“Three Sisters” by Anton Chekov

The Extraordinarily Mundane.

Chekov. A name that fills English majors with equal measures of dread and excitement. Chekov is a behemoth of dramatic literature, right up there with Ibsen and Beckett. Chekov’s most popular work is by far “The Cherry Orchard,” but the work of Chekov that is most near and dear to my heart is “Three Sisters.”

“Three Sisters” is the first work by Chekov that I’ve ever read, and I’ll admit it; my first time through, I was bored. The action of the characters felt stilted and halting, the dialogue overlapped and interrupted in ways that made no sense, and nothing really HAPPENED in the play.

At least, that’s what I thought my first time through.

Chekov is clearly a brilliant man, well-loved by all fans of dramatic literature, so I wondered: what am I missing? Am I missing the Chekov-gene? Am I missing some great symbol that explains the entire work? I needed answers, so I dove back into the text for a second time, and I ended up doing some research along the way.

In “Chekov’s Three Sisters: A Proto-Poststructuralist Experiment” by Sarah Wyman, the first line of the article reads, “In Anton Chekov’s ‘Three Sisters’, the domestic scene may appear estranged, both static and understated, but it becomes increasingly familiar the longer one looks.” Wyman was absolutely right. My second time through “Three Sisters,” I began to see the play the way it was meant to be seen.

In modern media, we have become used to constant action, perfectly timed and witty dialogue, and world-shattering events that can only fall under the fantasy and sci-fi umbrellas. “Three Sisters,” however, is work grounded in kitchen sink realism; it’s so much like reality, we have a hard time reconciling it as a form of entertainment. In real life, people often stand apart, zone out, talk over one another, monologue without realizing, and events that seem small to others can take on enormous gravity to those in the thick of it. This is the world that Chekov has made. As readers or an audience, we are not necessarily supposed to like Olga, Masha, and Irina, but we are meant to root for them because we can see ourselves in them.

So what do these titular three sisters want out of life? It’s fairly simple– they want to live it. They all have dreams, dreams of having successful careers, falling in love, and returning home to Moscow. However, by the end of a play that takes place roughly over four years, the sisters are right back where they started, only with harder hearts. What is it the sisters have to hold onto in the end? Ibsen called it “the life-lie.”

I think I’d prefer to call it hope.

Italo Calvino came up with the idea of lightness, and in her book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write,” playwright Sarah Ruhl describes lightness as, “a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.” Lightness is a victory over heaviness, in that way. Chekov’s play could be read as an extremely heavy work. Olga realizes she has missed her window to fall in love and marry, Masha falls for a man who isn’t her husband whom she must inevitably lose, and Irina’s fiancé dies in the final pages of the play. An audience could leave the theater or a reader could shut the book and think, “My god, how depressing!”

But that is not Chekov’s point.

Olga says, in one of the last lines of play, “Oh, dear sisters, this life of ours is not over yet.” That, in the end, is Chekov’s message. Everyday life can sometimes be crippling, and we are often left at a fork in the road, wondering how we can even begin to lift our feet and take another step. But we live, regardless. Whether for ourselves, for others, or for those yet to come, we do live. Chekov’s “Three Sisters” is a play about the beauty and power to be found in reality, and about the lightness of life– through humor, grace, and hope, I’d say we can do just about anything.