Sonya and Vanya, at the play's end, seem bereft, marooned by those on whom they had pinned their hopes. Vanya cannot bear up under the disappointment and dissolves into tears, at which point Sonya tries to console him with her vision of Nirvana and the possible blessing of posterity. Vanya's plaints have been mingled with the humdrum recitation of accounts, a device which Chekhov may have borrowed from Sumbatov's play Chains (1887), a work he admired. In Sumbatov, the consoler is a plain-spoken middle-aged woman, an authority figure; her patient is a nervous young spinster. Chekhov reverses the relationship; the young spinster recommends work for the older authority figure. Sonya acts in loco parentis and her counsel of patience has the same soothing but empty effect as Marina's cooling offer of lime-flower tea had on the Professor. Nothingness as a consolation prize is not necessarily endorsed by Chekhov, as it is by Strindberg in his dream plays. Nevertheless, in the words of an American critic, 'The inertia of the spirit in Chekhov is there as a blessing as well as a curse'.7
In Uncle Vanya Chekhov was transferring to the theatre the ability to pose questions without solving them, to suggest life beyond the last page that had hitherto been the exclusive property of the novel. Ibsen had already pioneered in dramatising the repercussions of private life; his plays reverberate with larger ethical and even cosmic considerations. There the tension in reconciling self- fulfilment with a hostile world has an heroic tinge, even when a Mrs. Alving or a John Gabriel Borkman falls. But, as the director Meyerhold pointed out, in Chekhov, there can be no tragic hero, only 'a group of persons devoid of a center'.8 The contradictory needs for self-fulfilment can never be consummated so long as they share this discordant 'propinquity'.
7
'Three Sisters9
The father a famous general, nice pictures, expensive furniture; he died; the daughters had a good education, but are slovenly in appearance, read little, go horseback riding, are boring. Chekhov's Notebook I,p. 130.
At the urging of the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov set about to write them a play. With specific actors in mind for given roles and, mindful too of the Art Theatre's strengths, Chekhov spent more time in the composition of Three Sisters, than on any of his earlier dramas. He was especially anxious to cut out superfluities in monologues and provide a sense of movement.1
At the core of the play stood the three daughters of an army officer who had spent their earliest youth in Moscow, but moved to the provinces when their father was transferred there as Brigadier General. The eldest, Olga, is a mistress in the local school; the middle sister, Masha, marries a classics instructor in the same institution; the youngest, Irina, is just turning eighteen when the play begins. They have invested a good deal of hope in their brother Andrey, who is supposed to become a professor and bring them back to Moscow, the scene of their happiest memories. But life supervenes. Andrey marries a local bourgeoise, Natasha, who proceeds to take over the sisters' home and force them into peripheral positions. Masha tries to lose herself in an affair with an unhappily married man, Colonel Vershinin, whose regiment is temporarily stationed in the town. Irina listlessly entertains two suitors, the insipid Baron Tusenbach and the enigmatic and surly Solyony. Olga unwillingly rises in the academic hierarchy. Ultimately these pastimes lead nowhere. By the play's end, Vershinin departs with his regiment, Solyony kills the Baron in a senseless duel, and Natasha and her children victoriously occupy the house. Against a mocking chorus provided by their former tenant, the nihilistic Army Doctor Chebutykhin, the sisters cling to some last vestiges of hope in order to survive.
Unfortunately, when the Art Theatre actors heard the author read the play for the first time, in October 1900, they were sorely disappointed. 'This is no play, it's only an outline' was the immediate reaction.2 Chekhov sedulously reworked it all, and in the process added many striking touches. The ironic counterpoint of Tusenbach's and Chebutykin's remarks in Acts One and Four, most of Solyony's pungent lines, Masha's quotation from Ruslan and Lyudmila about the curved seastrand were added at this stage. It is wonderful to think that only while revising did Chekhov decide to leave her on stage for the final tableau.
Chekhov sat in on the early rehearsals, and insisted that a colonel be in attendance to instruct the actors in proper military deportment; he personally orchestrated the fire- bell sound effects for Act Three. He put the greatest emphasis on that act, which, he insisted, must be performed quietly and with weariness (to Knipper, 17 and 20 January 1901). When Stanislavsky proposed that Natasha cross the stage at the beginning of the act, looking under furniture for burglars, Chekhov riposted that her silent crossing with a candle 'a la Lady Macbeth' would be more 'horrible'. On the other hand, Stanislavsky requested the suppression of a stage direction that required Tusenbach's corpse to be carried across the upstage area during the play's final speeches: too many extras, too much noise and distraction, and an inevitable wobbling of the backdrop were his grounds. Chekhov complied.
Three Sisters opened at the Art Theatre on 31 January 1901, with Stanislavsky as Vershinin, Olga Knipper as Masha, Meyerhold as Tusenbach and Vishnevsky as Kulygin. Although many critics were put off by the play's seeming hopelessness and what struck them as vague motivation in the characters, the production was acclaimed by the public. 'It's music, not acting', asserted Gorky. The great actress Yermolova, who, years before, had turned down the fledgling dramatist's Without Patrimony, declared that at last she realised what the Art Theatre was getting at.
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.