[In the following essay, Kramer examines the role of love in The Three Sisters and the characters' reactions to their romantic entanglements.]

For all the talk about Three Sisters, it is still extraordinarily difficult to determine exactly what the play is about. One prominent school places the emphasis on the sisters as inevitably ruined creatures. Beverly Hahn, for instance, speaks of the “inbuilt momentum towards destruction” in the sisters' world.¹ Another commentator claims that we cannot avoid contrasting the success of Natasha and Protopopov with the failures of the sisters.² We might do well to examine just what the first two do achieve: a house, an affair, and a businesslike manipulation of the professional positions of the others. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that the sisters have in some way failed because they do not aspire to such heights of crass avarice as Natasha and Protopopov. But there is still the claim that the sisters continually yearn for a quality of life that they do not possess, and yet do very little, if anything, to make their dreams come true. Chekhov invited this response by initiating the to Moscow line. That goal remains unattained, while the desires of Natasha and Protopopov are richly fulfilled. This seems to present an opposition between those who get what they want and those who don't, as if the goals were equivalent, but abilities not. Natasha wants the big house on the hill and a union with the man who runs things in town—the boss. These may be attainable prizes, and certainly Natasha does wrestle their house away from the sisters, but the sisters never really enter into combat with her over such issues. If they did, they would themselves be transformed into first-class Natashas, an extremely dubious achievement at best. Natasha sees living in the big house at the top of the hill as an end in itself. The sisters' aspirations go considerably beyond this. Moscow as destination is equally illusory. Natasha, incidentally, isn't even up to that aspiration on the fanciful scale; she's quite content with a good view in a city much like Perm. The questions the sisters seek answers to are considerably more basic: how to seize and properly evaluate one's own experience, how to cope with experience, and when all one's delusions have been cast aside how to go on somehow from there. The particular area of experience around which the majority of the action in the play revolves is the question of love. The stance of nearly every character is determined by his ability to establish a close relationship with another. Love gone awry is in most instances the pattern. Ol'ga seems to have the least chance of finding a mate—a situation to which she has become largely reconciled, though in Act I she chides Masha for failing to value the man she does have. Kulygin himself—aware of the failure of his own marriage—pathetically suggests to Ol'ga in the third act that if he hadn't married Masha, he would have married her. Irina ultimately admits that her desire to reach Moscow is directly connected with her desire to find her true love. Masha is the only one of the sisters who does at least temporarily find real love, and in this sense her experience is the standard against which the experience of nearly all the other characters is to be measured. Chebutykin once loved their mother but has long since lost that love, and with it his involvement in actual experience. Solenyy, on the other hand, capitalizes on his inability to inspire love by deliberately creating hostile relationships. But to determine the structure of the play as a whole and the way in which the experience depicted adds up to a statement about human capabilities, we must look in considerably more detail at the variety of responses to love among the main characters.

It is Andrey's fate to make the most ghastly miscalculation of them all in believing he loves Natasha. How could he, an educated man, brought up in the same environment as his sisters, believe he has fallen in love with her? Masha in the first act discounts the possibility that he could be serious about her. The answer seems to lie in a recognition that he has been constantly living under pressures he can't bear. “Father … oppressed us with education. … I grew fat in one year after he died, as if my body were liberated from his oppression,” he tells Vershinin.³ He has been preparing for a university career, bowing to his father's wishes—a course he abandons immediately after his marriage. Since the father's death, Andrey has been under constant pressure from his sisters to deliver them from this provincial town. His love for Natasha is simply a means of escaping these various responsibilities, which have been thrust upon him. But a relationship based on such motivation becomes a trap from which Andrey desperately wishes to escape. In some dialogue that Chekhov eventually deleted from the play, Andrey dreams of losing all his money, being deserted by his wife, running back to his sisters, crying, “I'm saved! I'm saved!”⁴ In the finished play, Andrey and Chebutykin argue about the efficacy of marriage, Andrey maintaining it is to be avoided, Chebutykin asserting loneliness is worse. But by the end of the play, even Chebutykin admits that the best course for Andrey is to leave, “leave and keep going, don't ever look back” (XI, 295). This is, indeed, the course Chebutykin himself adopts at the end of the play. Andrey's escape from responsibility through love thus seems to lead only to an entrapment from which he would be only too happy to flee by the end of the play. His predicament stems not so much from Natasha's nature as from his own desire to avoid experience by hiding behind a very illusory kind of love.

