The sisters do not realize that the wrecker of their future is their brother, Andrey. He has easily given up the ambitions of his Moscow days—he had intended to be a professor—and has sunk to a minor job on the town council and to gambling at cards in this provincial backwater. He has fallen in love with Natasha, a shrewd local girl, one of Chekhov’s predatory women, and has married her. She becomes, by this marriage, the ruler of the house, and her provincial manners are mocked by the sisters. She is an ambitious secretive schemer. She has become the mistress of the powerful chairman of the town council, who does not appear in the play. Her only weakness is her ridiculous, if cunning, fuss about her baby. We soon hear whispers that the brother has gambled away his sisters’ inheritance.
It was Chekhov’s rule that a play must come to a decisive head in the third act. There is a sudden fire in the town—two streets of wooden houses are burned to the ground—and the soldiers help to fight it. We know of the fire by the sound of the galloping horses of the fire brigade, also by the reflected red glow on the walls of the room in which the sisters, overwrought by taking in refugees, are exchanging confidences. They are interrupted in their confessions and are scared by the sight of Natasha, asserting her power by crossing the room where they are huddled, carrying a lighted candle and ignoring them. It is the most arresting moment in the play. She is Lady Macbeth reborn. Masha says: “She goes about looking as if she started the fire.” Yes, Natasha is the spirit of destruction. We have already seen her cruelty when she sacks the eighty-year-old servant who has worked for the family all her life. Andrey, too, has seen his wife’s imperious “walk.” Confused by his guilt about what he has done to his sisters, he protests that he loves his wife and that they are wrong to hate her. She is splendid, he says, and they must stop hating her. Suddenly he shouts: “Don’t believe a word of what I’ve said.” He confesses he has mortgaged the property to pay his debts.
In the last act the play is haunted not simply by the goodbyes of the soldiers and the girls as the army prepares to move off. The partings begin. We shall see Masha’s guilt as she says good-bye to Vershinin. Her decent ridiculous husband, the schoolmaster, puts on a false beard and mustache he has taken from a boy in his class and clowns to prevent Masha from confessing her guilt. The fool loves her and she is grateful. But laughter and tears are not enough. Theater requires horror. Everyone half knows that the baron and the jealous Solyony are absent for no good reason. There is the sound of a shout from across the fields. It is not a shout but a shot: Solyony has had his duel and killed the baron. Chebutykin, the believer in meaninglessness, reacts to this tragedy with a typical display of indifference. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and sings his familiar silly song: “Tararaboomdeay.” The collector of faits divers from the newspapers is enjoying being adjacent to catastrophe. Why? No reason at all except that it supports his doctrine: “Nothing matters.” God has become the Absurd, or, rather, the Indifferent.
At the house Natasha, the vulgar interloper, says that she intends to have their lovely avenue of firs cut down “because it looks awful in the evenings.” She is going to have a proper little suburban avenue of garden flowers. She sees a maid has left a table fork on a chair and screams at the maid: “Don’t answer me back”—the voice of power and pettiness made absolute.
Farewells are over. We see the sisters listening to the distant, stirring, mocking sound of the army band as the soldiers march away. The symphony is over. Olga comforts Masha. As she weeps Irina cries, “Why do we have to suffer so much?” but clings to Chekhov’s remedy: we must work and work and think of nothing else. The most searing line comes from Olga: “In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices, and [most piercingly of all] no one will even know how many of us there were.”
What has moved us so much? As in real life the feeling lies not in the words that are said, but in what lies unspoken between the words. Even the abused things of this household play their part.
Before turning to his last play, Chekhov turned to what would be his last story. It exists in five versions and is The Bride. Many Russian and English critics have seen it as being “more affirmative” or “positive” than the rest of his later writing because the heroine, Nadya, breaks with her provincial family and leaves her home to go to Petersburg to be reeducated. She is stirred by the wild talk of Sasha, a young painter, who talks about “the glorious future.” He is obviously dying of consumption and she has been captivated by what she supposes is his genius. In fact he has failed as a painter and is no more than a lithographer in a modest printing works. His stirring speeches are those of a man recklessly deceiving himself but she has learned something from him: one must rebel. Sasha has at least made her break with the pompous conventional son of a priest to whom she was engaged. There is a remarkable scene in which her fiancé takes her to inspect the house and conventional pictures and furnishings which would be her future home. No elation there! What a prison! Her future husband’s only gift is the absurd squeaking and grunting preoccupation with playing the violin. There is a wonderful moment when Chekhov uses his old trick with sounds: one day a string snaps.
In a letter to Olga Chekhov said he was writing this story in the “style of the seventies,” which suggests his study of self-satisfied bourgeois life in Three Years. He said he was writing slowly, a spoonful at a time— “possibly because there are a lot of characters or because I’ve lost the knack.” Not quite, for in a few lines he establishes the dead town. One quiet evening Nadya stands listening to the distant croaking of the frogs, which makes the place seem “much larger than it really is.” Chekhov evokes the finicking house-proud mother and her pride in her jewelry. We hear Sasha’s denunciation of the beetle- and bug-infested kitchens where the servants sleep on the floor. Much of Sasha’s talk will recall Trofimov’s outburst in The Cherry Orchard. There is a savage moment when the prim garden of the house is slashed by the autumn winds. News comes that Sasha, who has been taking the koumiss cure, has died, and Nadya leaves home for good. The last words of this story are enigmatic: