SOURCE: "Natasha Ivanovna, the Lonely Bourgeoises," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, September 1983, pp. 305-09.

[In this essay, Majdalany mounts a defense of Natasha. Ivanovna in Three Sisters, in an effort to arrive at a more balanced interpretation of the character than the merely selfish and predatory figure she is commonly considered.]

Whilst all commentators of Chekhov's play dwell at length upon the aesthetic longings of the three sisters, and tenderly evoke their sensitivity bruised by frustration, no comparable sympathy is extended to Natasha, their brother's young wife. ¹ She is indeed as vain, selfish and even ruthless as she has been categorized; but what all these attributions have crowded out is the fact that first and foremost she is a disoriented petite bourgeoise, socially insecure and lonely in an alien and hostile environment.

To maintain objectivity, the critic must resist the temptation to redress the balance by tilting it in Natasha's favour. She is no more a flawless heroine than any of her sisters-in-law, but she deserves a fair appraisal. Natasha should be examined as an individual with feelings and attitudes which, although they may lack subtlety and charm, still have a right to our understanding and a claim on our compassion. Yet, what invariably seems to happen is that she is criticized as the sisters' antagonist, who she is in a sense, and it is not taken into account that the source of the conflict resides in a personal and social incompatibility for which all four women must share equal responsibility.

Harvey Pitcher comes close to explaining the reason for the general indictment of Natasha when he writes: "Everyone has always agreed that Natasha is an odious character and that to dislike her thoroughly is only right and proper. But there is such an impatient desire to find someone to blame in the Three Sisters, such a gleeful rush to castigate Natasha for her most obvious failings, that comment on her has often been superficial."² Yet, even after this caveat, he goes on to say: "When the gauche and tastelessly dressed Natasha makes her belated appearance, the audience is inclined to share the sisters' scepticism."³

By whose standards is Natasha's attire tasteless? Further, is Masha's venomous outburst which introduces the girl to the audience a mere expression of scepticism? This indirect presentation sets the tone and indicates the nature of the antagonism between the parties, as we see the balance of power shifting to the final effective dominance of Natasha. Her raw physicality explodes through Masha's outburst: she is garish, loves brightly coloured clothes, those yellows and reds which have no status amid the sober monochromes adopted by the sisters. Her shiny cheeks, which "look as though they've been scrubbed" (p. 261), reinforce the image of red-blooded sexuality, that earthy vitality which stirs the pallid emotions of Andrey: "Oh, how young you are, Natasha, how wonderfully, beautifully young!" (p. 271).

Natasha makes her first entrance "wearing a pink dress with a green belt. " Awkward among a social elite, upset at being late, eager to please, her reactions are perfectly natural: she looks at the mirror, tidies her dress, and goes in to kiss Irena. Feeling shy, she admits as much to Olga, who takes one look at her and responds: "(Alarmed, dropping her voice.) You've got a green belt on! My dear, that's surely a mistake!" The bewildered young woman is guileless enough to believe that Olga's dismay is due to some esoteric knowledge of the occult: "Why, is it a bad omen, or what?" (p. 268).

Far from sharing the sisters' scepticism, an unbiased audience gasps at what J. L. Styan accurately describes as "Olga's feline cruelty."⁴ But even as he credits Olga with the unpleasantness she richly deserves, he hints that Natasha's behaviour is already indicative of vanity, deceit and hypocrisy. As for David Magarshack, this exchange provides him with the Chekhov-sent opportunity of proving Natasha's vindictiveness⁵ when, at the end of Act IV, she tells Irena: "My dear, that belt you're wearing doesn't suit you at all" (p. 328). If this is vindictiveness, it is amply justified by the family's behaviour towards her in the intervening years. When she has not been ignored, she has been either slighted (by Masha, Toozenbach, Soliony) or reminded of her lowly background (by Olga, e.g., in Act III, patronizingly: "Please try to understand me, dear.… It may be that we've been brought up in a peculiar way, but …" [p. 297]).

