Anton Chekhov

The writer Leonid Andreyev attended the thirtieth per­formance, despite a friend's warning that its effect would be suicidally depressing. Quite against expectation, he found himself totally drawn into the play by the middle of Act One; no longer appraising the scenery or the actors, he became convinced that 'the story of the three sisters ... is not an invention, not a fantasy, but a fact, an event, something every bit as real as stock options at the Savings & Loan'. By the end, he, with the rest of the audience, was in tears, but his dominant impression was not pessimistic. For Andreyev, the residual effect, the pervasive mood, the play's basic 'tragic melody' was a yearning for life. 'Like steam, life can be compressed into a narrow little container, but, also like steam, it will endure pressure only to a certain degree. And in Three Sisters, this pressure is brought to the limit, beyond which it will explode, - and don't you in fact hear how life is seething, doesn't its angrily protesting voice reach your ears?'⁴

This reaction was due in part to the play's early run coinciding with student riots; consequently the characters' aspirations were identified with topical political sentiment. It was due as well to the theatre's remarkably veristic production and its careful transmission of mood. Eventu­ally, theatregoers would say not that they were going to the Art Theatre to view Three Sisters, but that they were 'paying a call on the Prozorovs.' Chekhov's technique, however, provided the premises for this illusion of reality.

The American poet Randall Jarrell has compared Chekhov's method in Three Sisters to that of the painter Edouard Vuillard.

In certain of his indoor and outdoor scenes of French domestic life, the foundation areas on the canvas are made less emphatic by the swarms of particles that mottle the walls with rose-printed paper, the rugs with swirls, the lawns with pools of sun and shade. From such variation and variegation comes his cohesion. Vuillard commingles plaids and dappled things as non sequitur as the jottings in Chebutykin's notebook.⁵

And Jarrell made lists of what he called 'Vuillard spots' in the play: apparently random speech habits, mannerisms, personality traits and incidents that add up to a character or an action.

It is a stimulating analogy, useful in revealing what is new

about Three Sisters. To extend the metaphor, this is the first time Chekhov employs a broad canvas devoid of exclu­sively foreground figures - no Ivanovs or Platonovs, not even Treplyovs or Vanyas; the sisters must share their space, in every sense, with Natasha, Tusenbach and Solyony. There are no more soliloquys: almost never is a character left alone on stage. The propinquity factor is very much at work. Andrey must pour out his discontents to deaf Ferapont, and Masha must announce her adulterous love to the stopped-up ears of her sister Olga. Tetes-a-tetes are of the briefest: no more Trigorin spinning out a description of his career or Astrov explicating maps to prospective paramours. Vershinin and Tusenbach spout their speeches about work and the future to a room full of auditors. Anyone arranging a rehearsal schedule of the play will soon discover that most of the actors must be on call most of the time, to provide the 'Vuillard spots' that compose the whole picture.

Those rhetorical paeans of Vershinin and Tusenbach have been cited as Utopian alternatives to the dreary provincial life depicted on stage. True, the men who formulate them are ineffectual, with no chance of realising their 'thick-coming fancies'. But the monologues do work as a meliorative element. In Dead Souls, the comic epic of Nikolay Gogol, Chekhov's favourite writer, lyric digres­sions and rambling speculations by the narrator are used to supply an idyllic, idealised contrast to the squalid action in the foreground. Chekhov, deprived of the narrative ele­ment, must put into the mouths of his characters visions of an improved life. The imagery of birds of passage, birch trees, flowing rivers sounds a note of freshness and harmony that highlights all the more acutely the characters' inability to get in touch with the spontaneous and the natural. The cranes are programmed to fly, 'and whatever thoughts, sublime or trivial, drift through their heads, they'll keep on flying, not knowing why or whither'.