Chebutykin's problems turn equally on love. He had at one time known a real love for the sisters' mother. That has long been in the past, but the only vaguely positive way he can deal with immediate experience is by the illusion that this love can be sustained through his relationship with the sisters, particularly Irina. His other protective screen is his growing insistence that nothing and nobody really exists and that therefore nothing matters. In his first appearance at stage center, he is talking sheer nonsense about a remedy for baldness and duly noting down this trivia. Shortly thereafter in Act I he displays his tender—almost sentimental—affection for Irina by presenting her with a silver samovar on her name day. The fact that the silver samovar is the traditional gift on the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary surely suggests that he is honoring the memory of the woman he loved and is exploiting the occasion of Irina's name day for this purpose. During the first two acts he alternates between these two poles—the attempt to sustain a lost love and an abiding interest in trivia. The chief sign of the latter is his constant reading of old newspapers, a device for distracting himself from the actuality of the present moment.

In Act III his failure to handle his experience reaches a crisis when, drunk, realizing he is responsible for the death of a woman who was under his care, he retreats into a pretense that nothing and nobody exists. It may be a measure of his feeling that he so retreats, but I would suggest that he associates this recent death with that death in the past of the woman he loved. Death has denied him his love, and the recent event vividly reminds him of his own earlier loss. Within moments of this breakdown he smashes the clock which had belonged to the sisters' mother. This may of course suggest that he is trying to destroy time itself, which separates him from his love, but he is also deliberately destroying a material object that belonged to her; it may also be a gesture of denial—a denial that his love ever existed. He tries to cover this by suggesting that perhaps there was no clock to break, and he accuses the others of refusing to see that Natasha and Protopopov are having an affair. The assumption is that if others don't see what's right before their eyes, why shouldn't Chebutykin refuse to recognize anything in the world that may hurt him? In any case, what comes out of this episode is our discovery that Chebutykin cannot deal with a death that takes away his love. His final stance in the play—“The baron is a fine fellow, but one baron more or less, what difference does it make?” (XI, 294)—is a pathetic indication of the lengths he is driven to in trying to cope with a love long since lost.

Solenyy is the only character in the play who turns away from love—turns away so completely that he commits himself to murder instead. He has an uncanny knack for turning a situation that is initially friendly into one of enmity. In Act II Tuzenbakh attempts to bury the hatchet with Solenyy, who immediately denies that there is any animus between them, thus provoking an argument and indirectly testifying to the correctness of Tuzenbakh's view of their relationship. Their discussion ends with Solenyy's “Do not be angry, Aleko” (XI, 271), which distorts Tuzenbakh's friendly overtures into a rivalry, presumably over Irina. Dissatisfied in his exchange with Tuzenbakh, Solenyy seizes upon the first opportunity for further quarrel. Chebutykin enters, regaling Irina with an account of a dinner given in his honor. He is particularly pleased with the chekhartma (lamb). Solenyy insists that cheremsha (an onion) is totally disagreeable. This pointless argument ends with a victory on Chebutykin's side when he says: “You've never been to the Caucasus and have never eaten chekhartma” (XI, 271). Chebutykin is the clear victor here, because Solenyy prides himself on being a reincarnation of Lermontov, the nineteenth-century Russian romantic poet whose setting is regularly the Caucasus Mountains. To suggest that Solenyy has never been there totally undercuts his stance as a hero in the Lermontov mold. Having lost the argument with Chebutykin, Solenyy immediately proceeds to avenge himself in the best Lermontov tradition by picking a quarrel with Andrey over the number of universities in Moscow.