The cumulative effect of this disregard would be sufficient to account for the change in Natasha's character and attitude "from the timid fiancee" to the "mistress of the household."⁶ In observing this evolution, the audience should recognize that Natasha's "sins of commission" are balanced by the Prozorovs' "sins of omission." The asperities of her selfishness collide with the granite of their egotism: she is vulgar and strives to become genteel; they are refined and never even attempt to groom her understanding or her manners. She grasps, they with-draw; she pushes, they recoil. Maurice Valency, no admirer of Natasha, nevertheless concedes: "She becomes a despot … [b]ut … she also demonstrates such strength of character as the well-bred sisters are incapable of developing."⁷

Once married to Andrey, quite understandably Natasha would like to feel that her new status lends her some measure of authority, and therefore she resents being overlooked: "[T]hey tell me that some carnival party's supposed to be coming here soon after nine" (Act II, pp. 272-273). Clearly no one had bothered to consult her, and no woman, now or then, in England or in Russia, would not be vexed at such evidence of neglect. It is her wounded vanity, not (as Magarshack assumes) her Satanic nature, that makes her countermand the party. Nor must we see her wish to secure Irena's room for her son as the stealthy move of a "ruthless predator"⁸; rather, it instances another collision between pusher and push-over which indicts both, albeit for contrasting reasons.

Furthermore, when Natasha tells her husband of her plans for the room, does he try to safeguard his sister's rights? As Natasha pauses for an answer, Andrey remains silent; when she shakes him into replying, his reaction is as limp as his violin-playing: "I was just day-dreaming.… There's nothing to say, anyway …" (p. 273). A more incisive husband, a more resolute sister-in-law, could have scotched Natasha's rise to power; but thwarted though she is in her desire to belong, Natasha never faces opposition in her wilfulness to possess.

Despised by her sisters-in-law, bound to a man cocooned in meditation on his wasted life, not surprisingly Natasha embarks on an affair with the gallant Protopopov, a man of her own social class and, like her, brash and determined to succeed. Here again, critics' prejudice supersedes fairness: whilst Natasha's dalliance is censured, not a word condemns Masha's passion for Vershinin. For all Masha's extolled sensitivity, the callousness she displays towards the long-suffering Koolyghin is breath-taking, even by modern standards. When in Act III the poor cuckold exclaims: "… I'm so happy, happy, happy!", his listless wife humiliates him publicly by retorting: "And I'm so bored, bored, bored!" (p. 304). Yet, it is Masha's volatile sister-in-law who is stigmatized for betraying a man who refers to her chillingly as "a sort of mean, blind, thick-skinned animal—anyway, not a human being" (p. 318).

Natasha's sense of inferiority and her wish to overcome it are both sharpened by the contempt in which she is held, so overt that even Andrey notices it. Like many petites bourgeoises who have jumped ranks, Natasha smarts at any mode of behaviour suggestive of disrespect. Petty by nature, vulgar by upbringing, and strident in response to the hostility of her surroundings, the girl who in Act I did not retort to Olga's criticism of her belt, by Act III has deteriorated spiritually without having improved socially.

Natasha's treatment of Anfisa, whilst not defensible, highlights the negativism that pervades the entire family and makes the relationship between Natasha and the sisters one of confrontation. As Natasha enters the room, she addresses Olga in her usual garrulous manner and ends her prattle on a note of motherly apprehension.

Chekhov's significant stage direction follows: "OLGA (without listening to her) …" (p. 296). Ignored again, Natasha's pent-up exasperation needs an outlet, and the hapless Anfisa becomes the object of her resentment. Natasha's words are cheap and cruel—but what are we to make of Masha's silence? Instead of going out "in a huff" (p. 296), filled with loathing for the vulgar intruder, Masha would have served Anfisa better had she stood her ground and given Natasha a piece of her mind. It is left to Olga to reprimand the young woman, as much for having distressed the old servant as for having troubled her own nerves: "Any cruel or tactless remark, even the slightest discourtesy, upsets me …" (p. 297). Natasha's behaviour is indeed condemnable, but she is not used to dealing with servants in the benevolent, paternalistic manner natural to the upper classes. Styan points out that she belongs to "the new ruling class who will adjust the old order of master and serf to the new order of rich and poor. #x2026;"⁹

