[In the following essay, Rzepka points out the similarities between The Three Sisters and several of the plays of William Shakespeare as well as Chekhov's preoccupation with the classical and Shakespearean archetype of three sisters.]

The paths of literary influence are often obscure. In a letter written from Nice, January 2, 1901, Chekhov warned Stanislavsky, who was already directing rehearsals of The Three Sisters back in Moscow,

I've introduced many changes. You write that when Natasha is making the rounds of the house at night in Act Three she puts out the lights and looks under the furniture for burglars. It seems to me, though, that it would be better to have her walk across the stage in a straight line without a glance at anyone or anything a la Lady Macbeth, with a candle—that way it would be much briefer and more frightening.¹

Natasha's entrance “a la Lady Macbeth, with a candle” appears not only in the long night of Act Three (p. 199)² but also at the beginning and in the middle of Act Two (pp. 163, 183), at dusk. Whether or not Chekhov had conceived his character with Lady Macbeth in mind, before writing his ad hoc stage direction to Stanislavsky, it is doubtful that an entrance so clearly evoking a set-piece of the Russian stage could have been repeated in this manner without the playwright's intending his audience to associate, if only subconsciously, his play with Shakespeare's.

Chekhov's “Lady Macbeth” reference helps to support other curious, though isolated, observations of Shakespearean influence on the writing of The Three Sisters. The young officer, Solyoni, Thomas Winner notes,³ also resembles Lady Macbeth in his compulsive hand-scenting. In Act Four, on his way to the duel with Tusenbach, Solyoni takes a bottle of perfume and sprinkles his hands with it: “There,” he says, “I've poured a whole bottle out today and they still smell. My hands smell of a corpse” (p. 212). The lines echo Lady Macbeth's in her mad scene, the same scene which inspired Chekhov's stage-direction for Natasha's entrance “a la Lady Macbeth”: “Out, damned spot! out I say!” Solyoni's speech corresponds particularly to the lines, “Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (V, i, 48-49).⁴

Solyoni's resemblances to Shakespearean characters do not stop here, however. In King Lear we find an even more precise parallel to Solyoni's words, “my hands smell of a corpse.” When the blind Duke of Gloucester comes across Lear raving on the heath and asks to kiss the king's hand, Lear replies, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality” (IV, vi, 136-37). As for parallels in characterization, Solyoni serves again to link Chekhov's play to King Lear, for the young officer seems in large part to be patterned on Lear's fool. Both are goads, gadflies to legitimate society. Solyoni teases Tusenbach, particularly, with songs and riddles much as the fool torments Lear. “You talk such nonsense that I'm tired of listening to you,” Tusenbach tells him (p. 141), exasperated by Solyoni's taunts at his efforts to “philosophize” (p. 150).

But like Lear's fool, Solyoni can find a straight-man in anyone.

Solyoni: If a man philosophizes, it will be philosophy or sophistry; but if a woman philosophizes, or two women, it will be—like cracking your fingers.

Masha: What are you trying to say, you terribly dreadful man?

Solyoni: Nothing. Quick as a flash, the bear made a dash. … (A Pause.)

(p. 145)

The rude young officer can turn anyone's “reasons” into an absurdist parody. Despite his fatal role in Tusenbach's death, Solyoni is not so much a principle of evil in the play as a principle of chaos. At times, his comments sound like lost lines from Shakespeare's text:

Vershinin: It's good to live here. And yet, strangely enough, the railway station is thirteen miles away. … And nobody knows why that is.

Solyoni: But I know why it is. (Everyone looks at him.) Because if the station were right here than 'twere not off there, and if it is off there, then it's not right here.

(p. 149)

“The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason,” says the Fool. “Because they are not eight?” asks Lear. “Yes, indeed: thou would's t make a good fool,” replies the clown (I, v, 35-39).