It is true that he declares his love for Irina toward the close of Act II, but one senses that he had expected a cool reception from her. In any case, the scene ends with what seems to be Solenyy's real message—that he will brook no rivals. To put it another way, Solenyy employs his declaration of love to establish a hostile relation with Tuzenbakh. We might also view the episode as a parody of the opening scene in Act II, where Vershinin declares his very real love to Masha. The initial exchange between Masha and Solenyy in the first act suggests that we are to view them as polar extremes in some sense. Solenyy's first speech implies a 1 + 1 = 3 equation: “With one hand I can lift only fifty-five pounds, but with two hands I can lift a hundred and eighty—two hundred, even. From that I deduce that two men aren't twice as strong, they're three times as strong as one man … or even stronger …” (XI, 244). Masha's opening speech implies a retort to Solenyy: “In the old days, when Father was alive, there'd be thirty or forty officers here on our name days, there was lots of noise, but today there's a man and a half …” (XI, 247). In view of the fact that the only officers present are Solenyy, Tuzenbakh, and Chebutykin, Masha's equation is apparently 3 = 1.5. Solenyy immediately picks up on this banter, if that's what it is, and compares one man philosophizing with two women trying to philosophize, the latter being equal to sucking one's thumb. Masha thereupon cuts him off: “And what is that supposed to mean, you terribly dreadful man?” (XI, 247). This exchange between Masha and Solenyy in the opening moments of Three Sisters is a vitally important one because, on the question of love, they represent polar extremes within the play: Masha is willing to take a chance on love; Solenyy can only capitalize on love as a pretense for a duel.

The wooing scenes between Vershinin and Masha are masterpieces in Chekhov's whimsical art. The process is initiated in the first act as Ol'ga and Irina laugh together over recollections of Moscow. It is Masha who suddenly pins down a real moment of connection in their lives when she recalls that they used to tease Vershinin as the lovesick major. In the first of his rather protracted philosophical speeches, Vershinin offers a justification for existence in response to Masha's statement that the sisters' lives will go unnoticed. She immediately responds to his attention by announcing she'll stay to lunch after all. This exchange initiates that special relationship between them. Shortly after this, Vershinin offers Masha another view with which she must be wholly in sympathy: “… if I were to begin life over again, I wouldn't get married. … No! No!” (XI, 254). This is the precise moment Chekhov chooses for Kulygin's entrance.

In Act II, Vershinin's speech on what life will be like in two or three hundred years is clearly directed toward Masha; indeed, his philosophical ramblings are primarily a way of wooing her. She understands this and laughs softly during his speech. Tuzenbakh is clearly not privy to this particular form of lovemaking. He believes he is engaged in a serious discussion with Vershinin and cannot understand why Masha is laughing. Vershinin, of course, has no reason to ask. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that in his musings about the future Vershinin almost never responds to Tuzenbakh's attempts to join in the discussion. Indeed, Chekhov revised the text of Three Sisters at a number of points to eliminate Vershinin's responses to Tuzenbakh's remarks.⁵ In the first act Tuzenbakh announces Vershinin's arrival to the assembled company; Vershinin ignores the introduction and proceeds to identify himself by name. In his first monologue on the future, Vershinin dismisses Tuzenbakh's attempt to enter the discussion with a curt “Yes, yes, of course” (XI, 251). In the musings about life in two or three hundred years in Act II, Vershinin suggests the theme and Tuzenbakh offers his opinion about the future. Vershinin is apparently ruminating on his own views as Tuzenbakh speaks—the stage direction reads: “After a moment's thought” (XI, 266). His subsequent remarks bear no relation to Tuzenbakh's; we get the distinct impression that Vershinin has not the slightest interest in a debate, thus emphasizing the real motive for his musings, to converse indirectly with Masha. The ostensible discussion continues with Masha's observations on the necessity for meaning in life:

“It seems to me a man must believe, or search for some belief, or else his life is empty, empty. … To live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. … Either you know what you're living for, or else it's all nonsense, hocus-pocus. (XI, 267)”

