[In the following essay, Tufts praises the satirical elements of The Three Sisters.]

Chekhov signals his audience from the very beginning. As the curtain rises on a set divided into a “drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom,”¹ a set which is itself a stage within a stage, we see the Prozorov sisters, each dressed in a costume that is emblematic of her situation in life and her view of herself, and each fixed in the posture that will characterize her throughout the play: “OLGA, wearing the dark-blue uniform dress of a teacher in the girls' high school, is correcting student exercise books the whole time, either standing or walking to and fro. MASHA, in a black dress, sits with her hat on her knees and reads a little book. IRINA, in a white dress, stands lost in thought” (I, p. 103). In the ballroom behind the columns, Chebutykin, an army doctor, and Tuzenbakh and Solyony, two officers of the brigade stationed in the sisters' provincial town, carry on a conversation which the audience cannot yet hear. The occasion for this gathering is the celebration of Irina's name day, and the date reminds Olga that:

Father died exactly one year ago, on this very day, the fifth of May. … It was bitter cold, it was snowing at the time. … I remember, as they took Father to the cemetery, the band was playing; at the graveside they fired a salute. He was a general. … given command of the brigade, and together we all left Moscow eleven years ago. I can remember perfectly well the beginning of May in Moscow. By this time in Moscow everything is in full bloom, it's warm, everything is bathed in sunlight. Eleven years have gone by, and I remember everything there as if we had just left yesterday. Oh, dear God in Heaven! This morning I woke up, I saw at once the sunlight everywhere, I saw at once that it was springtime and I felt my heart would break with joy. I wanted desperately to go home again. (I, pp. 103-104)

Yet just as the audience is becoming caught up in Olga's rhapsodic longing for Moscow, Chekhov breaks the mood, letting us hear a fragment of the conversation that has been going on in the ballroom as Chebutykin suddenly exclaims, “The hell you say!” probably in response to Solyony. “Of course, it's all nonsense,” adds Tuzenbakh, not only underscoring Chebutykin's inaudible comment to Solyony, but joining the ironic counterpoint to Olga's vision of Moscow as an earthly paradise (I, p. 104). Now, as Olga and Irina go on to speak passionately of the “one dream [which] keeps growing stronger and stronger, one dream. … To leave for Moscow. To sell the house, put an end to everything here, and go off to Moscow. … Yes! As soon as possible, off to Moscow,” Chebutykin and Tuzenbakh laugh in the ballroom behind the columns, the stage within the stage (I, p. 104). And it is by setting up this visual image of his characters as themselves actors on separate stages where a number of dramas are being performed simultaneously that Chekhov puts his audience on their guard, letting us know from the start that Moscow is neither the lost Eden of which the sisters dream nor a place to which they will ever return and that no character is necessarily to be taken at his or her own word.

Thus Chekhov encourages his audience to temper emotional identification with critical reflection, employing a method here similar to the one he used in his fiction, a method which he described in a letter to Alexei Suvorin, his friend and publisher: “When I write I count upon my reader fully, assuming that he himself will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the telling.”² And in The Three Sisters Chekhov relies on the acuity of his audience to pick up the clues he gives them and so discover the ironic counterpoint against which to judge what the characters do and what they say about themselves and each other. Much of that counterpoint, when not contained within the actual way the dialogue is structured as, for example, in the juxtaposed conversations which open the play, is to be found in the literary allusions which Chekhov scatters throughout The Three Sisters. Relying on the literary memory of his audience, a memory both aural and oral, which would have enabled every educated Russian of the day to recognize and recite by heart much of the country's great works of prose and poetry,³ Chekhov works to manipulate the members of that audience into actively providing much of the ironic counterpoint to the characters' visions of themselves.

That much of the irony of that counterpoint, together with the satiric treatment of the characters it implies, should have gone unheard is understandable in English-speaking productions of The Three Sisters where knowledge of Russian literature is, for the most part, spotty. Yet the lack of emphasis given that counterpoint, even in Russian productions, is a consequence of the inheritance from Stanislavsky who, as a director, may have identified all too closely with the angst of Chekhov's characters. As Chekhov himself was aware and as he told the young student Tikhonov in the often-quoted remark of 1902:

You say that you have wept over my plays. Yes, and not only you alone. But I did not write them for this purpose, it is Alekseev [Stanislavsky] who has made such crybabies of them. I desired something other. I only wished to tell people honestly: “look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!” The principal thing is that people should understand this, and when they do, they will surely create for themselves another and a better life. I will not see it, but I know it will be entirely different, not like what we have now. And as long as it does not exist, I'll continue to tell people: “See how badly and boringly you live!” Is it that which they weep over?⁴

It may be precisely for that reason—to make the members of his audience look at themselves—that Chekhov strives continually throughout The Three Sisters to disrupt absolute sympathetic identification with satiric insight. For as they endeavor to place themselves above surroundings in which they cannot find the beauty, the fineness of feeling, nor the intensity of sensation furnished both by literary models and their own romantic visions of themselves and of life, the characters construct scenarios through which they are able to become performers of dramas more extravagant than their actual lived experience.