Lines, scenes, themes, and character traits from Macbeth and King Lear insinuate themselves into the text of The Three Sisters in other ways. Like her prototype, for instance, Natasha is ruthlessly ambitious for her husband, Andrei, who aspires to a prestigious chair at Moscow University but is trapped in his dead-end job as Secretary of the District Board by gambling debts and his wife's insatiable hunger for the status that income, possessions, and property alone can provide. Both Macbeth and The Three Sisters also include in their casts doctors who cannot doctor. Regarding his patient's behavior, Lady Macbeth's physician remarks (again, in the so-called “mad scene”), “This disease is beyond my practice” (V, i, 56), and Tchebutykin, in Chekhov's play, registers his own professional futility at a number of points.⁵ In both plays, finally, sleeplessness is a reiterated and important theme. The four acts of The Three Sisters, while set some years apart, convey the impression of a single twenty-four hour period comprising a long night punctuated by knocks, ringing bells, vague shouts, and insistent alarums similar to the long, sleepless night of Macbeth in which Duncan is murdered and Macbeth tells his wife, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murther Sleep!’ (II, ii, 34-35). In the first act of The Three Sisters Andrei ascribes his irritability to his lack of sleep: “I haven't slept all night” (p. 153). Act Three is a waking nightmare of frayed nerves and tense confrontations in which no one can sleep, least of all Masha, who tries pointedly throughout. In Act Four Tusenbach mentions to Irina that the torment of his uncertainty over her love for him hasn't let him sleep all night (p. 214).

Many parallels to King Lear are centered on the farther-daughter relationship so strongly evoked between Tchebutykin and Irina, who, like Cordelia, is the youngest of three sisters. Tchebutykin is not only old enough to be Irina's father, but there are hints that he was her mother's lover—thus, that he is, in fact, the three sisters' true father (Act One, p. 146; Act Two, p. 181; Act Four, p. 209). In the first act of the play, Tchebutykin presents Irina with a silver samovar as a name-day gift, a present so extravagant it embarrasses both her and her sisters. Like Lear, Tchebutykin would “buy” his youngest daughter's love. “My dear, my little child,” he says to her, “I have known you since the day you were born. … I carried you in my arms. … I loved your dear mother. …”

Irina: But such expensive presents!

Tchebutykin: (Through his tears, angrily): Expensive presents! … Why you're completely … (To the orderly.) Carry the samovar in there. … (Mimicking) Expensive presents. …

(pp. 146-7)

Irina, like Cordelia, is the principal object of her “father”'s lavishness, and her refusal to respond to his gift in the way he expects precipitates his sudden hurt and anger.

Later, in Act Four, Tchebutykin envisions himself and Irina living out the rest of their lives together, much as Lear, in the last scene of Shakespeare's play, urges Cordelia to join him: “Come, let's away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. … so we'll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news” (V, iii, 8-14). “In a year they will retire me,” Tchebutykin tells Irina. “I'll come back here and live out my little span near you. Just one short year is left before my pension. … I'll come here to you and change my life from the very roots. I'll become so quiet, right—right-minded, respectable” (p. 205).

What is intriguing about these fragmentary correspondences between The Three Sisters and Macbeth and Lear is that, unsystematic as they are, they remain highly concentrated, despite the plays' obvious generic differences. Neither coincidence nor caprice would lead one to expect that so many similarities would appear in The Three Sisters to characters, speeches, and events in the only two plays by Shakespeare where the dramatis personae include three sisters, and, for that matter, in but a handful of famous scenes from these two plays: those Shakespearean “show-pieces” that so appealed to the theatrical imagination of nineteenth-century Russia that they were translated long before a complete play by Shakespeare saw the footlights.

Chekhov's weakness for literary borrowings, especially in his last plays, has long been recognized. Winner, for example, feels they represent “one of the most striking variations of the playwright's many evocative devices. Such devices, while standing outside the immediate action of his later plays, frequently are of symbolic significance and sometime have a commentary function similar to that of a Greek chorus.”⁶ Winner is not alone in his hunt for influences. Simon Karlinsky, in his commentary on The Three Sisters in a recent edition of Chekhov's letters, enumerates many parallels between the playwright's work and that of other Russian writers,⁷ and David Magarshack, an adept at tracing allusions, quotations, and references, considers Chekhov's predilection for such devices especially significant in this particular play, where “the contrast between realistic and symbolic planes of perception assumes quite exceptional importance. That is why almost every character in the play has a number of symbols attached to him or her in order to emphasize the fact that they belong to a world of art rather than of life.”⁸