In effect, her words confirm her need for the kind of reassurance Vershinin has been offering her, that what man is presently doing is creating the possibility for future happiness and understanding. Vershinin's next line—“Still it's a pity our youth has passed” (XI, 267)—is almost a reproach to Masha: since youth has passed and each of them is set in his respective relationship, their mutual happiness is impossible for any protracted period of time. Masha greets his reproval with the famous line from Gogol: “It's dull in this world, gentlemen.” Tuzenbakh, not comprehending the private dialogue, answers with a paraphrase of Masha's reference to Gogol, expressing his frustration over a conversation he was never meant to follow. Chebutykin does apparently follow at least the drift of the conversation—love—as he notes that Balzac was married in Berdichev. Irina, either consciously or unconsciously, picks up on this drift as she repeats Chebutykin's observation. Tuzenbakh, now attentive to one strand in the discussion—what can we do with our lives?—announces he's leaving the service. Having argued that life will always be pretty much the same, he now asserts that he will change the direction of his own. This is an important aspect of that contradiction of position so characteristic of Tuzenbakh and Vershinin. It is highly ironic that Vershinin consistently denies there is any happiness for us now, while achieving at least a momentary happiness with Masha. Tuzenbakh, on the other hand, argues that he is happy right now, in his love for Irina, while he is denied any return of that love. Masha, characteristically, disapproves of his determination to change, feeling herself denied any such opportunity.

In the third act, Vershinin's musings on life in the future are a direct response to Masha's arrival on the scene. After Chebutykin's rather shocking references to Natasha having an affair, perhaps partly to distract everyone's attention from the assumption that he and Masha are, too, Vershinin launches into a peroration on what his daughters have yet to go through in their lives. When Masha enters, he almost immediately shifts theme from daughters to life in the future, as though the topic has already become a secret code between them. His musings are intermixed with his laughter and expressions of happiness. Everybody has fallen asleep except Masha and Vershinin, making clear that his philosophizing is a way of talking about love. The episode ends with their strange love duet from Chaykovskiy's Yevgeniy Onegin.

Near the end of the third act Masha has her frank talk with her sisters. Ol'ga refuses to listen; Irina listens most attentively, as she presumably longs for a love of her own. Despite Ol'ga's disclaimers, Masha's confession of love brings the sisters closer together than they have been at any point in the play thus far and prepares the way for their final scene of coming together in the finale.

In the fourth act Masha speaks to Chebutykin of her love, implicitly comparing her own position with his at an earlier time:

MASHA: … Did you love my mother?

CHEBUTYKIN: Very much.

MASHA: Did she love you?

CHEBUTYKIN after a pause: That I don't remember anymore.

MASHA: Is mine here? That's the way our cook Marfa used to speak of her policeman: mine. Is mine here?

CHEBUTYKIN: Not yet.

MASHA: When you take happiness in snatches, in little pieces, and then lose it as I am, little by little you get coarse, you become furious. … (XI, 293)

The ambiguity in Chebutykin's reply to Masha's question about her mother is remarkable. Is he trying to protect the honor of the woman he loved? Did she perhaps not return his love? Or is his reply part of his attempt to deny the past experience itself? We have no way of knowing. Masha's use of “mine” must refer to Vershinin, and Chebutykin so understands it. If he thought she were speaking of her husband, he could not reply “Not yet,” for he has just seen Kulygin go in the house. Masha's remarks on happiness contain little joy, and yet she is admitting she has now known love, and the indications are that it will not turn her away from experience as it has Chebutykin. We shall see more of this in the finale.