If Chekhov, as a result of the “tragic” weight given his play by Stanislavsky, did not succeed in communicating its satiric implications, that seeming failure may itself be the measure of how successful he actually was, since it is often the ironic fate of the satirist whose criticism is most incisive to have the point missed by the very audience for which it is intended. This is especially the case with The Three Sisters, for the satire here is in the Horatian mode, gentle, rather than biting, smiling, rather than bitter, aiming not so much to express or provoke moral indignation and contempt as to elicit sympathetic, knowing laughter. And if such laughter has its source in a certain degree of identification with the characters on the stage, it is perhaps that identification which accounts for the reaction of the play's first audience as it was described by Stanislavsky: “At the end of Act One … there were about a dozen shattering curtain-calls. After Act Two there was one. After the Third Act only a few people timidly applauded and the actors could not appear, and after Act Four, they got one very thin curtain-call.”⁵ Indeed, the active participation required of an audience watching a performance of The Three Sisters might well produce an uncomfortable feeling of recognition as such participation comes to reveal a kind of self-delusion rooted in a sense of superiority that never validates itself through meaningful action. For the characters, who believe themselves mired in the banality of provincial life, are shown to be accomplices to that banality, not so much trapped in their provincial town as prisoners of their own quasi-literary plots, fixed in self-conscious poses which deny them authenticity—which is to say, the ability to inhabit lives that, for better or worse, are fully their own—as they watch time, and life itself, slip by while events which might otherwise have been influenced or controlled take on the power and inexorability of fate.

In the first act of the play, then, as Chekhov introduces the Prozorov family and the officers of the brigade who make up their social circle, he is already presenting the audience with the telling details that suggest the self-conscious dramas in which these characters imprison themselves. Here are Olga and Irina who long for Moscow and the hazily defined, but more vivid life they know surely awaits them there, the life for which they, like the heroines of a romantic novel, believe themselves intended; and here is their sister Masha who, like that earlier Masha of The Seagull, wears black as a token of mourning for the life she has cast as grand tragedy. Here is Masha's husband Kulygin, who spouts Latin aphorisms and the pronouncements of his headmaster, playing the role of schoolteacher to the hilt, perhaps because it was that role which once made Masha think him “terribly scholarly, clever, and important” (II, p. 121). Here, too, are the officers of the brigade: Baron Tuzenbakh, who yearns to take on the life of a manual laborer because he loves Irina and she, in a fit of romantic transport, has spoken of such a life as “happiness … ecstasy” (I, p. 106); Vershinin, who philosophizes at every opportunity because the pose of the philosopher speculating about the wonderful life awaiting humanity in the distant future provides him with an escape from the responsibilities of the present; Chebutykin, who makes Irina the surrogate for her dead mother because this enables him to continue playing the part of the constant lover, the one role which for years has provided the only purpose for his life; and Solyony, who insists on his resemblance to the romantic poet Lermontov because he has somehow never acquired the knack of fitting in socially, of making people like him. Rounding out this company are Andrey, the sisters' brother, and Natasha, the woman he marries and the instrument of the Prozorovs' eventual dispossession. Weighed down by his own and his sisters' expectations of him, the dream they all share of his becoming “a professor at Moscow University, a famous scholar of whom all Russia is proud!” (I, p. 120), Andrey, still cherishing that dream, flees from those expectations into marriage with Natasha, herself a caricature of the sisters' good breeding and refined sensibilities which provide her with the model for her own presentation of self.

Because Chekhov continually suggests that the models for all the self-conscious dramas of his characters have their origins in an external ideal, whether that ideal be derived from literature, or, as in the case of Natasha, from the higher social sphere to which she aspires, it will be most useful here to focus on Irina, Tuzenbakh, Solyony, and, finally, Masha, the four characters in the play most closely tied not only to an external ideal, but, particularly, to a literary model. What will emerge through such a focus is not only the sort of literary model that drives each of these characters, but also, perhaps, a suggestion of the way the major characters in Three Sisters might be played: as actors eternally on a private stage where every gesture, being never fully authentic, must always be slightly exaggerated.

Thus, if Chekhov has already let the audience know by means of the juxtaposed conversations which open the first act that no character's words are necessarily to be taken at face value, the discussion of work which begins as Tuzenbakh, Chebutykin, and Solyony join the sisters in the drawing room becomes a case in point. Here, Irina speaks passionately of her longing for work, but, as the ealier stage direction describing her has implied, Irina, the youngest of the sisters, “in a white dress and lost in thought,” is a dreamer with no experience of the world, a young woman who, as Olga says, “wakes up at seven, but … lies in bed at least until nine, thinking about something or other” (I, p. 106). And the “something or other” about which she thinks, as the ensuing action of the play itself comes to suggest, is not so much a life of hard work as it is the longed-for lover who awaits her in Moscow, the man constructed out of romantic fantasy whom she has “dreamed about … come to love” (III, p. 141). Indeed, it is because she cannot express that private, cherished dream to the people who, she knows, “still think of me as a little girl” (I, p. 106), who would, no doubt, tease her, that Irina transforms her longing for this fantasy lover into a longing for work. The result becomes a self-conscious performance which captivates even the performer herself and eventually imprisons her, for it is based on a text gleaned from books and refined by Irina's own romantic imagination into an epiphany:

When I woke up this morning, I got up and washed, and then suddenly everything in the world became clear to me. I know now the way people must live. … I know everything. A person must toil, work by the sweat of his face, no matter who he may be, and in this—and this alone—is found the meaning and the purpose of his life, his happiness, his ecstasy. How right and good it is to be a workman who gets up before sunrise and breaks stones on the road, to be a shepherd, to be a teacher who teaches children, to be an engineer on the railroad. … Just as some people thirst for a cool drink on a hot day, so do I in the same way—I thirst for work. (I, p. 106)