As for Chekhov's knowledge of Shakespeare, we know from letters and notebooks that Chekhov, like his contemporaries, admired the plays a great deal and was well-acquainted with them,⁹ although he could not read English (unlike his creations, the Prozoroff sisters!) and never quoted Shakespeare in the original. Thanks to Winner's researches we also know that Chekhov was fond of alluding to Shakespearean characters, scenes, and speeches. Winner shows, for instance, that Chekhov used themes and situations from Hamlet to cast an ironic light on Treplev's pretensions and failed grandeur in The Seagull, and that as early as the brief vaudeville, Calchas (1887), Chekhov was including verbatim excerpts from King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet.¹⁰

If, as Magarshack contends, the world of The Three Sisters is a “world of art,” then the fragmentary nature of the material from Macbeth and King Lear presents a problem: what does it add up to? What does it mean? In fact, the Shakespearean parallels and allusions are hardly more haphazard than many of the more obvious literary allusions cited by Magarshack himself. For instance, Solyoni's nonsense rhyme, “Quick as a flash, the bear made a dash,” is taken from Krylov's The Peasant and the Farm Laborer,¹¹ but it remains nonsense all the same. Even Masha's bit of verse in Acts One and Four—“By the curved seashore a green oak, a golden chain upon that oak”—which comes from Pushkin's Cossack love story, Russlan and Ludmilla, and would seem most clearly to support Magarshack's point,¹² represents Masha's longing for a Romantic escape from the world of the play and into a “world of art,” a longing which her affair with Vershinin will satisfy. The quotation, like Solyoni's affected resemblance to the historical Lermontov, heightens by contrast the dreariness, the monotony, the meaninglessness of the world these characters are condemned to inhabit. This is not a world of art, but a world striving to be art, or pretending to be art, aspiring to the condition of art: to have some ultimate design or end beyond itself, a telos, or Fate.

In this sense, despite their generic differences, The Three Sisters, Macbeth, and King Lear share a family resemblance: all three plays unfold in a universe ruled by wayward and unpredictable powers, or by no identifiable powers at all. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” moans Gloucester, “They kill us for their sport.” For Macbeth, hoodwinked by the three “weird”—that is, “wayward”—sisters, life becomes “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” At the end of Chekhov's play, after Tusenbach's sporadic attempts to “philosophize,” after Vershinin's futuristic speculations on fulfillment—“Man needs such a life, and if it is not here yet, he must anticipate it, wait, dream of it, be prepared for it” (p. 154)—and after the three sisters' repeated attempts to find some meaning in life, we still do not know “why we live, why we suffer” (p. 220), in Olga's words.

All three plays also share a common archetype, three women, which recurs in dream, myth, and legend linked to the notion of Fate, or a fateful choice whose consequences are unanticipated. In Lear, the aged king chooses to reject Cordelia, the youngest of three sisters; in Macbeth, Macbeth chooses to follow the advice of the three witches; and in Chekhov's play, Irina's acceptance of Tusenbach's proposal, which leads to his death in a duel with Solyoni, is but the latest re-enactment of the fateful choices already made by her sisters, Masha (to marry) and Olga (to remain unwed), both of which have ended in disappointment. It is the archetype of three sisters, an image universally associated with an inscrutable power governing life's choices, which provides, ultimately, the foundation for the three plays' variegated resemblances.

The first and, to my knowledge, the only attempt so far to apply the theory of archetypes to Chekhov's work was undertaken by Winner. In a paper delivered before a joint meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Cultural Renaissance Conference in 1962, Winner drew attention to many classical myths and to works like Faust and Anna Karenina which seem to have suggested models or prototypes for characters and situations in Chekhov's short stories. These models Winner calls “archetypes,” defining them much in the manner of Frye and his followers as “symbols in the form of patterns or themes which are drawn from mythology or great literary works capable of evoking ultimate values of a cultural tradition.”¹³ The image of three women or three sisters would itself qualify as such an archetype, for the figure recurs in Western folklore, myth, and legend: in the tale of Cinderella and her step-sisters, in the triple personae of the Greek moon-goddess Diana-Artemis-Hecate, as the three rivals, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, in the story of the judgment of Paris, and in the Norse legend of the three “fatal sisters” who weave the web of life, to name only a few examples.