As far as love is concerned, Irina would seem to be in the best position of the three sisters. She is unattached; two suitors pursue her; and yet she is unhappy because there is an imaginary third lover, whom she associates with Moscow. It is the dream of going to Moscow that animates her in the first act, and, although it is not clear why Moscow is so important to her at this point, it does become clear by the end of Act III. Still, there are hints, even in the opening scene, that it is love Irina seeks. When Tuzenbakh reports the arrival of the new battery commander, it is Irina who pricks up her ears, inquiring, “Is he old? … Is he interesting?” (XI, 244). Her desire to work looks like a second choice, and Tuzenbakh is at his most pathetic as he tries to ingratiate himself with her by sharing her desire for work: “That longing for work, Oh Lord, how well I understand it!” (XI, 245). Tuzenbakh seems to use the work theme to promote his standing with Irina in very much the way Vershinin talks of the future to woo Masha. Irina's cry at the end of Act II—“To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!”—suggests that it is an appeal to love, if we look at the context out of which it arises. Solenyy has just made his rather ridiculous and thoroughly repulsive declaration of love to her; Vershinin has just returned bearing the news that his wife didn't poison herself after all; Kulygin is unable to find his wife; Natasha has just left with Protopopov; Ol'ga makes her first appearance in the act, complaining of professional responsibilities and of Andrey's gambling losses. Each situation suggests an abortive love relationship, including the absence of a love for Ol'ga. If all this is what provokes Irina's cry, it may well mean she is looking to Moscow for the kind of love that is simply unavailable to her here.

Her association of Moscow with love becomes explicit in the third act when she says: “I always expected we would move to Moscow, and there I would meet my real one, I've dreamed of him, I've loved him. … But it seems it was all nonsense, all nonsense …” (XI, 285). In the final lines of Act III she agrees to marry the baron, but still wants to go to Moscow: “… only let's go to Moscow! I beg you, let's go! There's nothing on earth better than Moscow! Let's go, Olya! Let's go!” (XI, 288). These words come after Masha's declaration that she loves Vershinin and would seem to suggest that though Irina has agreed to marry Tuzenbakh, she looks forward to finding her real love elsewhere, as Masha has.

Ol'ga has had the least opportunity to find happiness through love, and yet Ol'ga seems to cope with her situation better than the other two. She has very nearly reconciled herself to a single life even at the opening of the play, and during the course of it she expresses her love in an entirely different fashion. We see her love in her readiness to help with both clothing and lodging for those who have been left homeless by the fire; we see it in her comforting Irina in the third act and in the way she silently acquiesces to Masha's love for Vershinin, as she steps aside to allow them their last moment alone together.

Finally, we must compare the situations at the opening of the play and at its end to gather some measure of just what the intervening experience has meant for the sisters, how it has altered their conceptions of human possibility. Harvey Pitcher has observed that the fourth act is very nearly an “inversion” of the first.⁶ He lists any number of actions and situations that occur in Act I and again in altered form in the fourth. He makes a convincing argument for seeing the finale as a negation of most of the positive elements that appeared in the opening, but I think that in addition to such negations, we see a number of positive elements in the finale that invert the hopeless and desperate attitudes of the opening. In one sense, the play moves from both naïve faith and despair to a heightened awareness of possibilities in life and a more solidly rooted ability to endure. At the opening, the sisters are both physically and temporally separated; Ol'ga is primarily oriented to the past as she recollects the death of their father a year ago and comments on how the last four years at the high school have aged her. Irina disclaims any interest in this past, as she remarks to Ol'ga: “Why talk about it?” (XI, 243). She also shares some of Irina's naïve faith in a future in Moscow, but even Moscow is in part a past orientation; certainly for Ol'ga it must be, since she is the eldest and would have the clearest memory of what their life had been like there. Irina's Moscow, on the other hand, is the land of the future; she can look only forward to Moscow and to going to work. Masha restricts her observations to an occasional whistle, is not particularly interested in either Ol'ga's sense of the past or Irina's hopes for the future; she is, as she sees it, buried in a present without hope. When Ol'ga suggests that Masha can come up to Moscow every summer to visit them, Masha's only comment is to whistle, as if, knowing her own present, she recognizes Ol'ga's wishful thinking as a mere whistling in the wind. Perhaps Masha's only departure from a present orientation is her remark about her mother: “Just imagine, I've already begun to forget her face. Just as they won't remember us. They'll forget” (XI, 250). But even here she seems to exploit both past and future to affirm the worthlessness of present existence. Thus, at the opening the sisters are totally at odds, as they contemplate three different perceptions of reality. Perhaps the only common strain here is their shared dissatisfaction with the present.⁷ Spatially, there is some sense of their occupying a restricted area, particularly with Ol'ga, who either sits at her desk correcting papers or walks to and fro about the room. Even Masha seems initially restricted to her couch. Temperamentally, they are also separated from one another here, each involved in her own activity—Ol'ga correcting, Masha reading, Irina lost in thought, their dresses dark blue, black, and white.