Along with the obvious comically deflating element in this speech—the declaration made by a young, inexperienced woman who, not having worked a day in her life, can nevertheless assert that she knows “the way people must live,” that she “know[s] everthing”—has been Chekhov's preparation of the ironic counterpoint to Irina's idealized vision in the characterization of Olga, the only member of the present company on stage who actually goes to work every day. As she stands encased in her “dark-blue uniform dress,” Olga complains of a constant headache and of how “day after day” she feels her “strength and youth drain[ing] away, drop by drop” (I, p. 104). Set against this reality, Irina's vision is exposed as an adolescent dream, a cover for romantic and sexual longing, since the suggestion is that her idealized notion of work must make any real work she comes to do a disillusionment, leaving her nearer the love-starved Olga's state of exhaustion of body and spirit than the “happiness” and “ecstasy” of which she has so rapturously spoken. And it is this suggestion which becomes reality later in the play as Irina, finding herself pursued not by some dashing, sensual lover, but by the all-too-familiar Tuzenbakh and the weird Solyony, first gets a job as a clerk in the telegraph office and later in the city council, performing what she sees as “work without poetry, without thought” (II, p. 123).

Having suggested the ironic counterpoint to Irina's romantic vision of work, Chekhov begins to use Tuzenbakh's response to that vision as a means of playing upon the literary memory of his audience, engaging them, as Tuzenbakh speaks, in the discovery of the full range of that counterpoint and its implications:

This longing for work, oh, dear God in Heaven, how clear this is to me! I've never worked, not once in my life. I was born in Petersburg, a city cold and idle, in a family that understood neither work nor worry. On coming home from military school, I remember there was even a valet to pull off my boots. At the time I was a bit silly—I'd say and do the first thing that came to mind—and my mother would always look adoringly at me. And she was always surprised when other people looked at me in a different way. I was protected against work. Only I doubt that the protection was completely successful, I really do! (I, p. 106)

But Tuzenbakh is in love with Irina and he is trying to get her to notice him. As he becomes more and more carried away by his longing for her, a longing for which he has at last found verbal expression in this shared seeming desire for work, he builds to an almost sexually impassioned climax:

The time has come, something huge and immense is coming nearer and nearer to all of us—a strong, exhilarating storm is beginning to gather, it's on its way, it's almost here, a storm that will soon cleanse our whole society—sweep away all the laziness, the indifference, the prejudice against work, the rotten boredom. I shall work, and in another twenty-five or thirty years every person will be working. Everyone! (I, p. 106)

Yet Chekhov immediately places the audience on its guard by having Chebutykin undercut Tuzenbakh's speech, proclaiming that he, for one, is “not planning to work,” and then proceeding to pull a newspaper from his pocket and, as he will do throughout the play, reading a piece of information at random: “Here … according to the newspapers, I know there was … a man named Dobrolyubov, but what he wrote about—I don't know … God only knows …” (I, pp. 106-107). The joke, however, is that God is not the only one to know this “man named Dobrolyubov” and what he wrote about, for Chekhov's Russian audience would surely have recognized this reference to the critic N. A. Dobrolyubov, author of the influential essay “What is Oblomovitis?” Written in 1859 in response to Goncharov's Oblomov, Dobrolyubov's essay analyzes the novel's protagonist as a Russian social type: an example of the so-called “superfluous man” characterized by laziness and a sense of superiority which keep him from facing life as it really is, the kind of individual, in short, evoked to perfection by Tuzenbakh's description of his youth in St. Petersburg, the city where the lethargic Oblomov lies in bed, dreaming away his days.

If they were as attentive as they were literate, the members of Chekhov's first Russian audience should already have experienced a sense of déjà vu as they listened to Tuzenbakh speak of his privileged and idle youth, for the elements of that description recall Goncharov's protagonist.⁶ Like Tuzenbakh, Oblomov was also born of a family which, as it is described in the novel, “did not particularly believe in mental troubles … [which] conceived of life as a state of perfect repose and idleness.”⁷ Like the young Tuzenbakh the lazy young Oblomov has his equally lazy servant Zahar to pull “on his stockings for him … put on his shoes … and if something seemed … amiss he gave Zaharka one on the nose with his foot.”⁸ Also like Tuzenbakh Oblomov is pampered by parents who “dreamed of a gold-embroidered uniform” for their son, “pictured him as a Councillor, [and] his mother saw him as a Governor. … They meant the boy to work just a little, not to exhaust his body and mind nor to lose the blessed plumpness acquired in childhood.”⁹ These echoes of Goncharov's indolent hero in Tuzenbakh's description of his youthful self are brought together by the reference to Dobrolyubov, for knowing both Oblomov and Dobrolyubov's essay, Chekhov's audience could also have grasped the satiric implications of that reference, to have understood that the malaise afflicting the characters in The Three Sisters is itself the same “Oblomovitis” described in Dobrolyubov's essay.