But Winner also considers patterns or themes from “great literary works” to be archetypal in the same sense as those drawn from myth, if they manage to evoke “ultimate values of a cultural tradition.” Shakespeare's plays are richly archetypal in this sense, and they have managed to appeal on a fundamental level to the Russian as well as to the Western European imagination. In fact, while even the best Russian writers of Chekhov's day had to defend the legitimacy of their work against the polemics of a criticism that saw the highest aims of art as proselytizing and reform, Shakespeare's image endured untarnished. The Elizabethan dramatist remained the overriding exception to Chernyshevsky's indictment of imaginative literature, and the first three of Shakespeare's plays to be completely and accurately translated into Russian were Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

It is important to emphasize, however, that Chekhov's play grew around the archetype of “three sisters,” not around the Shakespearean plays which also embody the archetype. Thus, the traces of the earlier plays are fragmented and distorted by the demands Chekhov himself put on the archetype common to all three. Strictly speaking, Chekhov did not even conceive a play at first, but was initially attracted by the idea of “three sisters” itself. “I am not writing a play,” he writes Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dachenko, a co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater. “I have a subject: three sisters. But I am not going to start work on the play until I finish the tales that are on my conscience.”¹⁴ Writing the play was a struggle not lightened by the fact that the essential cast he had settled on (including Natasha) required four female leads, an “awkward” arrangement, as the playwright observed to an actress friend.¹⁵ Despite the headaches created by his casting, however, Chekhov could not bring himself to tinker with its fundamental trio. The idea of “three sisters” remained somehow central to his conception of the play, the leading idea of the work.

Of course, Chekhov's three sisters do not, like the classical or pagan Fates, govern events. But, according to Jung, they need not correspond precisely to their mythological and literary counterparts in order to function in an archetypal manner. Jung emphasized in his writing on dream psychology and myth that archetypes are not to be considered as things or ideas of things residing in the “collective unconscious,” nor are they to be taken as a simple concrete shorthand for more abstract notions, like “Fate.” Rather, the archetypes are instinctual categories for the disposition, projection, and transformation of psychic energy, and thus quite pliable and adaptable to the individual imagination. What any person or culture will do with an archetype is to some degree an open question, although any archetypal image, however used in a particular instance, will still carry with it deeper associations linking it to its many other manifestations. “Archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a limited degree,” writes Jung. He likens them to the Kantian a priori categories of the understanding, but oriented toward “psycho”-logical rather than logical relations: “The archetype itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms.”¹⁶

Some idea of the indirect relationship between any particular representation of three women and the archetype of Fate can be gained by a consideration of the trinity of deities that came to be associated with the moon in later Hellenistic mythologies. Here, a heavenly body with powerful influence over natural events and human behavior became associated with three distinct goddesses, though these, clearly, were not taken to be the same as the “Moirai,” or Fates themselves. In a more indirect fashion the image of three women can be associated with a fateful choice of one sort or another that has unforeseen consequences, whether good or bad. The Cinderalla story is one example, the story of the judgment of Paris, with its catastrophic outcome in the fall of Troy, another.

The Prozoroff sisters, however little they resemble their classical or literary predecessors in “content,” betray their deeper, “formal” archetypal kinship in many specific details of their personalities and preoccupations. For instance, in our first glimpse of them and in subsequent scenes they seem to be differentiated with respect to temporal orientation, one looking toward the past, another toward the future, and the third to the present for fulfillment. Martin Hermann Ninck, the German mythographer, has observed that the ternary aspect of the figure of Fate, as represented by the Norns of the Germanic tribes or the Moirai of ancient Greece, “refers most particularly to the three temporal stages of all growth (beginning-middle-end, birth-life-death, past-present-future).”¹⁷ Olga, the eldest sister, dwells mostly on the past: “Father died just a year ago today, on the fifth of May—your saint's day, Irina,” she reflects in her opening speech. “It was very cold then and snowing. I thought I could never live through it; you were lying in a dead faint. But now a year has passed and we can talk of it freely; you've a white dress on, your face is beaming. (The clock strikes twelve) And the clock was striking then too” (p. 139). But Irina replies, “Why think of it?” The passage of time, as in this instance, with the striking of the clock, is constantly adverted to in the play, as if to provide a benchmark for memories and hopes, thoughts of past and future. While Olga looks back to the days when Colonel Prozoroff was alive, Irina has no interest in reminiscing—she, the youngest daughter, looks toward the future for her fulfillment, in work or in marriage. The play begins on her name-day, as if to suggest her re-birth as an adult, a woman, and her color, white, is a symbol of forward-looking hope and innocent expectations.