Ol'ga's opening speech is full of strands connecting past, present, and future:

Father died exactly a year ago on this very day, the fifth of May, your name day, Irina. It was very cold then, snow was falling. I thought I couldn't bear it, you lay in a dead faint. But a year has passed and we remember it easily; you're wearing a white dress now, your face is radiant. The clock strikes twelve. And the clock was striking then. Pause. I remember, when they were carrying Father, there was music playing and they fired a volley at the cemetery. (XI, 242-43)

The play opens with the recollection of a death, just as it will end with the news of a death at the present moment. At the same time, Ol'ga's recollection of death is associated with birth; it is also Irina's name day. Ol'ga's reflections next focus on the difficulty of facing the loss of a father whom both Ol'ga and Irina presumably loved, but, as if in anticipation of their stance at the end of the play, Ol'ga notes that they did survive the calamity. In short, Ol'ga's speech is a kind of summary of their reactions to calamitous experience: it is both unendurable and endurable, and calamity itself is mixed with elements of joy. The contrast between the weather a year ago and the weather today (“sunny and bright”) underscores a recurrent cycle of anguish and joy. The funeral music of the military band of a year ago will be transformed at the end of the play into music that is played “so gaily, so eagerly, and one so wants to live” (X, 303).

The process of redressing natural relationships which were at the very least strained in Act I gets under way near the end of Act III. First, there is Masha, who refused to join in the sisters' conversation at the opening. In Act III she draws the sisters together, although against Ol'ga's better judgment, in her frank discussion of her love for Vershinin. This is followed shortly by Andrey's confession to at least two of his sisters that he is desperately unhappy, which constitutes a considerably more honest response to the family than his rapid departure from the scene as early as possible in Act I. The setting in Act IV is the garden attached to the house. On the one hand, it is true that Natasha dominates the house, but at the same time, if we recall that sense of the sisters' confinement in the living room of Act I, there is a compensatory feeling of openness in Act IV. The garden is unquestionably preferable to the living room now, and one is uncertain whether the sisters have been evicted or liberated—perhaps a combination of the two. The final tableau certainly contrasts the separation the sisters felt in the opening scene with their physical closeness at the end—“The three sisters stand nestled up to one another” (XI, 302). But the physical closeness reflects a far more basic sense of unity. Harvey Pitcher has quite justly commented on this scene: “The sisters feel perhaps closer to one another now than they have ever done before.”⁸ In the departure of the regiment and the death of Tuzenbakh, they give themselves to one another as they have not done earlier. They give themselves to their love for one another and discover a strength in this to endure.

Masha has the first of the sisters' final speeches, and I would like to look at her words, not as they are printed in texts today, but as they appear in Chekhov's original version of the speech, which, unfortunately in my view, has never been restored to the play. The speech was cut at the request of Ol'ga Knipper, who found the lines difficult to speak.⁹ It would appear that Chekhov silently acquiesced. I've indicated the deleted lines by brackets:

Oh, how the music is playing! They are leaving us, one has really gone, really and forever; and we'll stay here alone to begin our lives anew. I shall live, sisters! We must live. … [Looks upward.] There are migratory birds above us; they have flown every spring and autumn for thousands of years now, and they don't know why, but they fly and will fly for a long, long time yet, for many thousands of years—until at last God reveals to them his mystery. … ¹⁰

The reference to migratory birds connects a series of images that run through the play and that have two reference points for their meaning. The first is the rather familiar metaphor of birds' flight as man's passage through life. Irina is the first to use the image in Act I: “It's as if I were sailing with the wide blue sky over me and great white birds floating along” (XI, 245). Chebutykin picks up on this metaphor in Act IV when he tells Irina: “You have gone on far ahead, I'll never catch up with you. I'm left behind like a migratory bird which has grown old and can't fly. Fly on, my dears, fly on and God be with you” (XI, 291). Chebutykin makes the metaphorical meaning clear here: he may be too old a bird to continue the flight himself, but Irina must of necessity be engaged in her passage through life. Shortly after this Masha refers to the birds, apparently with reference to Vershinin: “When Vershinin comes, let me know. … Walks away. Migratory birds are leaving already. … Looks upward. Swans, or geese. … My dear ones, my happy ones …” (XI, 294). Like Chebutykin, Masha here refers to others whose lives go on, but in her final speech her “we must live” is connected with the bird imagery so that it becomes a positive image for her as well; her life—the life of all the sisters—will go on.

