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'.
The most blatant call for an alternative is the sisters' recurrent plaint, 'To Moscow, to Moscow!' Almost from the play's premiere, critics wondered what was stopping the Prozorovs from buying a ticket to the big city. Obviously, Moscow is a Holy Grail, envisaged differently by each character. Andrey sees it not only as a university town, but as the site of great restaurants, while for old Ferapont it marks the locale of a legendary pancake-fest. Vershinin gloomily recalls a grim bridge and roaring water there, Solyony has invented a second university for it, and Olga looks back to a funeral. No clear image of Moscow emerges from the medley of impressions, so that it remains somewhere over the rainbow, just out of sight.
But because the sisters are fixated on this distant point, commentators and directors have constantly inflated them into heroines. Too frequently, the play is reduced to a conflict between three superwomen and a ravening bitch: the sensitive and high-strung Prozorovs can be no match for the ruthless life-force embodied in Natasha, and so they succumb, albeit preserving their ideals. This common interpretation is not borne out by a close examination of a play, which Chekhov said had four heroines. As the Rumanian critic Jovan Hristic has shrewdly noted, the three of the title are 'true spiritual sisters of Hedda Gabler, who corrupt everything around them by dint of thinking themselves superior'.6 The analogy works on several levels, from the military upbringing to the ultimate downfall, engineered partly by an instinctual bourgeoise (Natasha for Thea Elvsted), a second-rate academic (Andrey for Tes- man), and an inept idealist (Vershinin for L0vborg). Like Hedda, the three sisters are at variance with their environment, which represents for them common vulgarity;
Masha's scorn of civilians is bitter. The play chronicles the town's encroachment on their lives, as Olga becomes part of the educational system, Irina a cog in the civil bureaucracy, Andrey a fixture on the County Council, and Masha in enforced attendance at faculty parties. By the last act, the stage direction informs us that their backyard has become a kind of empty lot, across which the townsfolk tramp when necessary. It is the next step after the fire, when the townsfolk invaded their home and bore off their old clothes. And, of course, Natasha's infiltrations and that of her lover and town's facto head, the unseen Protopopov, began earliest of all.
To protect themselves against this encroachment, the sisters have erected a paling of culture, and within it, they have invited the military. For once, Chekhov does not use outsiders as a disruptive force; for the sisters, the soldiers spell colour, excitement, life. But the factitiousness of this glamour is soon apparent: a peacetime army is a symbol of idleness and pointless expense. Men trained to fight while away their time philosophising and playing the piano, teaching gymnastics and reading the paper, carrying on backstairs love affairs and fighting duels. The sisters have pinned their hopes on a regiment of straw men. It is hard to determine who is the weaker, Vershinin, forecasting future happiness while unable to break with his psychotic wife, or Tusenbach, whose noble sentiments are belied by his unprepossessing appearance and unassertive manner. Chekhov relentlessly moves through the ranks to show Solyony as a vainglorious bully, Chebutykin as an incompetent doctor, and Fedotik as a toy-loving child. These are carpet knights, suitable for dressing out a party (like the Captain in The Wedding), but not for salvaging anyone's life. That the sisters should make such a fuss about them reveals at once the irreality of their values.
Similarly, if culture, in the sense of refined feelings revealed through sensitivity and cultivated understanding, is the touchstone for the Prozorovs, it will not sustain scrutiny either. The term intelligentsia is misleadingly translated as 'intellectuals,' when it simply means those persons who had enjoyed a higher education. For Russians, it bore a burden of political awareness, social commitment and an obligation to those benighted souls who did not share the intelligent's advantages. The Prozorov family prides itself on these virtues, and judges others by them. Many of the major characters are closely connected with the school system. Olga is somewhat unwillingly promoted from teacher to headmistress, and despite her complaints and exhaustion, it is that work which enables her to maintain her independence and create a haven for her old nanny. Kulygin is a tutelary careerist, truckling to the principal and turning Masha into a faculty wife. Andrey's father had intended him for a professor in Moscow, and his sisters make him feel guilty for missing this goal. On the scale of failed but honourable intelligents that includes Ivanov and Vanya, Andrey, with his gambling and whining, is a despicable come-down.
When tested by the realities of life, the fabric of their culture soon falls to pieces. The Prozorovs and their circle cling to the shreds and patches - Latin tags for Kulygin, quotations from Pushkin, Krylov and Lermontov for Masha and Solyony, amateur music. Andrey's 'sawing away' at the violin and Masha's untested prowess at the keyboard are mocked in the last act by Natasha's offstage rendition of 'The Maiden's Prayer'. Irina grieves that she cannot remember the Italian for window, as if foreign vocabulary could buoy her up in the sea of despair. Solyony poses as the romantic poet Lermontov, but his ultimate behaviour shows him to be more like Martynov, the man who killed Lermontov in a duel. During the fire, Natasha condescendingly must remind Olga of the intelligent's duty 'to help the poor. It's an obligation of the rich'. Philosophising (always a pejorative word for Chekhov) passes for thought, snippets from the newspaper ('Balzac was married in Berdichev') pass for knowledge, a superior attitude passes for delicacy of feeling, yet everyone's conduct dissolves into rudeness or immorality.