By using Goncharov's novel as the springboard for his own analysis of the intelligentsia of his day—the same intelligentsia which made up a large part of the audience of the Moscow Art Theatre and so, ironically, was much more likely to feel sympathetic identification with Chekhov's characters than to view them satirically—Dobrolyubov diagnosed “Oblomovitis,” with its symptoms of weakness, irresolution, lethargy, and egotism, as the disease caused by the moral and social corruption he saw at the heart of Russian life. Moreover, in Dobrolyubov's criticism of a Russian intelligentsia stricken with “Oblomovitis” there appears a strikingly apt description of the characters of Chekhov's play:

They merely talk about lofty strivings, consciousness of moral duty and common interests; when put to the test, it all turns out to be words, mere words. … Even the best-educated people, people with lively natures and warm hearts, are prone in their practical lives to depart from their ideas and plans, very quickly resign themselves to the realities of life, which, however, they never cease to revile as vulgar and disgusting.¹⁰

Indeed, when Natasha is seen not as the play's villain, but, rather, as emblematic of what Dobrolyubov has called “the realities of life,” or, earlier in his essay, the “existing influences” to which the Russian intelligentsia, symbolized by the figure of Oblomov, can only respond with “passive submission,”¹¹ then the Prozorovs, like all those “Oblomovs” in various guises catalogued by Dobrolyubov, numbly submit themselves to those “realities,” to the “existing influences” which Natasha represents, though the sisters “never cease to revile” her as “vulgar and disgusting.”

The irony here is double-edged, for in spite of the use Dobrolyubov made of it, if Goncharov's novel expresses the hope that the fading Russian gentry would leave behind the best of its values—its devotion to human relationships, its regard for courtesy, its love of art—the self-preoccupation of the Prozorovs, together with the parody made of those values by Natasha, diminishes such a hope. And here emerges the full ironic use Chekhov is making of the allusion to Goncharov's novel: for while Oblomov is paralyzed by the dream of his idyllic childhood and so cannot act in the world, the characters in The Three Sisters, who dream of the paradise awaiting them sometime in the future, somewhere beyond their provincial town, are too engrossed in their dreams to keep the world, embodied by Natasha and her offstage lover Protopopov, from acting upon them. If it is a feeling of cultural loss that has been at the center of the “tragic” reading of the play, it may also be this same feeling which lies at the heart of Chekhov's satire: his desire to tell people, “See how badly and boringly you live!” For by seeing, they might “create for themselves another and a better life.” Thus by placing the allusion to Oblomov and the reference to Dobrolyubov together at the beginning of The Three Sisters, Chekhov not only removes all suspense by letting the audience know what, in effect, they can anticipate over the course of the action, or lack of it, but he also encourages a critical, rather than a romantic or sentimental, view of the characters and their situation.

At the same time as Chekhov establishes this allusion to Goncharov's novel, implicitly connecting Tuzenbakh with Oblomov, he gives a further twist to the irony of that connection by having Tuzenbakh strike a pose which, together with his German name, evokes Oblomov's foil in the novel, the half-German Stolz,¹² the character whose energy rivals Oblomov's indolence and who, as Goncharov describes him, “pursued his own aims with bold disregard for obstacles and turned aside only when a wall rose before him or an abyss opened at his feet.”¹³ The point here is the lack of authenticity, the play-acting, conscious or unconscious, at the heart of Tuzenbakh's self-transformation, for as Goncharov describes the failure of Stolz's father, to whom the young Oblomov is sent for lessons, to undo the “primeval laziness, simplicity, peace, and inertia” that are the legacy of life at Oblomovka,¹⁴ so, too, Chekhov suggests, a man brought up to be Oblomov cannot so easily turn himself into Stolz. What is more, Tuzenbakh himself insists, “I'm a Russian, word of honor. Why, I don't even speak German. My own father belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church …” (I, pp. 113-114). As the reference to Dobrolyubov has already implied, “Oblomovitis” is indeed a specifically Russian “disease,” and the joke Chekhov shares with his audience here is having Tuzenbakh go out of his way to establish his claim as one of the legitimately afflicted. What the audience should know at this point is that Tuzenbakh is, in fact, creating a character through which to present himself, a character fashioned out of Irina's hymn to work, whose script is derived from her words. To that end, the Baron rejects the privileges of his social class, resigns his commission in the army, and announces that he is going to become a laborer in a brick factory—all this to act the part of the man he believes Irina could love, to move onto the stage where he may be allowed to join her in her own self-conscious performance.

The great irony for Tuzenbakh, of course, is that the part he has chosen to play is the wrong one, for he has failed to detect the fact that Irina's speech about her “thirst” for work, like his own, has a subtext, that it cloaks a passionate longing for the romantic lover who could save her from life in the provinces. Because the role in which Irina has cast herself is not, as it appears on the surface, that of the social egalitarian dedicated to hard work, but, rather, that of the fairy-tale heroine—the princess in the tower—she must see herself as unable to love anyone other than the “right man for me” (III, p. 141). Until he arrives to claim her, she knows that her soul, as she tells Tuzenbakh, must remain “a beautiful piano that has been locked up and the key … lost” (IV, p. 151). That Tuzenbakh cannot find that lost key does not merely result from his total ignorance of the actual role that Irina would have the “right man” play, but from the unalterable physical fact that he is not in the least suited to be cast as the handsome prince: not only is he “not good-looking,” but he is “so ugly” in his civilian clothes that even Olga cries when she sees him (III, p. 141). Though Irina finally does agree to marry Tuzenbakh, to become his wife, “faithful and obedient,” she cannot help but let him know that it is “not in [her] power” to love him (IV, p. 151). And if she has been constructing a fate for herself based on her reading of her life as a romantic text, it is that “fate” which is sealed when she agrees to marry Tuzenbakh, as Irina, much like her sister Masha before the entrance of Vershinin, becomes fixed in the plot of her own self-conscious drama, yearning forever for the dream lover who dwells in the never-to-be-regained paradise that is Moscow.