Masha, meanwhile, according to the stage directions, “sits and reads a book” (p. 139). Her absorption in reading reflects her need to escape the real world altogether, her abandonment of hopes for the future or memories of the past for more immediate stimulation and gratification. Throughout the play, Masha, impulsive, instinctive, passionate, lives most for the present moment, with little thought of consequences in her love affair with Vershinin. When she finds the present moment unstimulating, she feels bored and unfulfilled. Furthermore, the way Masha registers her boredom here and throughout the first act by reciting the fragment from Russlan and Ludmilla—“By the curved seashore a green oak, a golden chain upon that oak … a golden chain upon that oak”—is archetypally significant. “Everything that dwells in the depths,” writes Ninck, “close to the Norns, is fraught with destiny, and most of all the water that rises up from the depths and the tree rooted in them. Water and tree are for this reason the most important elementary symbols [of Fate].”¹⁸

Finally, as Walter F. Otto points out in The Homeric Gods, “Birth and death are the great seasons of the Moirai, and along with these marriage is a third.”¹⁹ Even with respect to the “content” of the three sisters archetype as it appears in Chekhov's play, we find a significant distortion of traditional archetypal symbolism, for while their “formal” resemblances to the Fates do not make of the Prozoroff sisters modern-day incarnations of the classical or pagan deities, Olga, Masha, and Irina do ironically invert the Fates' traditional function. Consider their reiteration of the “Moscow” theme—“To Moscow!”—which calls to mind the Prozoroffs' only hope for escape from the crushing ennui of their existence. The theme is prophetic, and Irina, particularly, voices it at prominent places in the text—in the final lines of Acts Two and Three, for instance. But the sisters' “prophecy” turns out to be false, mere wishful thinking, and their “oracular” role is pointedly undercut by such brief scenes as that in Act Two, when Irina reads the Moscow prophecy into Fedotik's patience game—“It's coming out right, I see. We shall be in Moscow” (p. 175)—only to be contradicted by the next card played.

On an archetypal level, then, “the Fates” themselves in Chekhov's play are at a loss to foreordain human events, or even to fathom the meaning of their own existence. The choices the Prozoroff sisters make, particularly Irina, determine the outcome of the play, but as Olga laments at the very end, “Everything turns out to be not as we'd like” (p. 219). When all is said and done, the world of The Three Sisters lacks what every “world of art” is most distinguished by: a sense of telos, of a final cause. The literary and musical allusions, the symbols attached to each character serve less to reinforce its “meaning” by reference to literary prototypes than, in the end, to break meaning to bits. Continually punctuating the snatches of song, the quotations, the posturings is the inescapable “Pause,” that uneasy silence through which we glimpse the void. We are left with nothing more than isolated, uncoordinated gestures toward an aesthetic form that transcends the absurd pointlessness of life in the play. Whatever the aesthetic form, the “point” or “meaning” of the play itself, it cannot derive from these allusions to a “world of art.” Rather, Chekhov's point is that life is not art, not a play at all. These are fragments shored against the ruins of a world larger than life: heroic, tragic, exemplary, romantic, significant. By alluding to works of art within his own work while at the same time fragmenting such allusions, Chekhov at once hints at a meaning beyond the quotidian, beyond the trite conversations and droll amusements of life as he renders it, while never allowing his characters to rise to that level of existence, or even to understand it.

What finally unites Chekhov's drama and Shakespeare's, and explains in addition the Russian playwright's intense admiration for the Elizabethan's darker plays, is a common philosophy of life that is expressed in the archetype they both drew on, or rather, a common scepticism that any such philosophy can be formulated and adhered to in a world whose ultimate purpose is beyond the grasp of human wit, perhaps even non-existent:

Tusenbach: Birds of passage, cranes, for example, fly and fly, and no matter what thoughts, great or small stray through their heads, they will fly just the same and not know why or where. They fly and will fly, no matter what philosophers spring up among them; and they may philosophize as long as they like so long as they fly. …

Masha: Just the same, has it meaning?