There is a second reference point for her speech, however, and that occurs in Act II when Tuzenbakh, as well, invokes the image. It comes in the midst of that scene in which Vershinin muses about the future, as a way of wooing Masha—a scene in which Tuzenbakh is largely left out of the proceedings. He says: “Migratory birds, cranes, for instance, fly and fly and whatever great thoughts or small may wander through their heads, they'll go on flying, knowing neither where nor why. They fly and will fly whatever philosophers may appear among them; and let them philosophize as much as they like, so long as they go on flying …” (XI, 267). Masha's last speech is equally a tribute to Tuzenbakh. In paraphrasing his lines she both acknowledges his conception of experience and reconciles it with her own point of view, that eventually we must have some understanding of why we do what we do. Irina's betrothed—whatever the degree of affection she may have had for him—has just died. Masha has just parted with the man she loves, but she transforms their shared sorrow into a virtual panegyric to Tuzenbakh and finds in it a reason why the sisters must go on living.¹¹ In any case, the sisters have clearly come a long way from that point a year before the play began when death seemed unendurable.

In Ol'ga's final speech she answers that remark of Masha's in Act I—“they'll forget us too”—when she says: “… They'll forget us, forget our faces, our voices, and how many of us there were, but our sufferings will be transformed into joy for those who live after us, happiness and peace will reign on the earth and they will remember with a kind word and bless those who are living now” (XI, 303). Essentially, she is reiterating Masha's appeal that we must go on living because the experience is worth the effort, and reaffirming that the purpose will be revealed in the future. But whether it is or not, the continuation of living is essential.

The sisters' final speeches are interspersed with Chebutykin's nihilistic observations on the total indifference of the universe to anything that happens. The interchange may be read as an ultimately ambivalent attitude toward the nature of experience, or it may be read as a final tribute to the sisters' faith. They have not retreated to Chebutykin's fatalism, though their experience of love has been no more encouraging. The final interchange between Chebutykin and the sisters may suggest not an either/or response to life, but a measure of their capacity for endurance. After all, love is largely a matter of faith.¹²

Notes

1. Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), p. 289. Hahn also offers a representative discussion of Natasha's role in ruining the sisters (p. 301).

2. Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 123.

3. A. P. Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem (Moscow: Ogiz, 1944-51), XI, 253. Further references to the play will be cited by volume and page number in the text.

4. Literaturnoye nasledstvo: Chekhov, ed. V. V. Vinogradov et al. (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk, 1960), LXVIII, 69.

5. In Literaturnoye nasledstvo two earlier redactions of the play are included (pp. 1-87; see esp. pp. 27, 30, and 41.)

6. The Chekhov Play, pp. 119-20.

7. See J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance: A Commentary on the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 162, for some further comments on the sisters' temporal orientation.

8. The Chekhov Play, p. 151.

9. See A. R. Vladimirskaya's introduction to the two earlier redactions of Three Sisters in Literaturnoye nasledstvo, pp. 13-14.

10. Literaturnoye nasledstvo, p. 86.

11. To delete the majority of Masha's final remarks may be a tribute to Chekhov's admiration, even love, for Ol'ga Knipper, but I see no reason why modern directors need bow to the actress' difficulties. They might well consider restoring this crowning link in the play's bird imagery.

12. Many of the views expressed in this essay have emerged from interchanges between director, actors, and myself during work on a production of Three Sisters in Seattle in the summer of 1978 by the Intiman Theatre Company, Margaret Booker, artistic director.