The irony of her situation, as Chekhov's satire implies, is that Irina's obsession with that lover who, she believes, can give back to her the “beautiful, genuine” real “life” from which she feels herself “moving further and further away” (III, p. 141) keeps her from taking responsibility for the life that is authentically her own and, in its way, may lead to Tuzenbakh's death at the hands of Solyony. For Irina's total absorption in the plot of her own romantic drama and the posture it requires of her compels her to tell Tuzenbakh, before he leaves for the fatal duel, that she feels “no love” for him, “none,” and it is a measure of her impenetrable self-involvement that she can say immediately after this, “You look distressed” (IV, p. 151), as though there were nothing in her words that should disturb him. While Chekhov leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not Irina has any knowledge of the duel Tuzenbakh is about to fight over her, that inability to speak the words which could ease his torment and provide some sort of meaning for the danger in which he is about to place himself becomes particularly cruel, especially after he begs her, “Tell me something. … Tell me something,” and she can only respond, “What? What can I say? What?” (IV, p. 151). Her inability to speak those words hints at the possibility of a heartsick Tuzenbakh leaving the stage to seek death from Solyony as the escape from a life with Irina in which he must daily bear the knowledge that she can never love him.

Yet just as it is Irina's self-conscious role as a romantic heroine which permits her no words of love, or even affection, that might comfort Tuzenbakh and ends by undermining her insistence on the superior nature of her own sensitivity, so it is Solyony's obsession with his contrived resemblance to the Romantic poet Lermontov which makes the duel in which Tuzenbakh will die inevitable. The obvious Chekhovian irony here, of course, is that Solyony succeeds in killing Tuzenbakh precisely because he meant to do no more than wound him, to “wing him like a woodcock” (IV, p. 150). What is more subtly ironic, however, is the use Chekhov makes of literary allusion to suggest to the audience that Solyony is an inept actor miscast in the role he has chosen to play. Boasting that he has “the disposition of Lermontov,” that he “even look[s] a little like Lermontov” (II, p. 128), Solyony, for all his posturing, cannot finally succeed in performing his part accurately, cannot even manage the correct exit: the real Lermontov, as every member of Chekhov's Russian audience would have known, was killed in a duel into which he, like Solyony, had goaded a romantic rival; Solyony ends by killing Tuzenbakh and lives to move on with the brigade.

Again, Chekhov relies upon the literary memory of his Russian audience to provide much of the ironic counterpoint to Solyony's obsession with his contrived resemblance to Lermontov. Thus, in the first act of the play, probably because he is aware that Tuzenbakh's speech about work is an attempt to woo Irina, the object of his own romantic fantasies, Solyony responds to Tuzenbakh's prophecy that “in twenty-five or thirty years every person will be working” (I, p. 106) with a prophecy of his own: “In only two or three years you will die of a stroke or I will lose my temper and plant a bullet in your forehead, my angel” (I, p. 107). The model for Solyony's performance here, of course, is Lermontov, or, to be more specific, Lermontov's own fictional alter ego Pechorin, the Byronic protagonist of his popular novel A Hero for Our Time. Solyony has lifted the plot of his own self-conscious drama from the “Princess Mary” section of Lermontov's novel in which Pechorin uses a woman as an excuse to quarrel with and ultimately kill in a duel a man who has tried to befriend him. Yet immediately after Solyony has uttered his prophetic threat, he “Takes a small bottle of scent out of his pocket and sprinkles his chest and his hands” (I, p. 107). It is with this gesture, not itself a consciously contrived part of Solyony's performance as Lermontov/Pechorin, that Chekhov signals his deflation of Solyony to the audience, creating a stage image which, as it evokes Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, reduces the would-be Byronic hero to a guilt-stricken woman, the passionate fighter of duels to the instigator of a murderous act of betrayal that has no honor in it. If Solyony, posturing as Lermontov/Pechorin, has used Tuzenbakh's speech as the occasion to set up the self-conscious drama of romantic rivalry he intends to play out, what Chekhov has done in his foreshadowing of the result of that rivalry is to let the audience know that, subconsciously at least, Solyony, who throughout the play will compulsively sprinkle scent on the hands which to him “smell like a corpse” (IV, p. 150), already knows himself to be a murderer, already is oppressed by his guilt.

Yet while it is that contrived resemblance to Lermontov which ultimately places Solyony in the position to become Tuzenbakh's murderer, it is also that “resemblance” which serves to conceal Solyony's actual sense of inadequacy and isolation, his knowledge that “when I'm together with a group of people, I'm despondent, shy, and … I talk all sorts of nonsense” (II, p. 128). Here, then, is the element of pathos in Solyony's self-conscious posturing: his attempt to disguise, both from others and from himself an authentic self which feels always inferior, always ill at ease. And that insecure and easily hurt little man is revealed early on in the play when Masha turns on Solyony at the beginning of the first act, calling him a “terrible, loathsome person” because he has insulted her by pompously announcing that when a woman“talks philosophy,” the result is “so much twiddle-twaddle” (I, p. 107). Solyony's response to Masha's attack upon him is, as usual, to retreat behind a literary text, and he covers up the fact that she has genuinely wounded him by quoting two lines from Krylov's fable “Old Mat and His Man”:

“Before he had time to let out a yell, The bear was squeezing him to hell.” (I, p. 108)

Intended obviously as a public rebuke to Masha for pouncing upon him like the bear in the fable, Solyony's choice of these lines, as Chekhov's own use of literary allusion suggests, goes even deeper than this.

