain that Chekhov was not being perverse, that he truly believed that this saddest of plays was a comedy. But why he believed this they did not know.

And perhaps we cannot know. At the end of Plato's Symposium, when all the other guests at the great party have fallen asleep, Socrates sits drinking with the comic poet Aristophanes and the tragic poet Agathon, compelling them "to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy and not quite following the argument." How the argument ran was not reported and will never be known. And it may well be that Chekhov's reason for calling Three Sisters a comedy despite all its sadness will also never be known, even by inference.

But perhaps we today are in a better position to speculate about it than were the members of the Moscow Art Theatre. To the people of his own time, the new and striking thing about the plays of Chekhov was that they expressed so fully the pathos of personal aspiration frustrated by social and cultural circumstances. The latter part of the nineteenth century in Russia saw the rapid development of the class of intelligentsia, as it was called, people of sensibility and education, readily accessible to the influence of ideas and ideals, who could imagine and desire more in the way of fulness of life than they would ever achieve. This discrepancy is common to similar groups in all nations, but what made it especially marked in Russia was the repressiveness of the Czarist government and the backwardness of the economy. A young Russian who undertook to live the life of intellect and art, or simply the good life in which intellect and art have their place, had fewer opportunities to do so than a young person elsewhere in Europe. His will, checked and baffled, lost its impetus and turned back upon itself in bitterness and self-recrimination. All Chekhov's plays are concerned with the defeat of delicate and generous minds, and the warmth of feeling that the Russian intelligentsia directed to Chekhov in his lifetime was in gratitude for his having made its plight so fully explicit and for having treated its pathos with so affectionate a tenderness. It is not too much to say that the intelligentsia of Chekhov's time received the pathos of his plays as a precious gift and cherished it dearly.

But what was new at the turn of the century is now fairly old. Although the theme of the adverse social or cultural environment is still central to our thought, by the same token it is pretty much taken for granted. The personal frustration that Chekhov's characters suffered is now no longer assumed to be the inevitable fate of the members of the intelligentsia; today, at least in some countries, they can look forward to lives of considerable freedom and activity, even affluence and power. As a consequence, while we respond, and even deeply, to the pathos of Chekhov's plays, we are not likely to value it in the same degree that it was valued by the members of the Moscow Art Theatre.

This being so, it is easier for us than it was for his colleagues in the theatre to suppose that Chekhov himself did not want his audiences to feel only the sadness of Three Sisters, although it had of course been his purpose to evoke it and make it poignant and salient. He also had another and what might seem a contradictory intention: to lead his audience away from those very emotions in the play which they most cherished. When Chekhov said that Three Sisters was a comedy, even a farce, he was not talking to critics or theorists of literature but to actors, and he was trying to suggest what should be brought to the text by those who put it on the stage, a complexity of meaning which the text might not at first reveal. The meaning of a highly developed work of literature cannot ever be given in a formula, and Chekhov's plays resist formulation rather more than most. Chekhov did not undertake to solve life; he was averse to the propagation of ideas; his sole purpose, he said, was to represent life as it really is. But life cannot be seen without judgment of some kind, and throughout Three Sisters, as throughout his other great plays, Chekhov undertakes to influence our judgment in many ways, giving us ground for sympathy with one character, of antipathy to another, of contempt for yet another, of distaste for this or that circumstance of existence, controlling not only the direction of our feelings but their duration and intensity as well, so that contempt begins to give way suddenly to understanding, or admiration to irony. Much, then, of our sense of the meaning of Three Sisters when we see it performed depends upon the style of the performance—upon, that is, the ability of the actors to complicate its emotional communication.

Stanislavsky, we are told, had a tendency to produce all Chekhov's plays in a deliberate and dramatic style, which emphasized the moments of painful feeling and made the plays into what were called "heavy dramas." This method, which in effect invited the audience to self-pity before the hopelessness of life, was no doubt the loyal Stanislavsky's way of expressing his sense of Chekhov's seriousness and importance. But if Three Sisters is acted with the lightness and the rapid tempo of the comic style, or with some of the briskness of farce, the response of the audience is bound to be different. The play will not then offer an exactly cheerful view of things; it will still be saying that life is, in all conscience, hard and bitterly disappointing. But this will not be its sole judgment. The seeming contradiction between the sadness of the text and the vivacity of the style will suggest an inconclusiveness of judgment, inviting the audience not to the indulgence of self-pity but to a thoughtful, perhaps even an ironic detachment.