Tusenbach: Meaning. … Look, it's snowing. What meaning has that?

(p. 173)

The same urgent longing for meaning and purpose that lies behind Masha's question drives Lear to rage, madness, and death, and Macbeth has described for all time that sense of life's absurdity and futility which pervades Chekhov's plays:

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

(V, v, 24-28)

In these famous lines Macbeth might almost be imagined responding to the speech of one poor player whose hour upon the stage has reached its end:

Olga: The music plays so gaily, bravely, and one wants to live. Oh, Lord! Time will pass and we shall be gone forever, they will forget us, they will forget our faces, voices, and how many of us there were, but our sufferings will turn into joy for those who will be living after us, happiness and peace will come on earth, and they will remember with some gentle word those who live now and will bless them. Oh, dear sisters, our life isn't over yet. We shall live! The music plays so gaily, so joyously, and it looks as if a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer. … If we only knew, if we only knew!

(p. 220)

Notes

1. Simon Karlinsky and Michael Henry Helm, eds., Letters of Anton Chekhov (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 391.

2. Page numbers will refer to the translation by Stark Young, in his Best Plays of Chekhov (New York: Random House, 1956). While not the most scholarly text, Young's proves to be closest to a word-for-word rendering when compared to such standard texts as David Magarshack's in Chekhov: Four Plays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969) or Ronald Hingley's in The Oxford Chekhov, vol. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

3. Thomas Winner, “Myth as a Device in the Works of Chekhov,” in Bernice Slote, ed., Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 72.

4. Citations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from the Arden Shakespeare: Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth (London: Methuen & Co., 1962) and W. J. Craig, ed., King Lear (London: Methuen & Co., 1927).

5. He is unable to advise Andrei, for instance, on what to do about his asthma: “Why ask me? Don't remember, my boy. Don't know” (p. 181). In Act Three the military doctor comes face to face with his own impotence: “The Devil take all of 'em, take—They think I'm a doctor, know how to cure any sickness, but I know absolutely nothing, I've forgotten everything I ever knew, remember nothing, absolutely nothing” (p. 190).

6. Thomas Winner, “Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of a Dramatic Device,” The American Slavic and East European Review, 15 (1956): 103-111.

7. Karlinsky and Helm, pp. 387-8.

8. David Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), pp. 236-7.

9. Familiar enough, in any case, to draw extemporaneously at length from a passage from As You Like It (II, i) in a letter commenting on Shakespeare's sensitivity to the cruelty of hunting. See Karlinsky and Helm, pp. 156-7.

10. Winner, “Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet,” p. 104. Winner does not mention that the excerpts are used specifically in parodies of theatrical declamation.

11. Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist, op. cit.

12. It is unfortunate, considering Magarshack's stress on the importance of understanding the specific origins of these quotations and allusions, that in his own translation of The Three Sisters in Chekhov: Four Plays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969) he should substitute for the lines from Pushkin a quotation from “Kubla Khan” (!): “For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of paradise.”

13. Winner, “Myth,” p. 71.

14. Avraham Yarmolinsky, Letters of Anton Chekhov (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 359.

15. Ibid., p. 289: “The play has turned out to be boring, long-drawn-out, awkward—awkward, I say, since it has four female leads, for instance.”

16. Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 79.

17. Martin Hermann Ninck, Götter- und Jenseitsglaube der Germanen (Jena: E. Diederich, 1927), pp. 145-6. Quoted in Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 228.

18. Martin Hermann Ninck, Wotan und germanisher Schicksalglauge (Jena: E. Diederich, 1935), p. 203. Quoted in Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 251.

19. Tusenbach's death makes an absurd period to a play that began with a gathering of friends to celebrate Irina's name-day, the Russian equivalent of a birthday celebration. Marriage, of course, happy or sad, successful or failed, welcomed or rejected or endured, provides one of the major themes of the play, from Olga's sad reflection on her missed chances in the opening scene—“I'd have loved my husband” (p. 141)—to Irina's being informed of her fiance's death in the play's last moments.