As the audience would have known, “Old Mat and His Man” is a fable on the theme of ingratitude: rescued by his workman from a sudden attack by a bear, Old Mat does not thank his savior, but instead “[h]eaps curses” upon him for ruining the valuable skin with his ax.¹⁵ Similarly, instead of being grateful to Solyony for his company, Masha has announced her intention of leaving Irina's name-day party where the present guests—Solyony, Tuzenbakh, and Chebutykin—whom she terms collectively “a man and a half,” cannot equal the company of the past when “Father was alive, [and] there were always up to thirty or forty officers around at our name-day parties” (I, p. 107). By responding with the lines from Krylov's fable, Solyony is getting some of his own back while, at the same time, revealing his hurt on two counts: that Masha has viciously attacked him and that, instead of valuing his company, she has, by her earlier statement, publicly impugned his manhood. Yet, ironically enough, when Chekhov employs this allusion again at the end of the play he turns it back on Solyony himself, for as they leave for the duel with Tuzenbakh, both Solyony and Chebutykin repeat the lines from the fable which, for the audience, now become a foreshadowing of and a comment upon Tuzenbakh's death at the hands of Solyony.¹⁶ Like the bear in the fable, Solyony has, throughout the play, attacked Tuzenbakh without provocation or warning, and, like Old Mat, Solyony, too, is guilty of ingratitude, goading and finally killing the one person who offers him the kindness and friendship for which he longs, the kindness and friendship which, were he able to accept them—and this is the point of Chekhov's satire in regard to Solyony—might have saved him from his loneliness and isolation, from the necessity of having to play at being Lermontov, a pose which itself only makes him even more of an outcast. Thus, as he flees from himself and the life that is authentically his own, Solyony in his role of Lermontov is obliged to vow that he will kill “any successful rivals” for Irina's love (II, p. 131), and the irony here, of course, is that he ends by murdering the one person in the play to find him “likable somehow” (II, p. 128).

Although Solyony's commitment to the fantasy of himself as Lermontov/Pechorin leads to an irretrievable reality both ludicrous and pathetic, there may yet be a further satiric twist to the presentation of the Solyony/Tuzenbakh relationship when, in the second act, Chekhov employs Solyony's own skewed use of literary allusion to play upon the ambiguity of the feelings he harbors for his romantic “rival.” Intending to convey his “Byronic nature” to Tuzenbakh, Solyony conflates a speech from Alexander Griboyedov's nineteenth-century comedy Wit Works Woe with lines from Pushkin's narrative poem The Gypsies, in the first case quoting the words accurately, but directing them to the wrong “character,” both in regard to Griboyedov's drama and the one he is so self-consciously contriving, and, in the second case, addressing Tuzenbakh as if Tuzenbakh were the character in Pushkin's poem with whom he himself ought to be identifying. The occasion for this literary malapropism is Tuzenbakh's attempt to make peace with Solyony over their “quarrel,” a quarrel the cause of which mystifies him. “You always make me feel as if something has happened between us,” Tuzenbakh says. “Although I must admit there's something strange about you.” Solyony's response is to strike a pose and declaim lines that would have been immediately recognizable to the Russian audience of Chekhov's day: “I am strange, but who is not strange! Do not be angry, Aleko! … Forget, forget your dreams” (II, p. 128).

As Chekhov's Russian audience would have known, the first of the lines Solyony speaks here—“I am strange, but who is not strange!”—belongs to Griboyedov's Chatsky, the popular hero of Wit Works Woe, the angry young man whose alienation from society arises out of his disgust at the corruption he sees in it. In quoting Chatsky's line, Solyony is, of course, engaging in both an unwittingly accurate piece of self-description and an obvious bit of self-flattery: after all, he is nothing if not strange, but he would have Tuzenbakh believe that the source of that strangeness is a moral sensibility superior to that of the people around him. Yet as an audience familiar with Griboyedov's play would also have known—and indeed much of the rhymed-verse dialogue of Wit Works Woe was quoted, like proverbs, in everyday conversation¹⁷—in casting himself in the role of Chatsky, Solyony has, in fact, directed his line to the wrong “character.” In Griboyedov's play, the words Solyony declaims are spoken by Chatsky to Sophya Famusov, the woman who has jilted him for her father's secretary, an oily womanizer named Molchalin. Moreover, the line itself occurs in the context of a conversation in which the embittered, jealous Chatsky is attempting to make Sophya reveal the name of the man who has supplanted him in her affections:

SOPHYA … threatening looks and angry tone; Yourself, you've all the queerness you're eschewing, A storm above oneself there's not much sense in brewing.

CHATSKY I'm odd; so's every one, I find, But idiots of the common kind.¹⁸

If in quoting Chatsky's line Solyony intends to get Tuzenbakh to remember it, complete it, and so feel himself insulted as one of those “idiots of the common kind,” it is the audience's own recollection of the line's original context which works to supply the ironic counterpoint, for in directing this line at Tuzenbakh, Solyony virtually places him in the role of Sophya Famusov, while Irina, if the logic of Solyony's line reading is followed, becomes Molchalin. By having Solyony, who is self-consciously presenting himself as Chatsky, address his line to Tuzenbakh, Chekhov plays upon the literary memory of his audience, suggesting that it may well be Irina who, at least subconsciously for Solyony, stands between him and Tuzenbakh, not Tuzenbakh who keeps Irina from him.