Whether or not we accept the play as a comedy, we cannot fail to see that there is comedy in it, and a performance in the comic style will give full recognition to its abundant humor of character. All the male characters, in one degree or another, provoke our laughter or at least our smiles—Vershinin by his compulsion to make visionary speeches about mankind's future happiness, Andrey by his fatness, Chebutykin by his avowed total ignorance of medicine, Solyony by his absurd social behavior, especially his belief that he resembles the great romantic poet Lermontov, Kulygin by his pedantry and silliness, even poor good Tusenbach by his confidence that he can solve the problems of existence by going to work for a brick company. It is an aspect of his gift that Chekhov is able to make us laugh at these people without allowing us to despise them. Our laughter is a skeptical comment on the facile belief that nothing but the circumstances of environment accounts for people's destinies, for what we laugh at is the self-deception, or the pretension, or the infirmity of purpose that in some large part explains their pain and defeat—and our own.

The three sisters themselves, however, appear in a light very different from that in which the male characters are placed. We cannot say of them, as we do of the men, that they have helped contrive their defeat; the situation of women being what it was when Chekhov was writing, there was virtually no way by which they might have triumphed over circumstances to avoid the waste of their lives. Each of the three girls had, to be sure, overestimated the chances of happiness, but what they had imagined and desired was not beyond reason. Such deceptions as they practice on themselves do not warp their personalities into comic eccentricity, as happens with all the men. In the sisters, we feel, life appears in its normality, rather beautiful: they are finely developed human beings of delicate and generous mind. And the end of the play finds each of them doomed to unfulfilment, bitterly grieving over her fate, despite the resolution to live out her life in courageous affirmation. That this final scene is intensely sad goes without saying. But it is an open question for the reader or the stage director whether the exaltation of fortitude and faith that the sisters muster up in the face of defeat is to be taken ironically, as a delusion which makes the sadness yet more intense, or whether it is to be understood as sounding a true note of affirmation. The answer to the question should perhaps be conditioned by the knowledge that the scene was written by a dying man.

Chekhov suffered from tuberculosis, at that time a disease not easily cured. A physician of considerable skill, although he had given up the practice of medicine, he was not likely to be under any illusion about his chances of recovery; he died four years after the production of Three Sisters, at the age of forty-five. His illness did not deprive him of all gratification. He worked, although against odds. His work was honored, and he was much loved. But he had to live in exile from Moscow, even from Russia; he was often in pain; physical activity became ever less possible; he was often separated from his young wife for long periods. It could not have been without thought of himself that he wrote such despairing speeches as the one in which Irina says, "Where has it all gone? Where is it? … life's slipping by, and it will never, never return.…"

Yet as we read Chekhov's letters of the last years of his illness, we find no despair in them, no bitterness, not even the sorrow we might expect to find. They are full of the often trivial details of travel, business, and work, of expressions of concern and affection for others, they address themselves to ordinary, unexceptional life, without tragic reverberations, even without drama. Perhaps an unwillingness to burden others with his darker thoughts in some part explains why Chekhov wrote as he did, but as one reads the letters alongside the plays, one feels that Chekhov was living life as the speeches at the end of Three Sisters suggest it must be lived: without the expectation of joy, yet in full attachment, and cherishing what may be cherished, even if that is nothing more than the idea of life itself. A man of affectionate disposition upon whom death had laid its hand would probably not be concerned with making a rational or prudential judgment upon life: more likely he would be moved to wonder if a transcendent judgment might not be made. And when Chekhov wrote that "it will be winter soon, and everything will be covered with snow," he may well have wished to suggest that in the cycle of seasons the spring will follow and that, sad as we may be over what befalls ourselves and others, life itself is to be celebrated. Over the centuries the attributes and intentions of comedy have been numerous and various. But one of the oldest of them has been to say that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, all will be well, the life of the earth will renew itself.