It is well known how Chekhov observed the social change that was taking place in Russia, of which the dominant feature was the emergence of the new commercial middle class, and dramatized it through Natasha and later, in The Cherry Orchard, through Lopakhin. Perhaps from an aesthetic point of view the playwright regretted the passing of an upper class whose leisure admitted of dreams and wistful hopes, whose life unfurled with the gracefulness of a slow-motion picture. The three sisters stand for potential that could no longer be fulfilled in a new Russia where the need for work was becoming imperative for survival, and the doom to which their aspirations are condemned elicits our sympathy. In contrast to their effete longings, the con-crete demands advanced by Natasha lead Magarshack, for example, to see her as a "convincing figure of evil."¹⁰ But she should be appraised rather as a young woman whose upbringing in a provincial town, among people with few claims to culture and refinement, has not equipped her to understand that material acquisitiveness need not be the sole aim in life. The contrast with her sisters-in-law heightens the opposition between those who fail to achieve and the woman who overachieves. Pitcher writes discerningly that "we can be quite sure that had Natasha suddenly taken it into her head to move to Moscow, she would have allowed nothing and no one to stand in her way."¹¹

To the very end, Natasha's impatient vitality challenges the moribund ethos of her surroundings: "I'll tell them to put flowers all round here, lots of flowers …" (p. 328). Her decision to have the trees felled is cited as yet another sign of her destructive nature and insensitivity to the past (whereas no similar criticism is levelled against Lopakhin's parallel resolution). How could she be awed by the sanctity of tradition when nothing in her background nurtured such sentiments? She has been educated, it seems, because Chekhov wrote that his play had "four responsible female parts, four educated young women."¹² But she belonged originally to a class with no heirlooms, arboreal or otherwise, and is concerned more with forging a congenial new environment than with preserving old relics sapped of the life force. (Toozenbach observes in Act IV: "Look at that dead tree, it's all driedup, but it's still swaying in the wind along with the others" [p. 321].)

Beverly Hahn writes that Natasha "seems to have no ideals at all"¹³ , a statement with which even the most impartial of commentators cannot quarrel. However, we must beware of confusing ideals, which demand a modicum of active participation, with dreams, which leave us free to do nothing whatever by way of commitment. Since dreams, not ideals, dominate the lives of the Prozorovs throughout the play, it is harsh to single out Natasha for her lack of vision.

Innocent of ideals, the petite bourgeoise to whom only Koolyghin has ever shown any courtesy is not short on determination: if she cannot be accepted, Natasha makes sure at least that no one will ever again laugh at her. The last we hear of her is her shout at the maid, an explosion of bad temper that precedes the slowly unwinding finale of the play, with the sisters grouped together in contemplation of their future. Natasha is so petty that she elevates the most trivial domestic shortcoming into a major catastrophe; the sisters are so oblivious to reality that even the death of Toozenbach, a friend and Irena's fiance, is subsumed by their hazy longings. There is little to choose between these antithetical attitudes. It is inequitable to scorn the rages of Natasha whilst indulging the egotism of her sisters-in-law, which even a tragedy cannot dent. If we are moved by Masha's frustrations, Irena's yearnings, and Olga's lassitude, we should also spare a thought for the young girl who came to lunch in her best frock, stayed on as Andrey's wife, and was never shown anything but contempt and aversion by her new family and their friends.

Notes

¹ All quotations from Three Sisters are taken from Anton Chekhov, Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (Harmondsworth, 1959).

² Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (London, 1973), p. 127.

³ Ibid., p. 135.

⁴ J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance (Cambridge, Eng., 1971), p. 178.

⁵ David Magarshack, The Real Chekhov (London, 1972), pp. 138-139.

⁶ William Gerhardi, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London, 1923), p. 27.

⁷ Maurice Valency, The Breaking String (New York, 1966), p. 219.

⁸ Magarshack, pp. 140, 138.

⁹ 'Styan, p. 201.

¹⁰ Magarshack, p. 140.

¹¹ Pitcher, p. 125.

¹² Anton Chekhov, Letter to Olga Knipper, 15 September 1900.

¹³ Beverly Hahn, Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), p. 278.