If what emerges here is the suggestion of a certain repressed homosexual attraction on the part of Solyony for Tuzenbakh, such a suggestion is itself played upon by Solyony's next line, his allusion to and quotation from Pushkin's The Gypsies: “Be not angry, Aleko! … Forget, forget your dreams.”¹⁹ Chekhov's audience, familiar with Pushkin's poem, would have known its story of Aleko, the brooding fugitive from the world of civilized society who takes refuge with a band of gypsies. Here he becomes the lover of Zemfira, the daughter of the old man who has taken him into his wagon. Time passes, and Zemfira takes a younger lover. But Aleko is too bound by the codes of the society from which he has fled and, unable to accept the freedom that is the supreme law of gypsy life, he kills Zemfira and her lover in a jealous rage.

Given the plot of Pushkin's poem, the actor playing Solyony has a choice: he can read the line from Pushkin as either Solyony's self-conscious dramatization of his own emotional state, or, more interestingly and consistent with the implication contained in the line quoted from Griboyedov, as Solyony's characterization of Tuzenbakh as Aleko.²⁰ In such a reading, Solyony's conscious intention may be to warn Tuzenbakh against the jealousy he will feel when, like Pushkin's Aleko, he finds himself jilted for a more attractive man—namely Solyony himself. What happens, however, is that it becomes Solyony who is placed in the role of Zemfira, for in the poem it is she who tells Aleko to forget the nightmares in which he dreams of her faithlessness. To read the line this way—with Tuzenbakh as Solyony's “Aleko”—is not only to follow through on the suggestion that, subconsciously at least, Solyony sees Irina as coming between him and a jealous Tuzenbakh, but also to discover the range of Chekhov's ironic counterpoint in relation to the Solyony/Irina/Tuzenbakh triangle. For if Solyony, playing the part of Chatsky, “loves” Tuzenbakh, whom he has subconsciously cast as Sophya Famusov, it is Solyony himself who must feel jilted by Tuzenbakh, as Irina is placed in the role of Molchalin by default. Similarly, if Tuzenbakh is cast by Solyony in the role of Aleko, then by declaiming Zemfira's line, Solyony seems also to be projecting jealousy on to Tuzenbakh, jealousy not over the loss of Irina, but over the loss of himself. In both cases, however, Solyony's skewed use of literary allusion implies a fuller range to Chekhov's irony in regard to this character and the Tuzenbakh/Irina/Solyony triangle: for it may not so much be Irina who attracts Solyony as it is Tuzenbakh, with Irina becoming little more than the vehicle through which Solyony can express feelings of attraction, even love, unaware of the true object of those feelings.

In terms of the self-conscious drama in which he is engaged, the point of all of Solyony's posturing—be it as Lermontov/Pechorin, as Chatsky, or even, if an actor chooses to play it this way, as the jealous Aleko—is to convince others, but perhaps most of all himself, that he really is the brooding, Byronic hero, moved by fate and the dictates of his own nature into the role of Tuzenbakh's, albeit unintentional, murderer. It is for this reason that, as he leaves with Chebutykin for the fatal duel with Tuzenbakh, Solyony quotes two lines from Lermontov's poem “A Sail”: “But he, rebellious, seeks the storm, / As if in storms there is peace …” (IV, p. 150). By quoting these lines, Solyony is, as usual, attempting to dramatize himself, to convince both himself and Chebutykin that he is the romantic rebel whose only sense of peace is, paradoxically, to be found in risk, in passionate action. Yet for an audience alert to the counterpoint Chekhov provides to Solyony's view of himself, that attempt, like all the others before it, falls flat. Unlike Lermontov's “sail,” the personification of the poet, Solyony, who is living life as though it were a romantic text, is not motivated by passion that is a genuine part of his nature; rather, he is continually play-acting passion in order to obscure and evade his authentic self, his own real life and desires.

For a Russian audience, both the lack of authenticity in the Lermontov pose and its ludicrousness have been summed up in the second act of the play when Solyony argues with Chebutykin over the difference between cheremsha and chekhartma. Chebutykin wins the argument when he tells Solyony: “Why on earth should I quarrel with you? You have never been to the Caucasus, and you have never eaten chekhartma” (II, p. 129). As every educated Russian knows, not only is the Caucasus a favorite setting in Lermontov's work, but it was also to the Caucasus that Lermontov was sent by the czar in punishment for taking part in a duel. For Chebutykin to state flatly that Solyony has “never been to the Caucasus” is tantamount to exploding his Lermontov pose; it is to leave him naked on the stage in mid-performance of the romantic drama he has substituted for his life.

Thus as Solyony's Lermontov pose is exploded by a Russian audience's knowledge of their country's literature, so, too, by employing literary allusion to create a satiric counterpoint, not only to Solyony's, but also to Irina's and Tuzenbakh's view of themselves, Chekhov has relied on the active participation of that audience to discover the gap between the self-conscious role each of these characters is playing and that character's authentic self. The discovery of that gap and the satiric view it implies is, perhaps, finally best summed up in Chekhov's use of the lines from Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmilla which Masha pensively quotes in Act One and which she will distractedly repeat in the last act of the play:²¹

By the curved seashore stands an oak tree green;
A golden chain to that oak is bound …
And linked to the chain with a scholarly mien
A tomcat is seen going round and round and … (I, p. 118)

By having her quote these lines, Chekhov is suggesting that Masha sees herself as Pushkin's Ludmilla, as a captive princess, for indeed, Masha feels herself imprisoned by her marriage—a marriage which is the result of a schoolgirl crush—to the schoolteacher Kulygin whom she once thought the cleverest of men. Vershinin becomes her deliverer, and she talks of her love for him as “my fate. There's no other choice” (III, p. 142). But even before he enters, the audience knows that Vershinin used to be called the “lovesick major” (I, p. 109). That he is a probable (and practised) philanderer is suggested by the fact that he behaves exactly as Tuzenbakh has predicted he would (I, p. 105): complaining to one and all about his family situation—“I have a wife, two little girls. Besides, my wife is a lady in declining health, and so forth and so forth” (I, p, 114)—though later insisting to Masha, “I never talk about this, and strange as it seems, I complain only to you alone” (II, p. 122). There is something all too familiar about Vershinin's behavior here and his words have the ring of the well-worn line of the philandering husband whose affairs may be the root cause of his wife's “crazy” behavior. It is a line that the “lovesick Major,” now become the “lovesick Lieutenant-Colonel,” has most likely used before and will probably use again, and it is a line that would be all too recognizable to anyone but Masha who, in her role of Pushkin's Ludmilla, has been longing to hear it. Thus recognizing the fragment of verse that Masha speaks, Chekhov's audience would have remembered the tale of the beautiful princess snatched away from her handsome prince and held captive by a dwarfish enchanter. The source of that enchanter's power lay in his fantastic long beard, and an audience familiar with Pushkin's poem could again have heard Chekhov's satiric counterpoint, for in the third act, Kulygin has shaved off his moustache in obedience to the dictates of his headmaster. The only beard he now possesses is a false one confiscated from one of his students (IV, p. 155). His power over Masha is nonexistent; it is not he who holds her captive: like Irina and Tuzenbakh and Solyony, Masha, too, is the prisoner of her own romantic drama which dictates her role as captive princess.

That these characters are prisoners of self-created romantic dramas and self-imprisoning plots should become apparent to an audience at once familiar enough with the literary allusions that permeate the play and careful enough as listeners to pick up the satiric counterpoint that Chekhov opposes to the characters' visions of themselves. To hear that counterpoint, an audience must not only grasp the source of the allusion and its original context, but also recognize the gap created by the use of that allusion between the self-conscious pose of the character and the reality of that character's authentic self as Chekhov allows it to be glimpsed. For in hearing that counterpoint, Chekhov's audience might also hear what he is trying to tell them: “‘look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!’” Once hearing, they might fulfill Chekhov's hope and “create for themselves another and a better life.” That the fulfillment of such a hope is still in question and that The Three Sisters continues to be performed, causing some audiences to identify with its characters and to weep, is itself a testament to the acuity of Chekhov's satiric vision.

Notes

1. Anton Chekhov. The Three Sisters, in Anton Chekhov's Plays, Eugene K. Bristow, trans. and ed. (New York, 1977), Act One, p. 103. All further citations are from this edition and will appear in the text.

2. Letter to Alexei Suvorin, April 1, 1890, in The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, Lillian Hellman, ed., Sidonie Lederer, trans. (New York, 1955), p. 99.

3. See also Richard Peace, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 5-6.

4. Quoted in Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (London, 1963), p. 581.

5. Quoted in J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance: A Commentary on the Major Plays (Cambridge, 1971), p. 149.

6. See also Peace, pp. 82-83.

7. Ivan A. Goncharov, Oblomov, Natalie A. Duddington, trans. (New York, 1929), pp. 125-126.

8. Goncharov, p. 144. See also Peace, p. 82.

9. Goncharov, pp. 143-144.

10. N. A. Dobrolyubov, “What is Oblomovitis?” in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, Ralph E. Matlaw, ed. (Bloomington and London, 1962), p. 166.

11. Dobrolyubov, p. 156.

12. See also Peace, p. 83.

13. Goncharov, p. 173.

14. Goncharov, p. 125.

15. Ivan Krylov, Krylov's Fables, Bernard Pares, trans. (London, n.d.), Book II, No. 19, p. 79.

16. It should also be noted here that in Act One, the lines from Krylov's fable also serve as a foreshadowing of the dispossession of the Prozorovs by Natasha's lover Protopopov. As David Magarshack has pointed out, when Masha mistakenly refers to Protopopov as “Mikhail Potapych” (I. p. 108), her error associates him with the “humorous name given by Russian peasants to a bear. (The familiar name for a bear in Russian is ‘Mishka,’ the diminutive of Mikhail. … Not one of the characters of course suspects that Protopopov will actually play the part of the bear in the two lines from the fable, but a Russian audience seeing the play for the first time could not help but associate, however vaguely, the very familiar two lines from Krylov's fable with Mary's [sic] ‘Mikhail Potapych.’ … [Thus] [t]here is a double meaning in this repeated quotation of Krylov's lines: they refer not only to Tusenbach's [sic] coming death, but also—by a previous association of ideas—to Protopopov's triumph over the three sisters.” David Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist (New York, 1952), pp. 234-236.

17. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, Francis J. Whitfield, ed. (New York, 1949), p. 111.

18. Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov, Wit Works Woe, Sir Bernard Pares, trans., in Masterpieces of the Russian Drama, Volume One, George Rapall Noyes, ed. (New York, 1961), III, i. p. 118.

19. In Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic and Ribald Verse, Walter Arndt, trans. (New York, 1972), pp. 274-313, especially p. 295, line 333. In Arndt's translation, Solyony's second line, the direct quotation from Pushkin, reads: “Do not believe deceptive dreams.”

20. For a different reading of Solyony's allusion to The Gypsies, see Peace, p. 82.

21. Six Poems from the Russian, Jacob Krup, trans. (New York, 1936).