Three Sisters

1 "Three Sisters" ("Три сестры") is Chekhov’s third of his four great plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, written between the failure-turned- triumph of "The Seagull" and "Uncle Vanya" and the last of his life, "The Cherry Orchard." He wrote it through 1900, largely away from Moscow – in Nice and in Yalta, where his advancing tuberculosis had already forced him to relocate for his health – and delivered it to the company piecemeal, act by act, by post. It premiered on 31 January 1901 (New Style) at the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, with Olga Knipper, whom Chekhov married the following year, as Masha. As with "The Cherry Orchard" three years later, Chekhov resisted the production’s pull toward unrelieved gloom; he called the play at various points a drama and, in his letters, insisted its comedy not be lost, even as its reputation since has settled overwhelmingly on the side of melancholy.

2 The three Prozorov sisters – Olga, Masha, and Irina – and their brother Andrei live in a provincial garrison town, eleven years removed from the Moscow of their childhood, to which the sisters long to return with an intensity that becomes the play’s central, unfulfilled refrain: "To Moscow, to Moscow!" Their father, a general, is a year dead as the play opens on Irina’s name-day; into the household comes Lieutenant Colonel Vershinin, newly posted from Moscow, whose arrival briefly rekindles the sisters’ hope of return even as it opens a quieter, sadder attachment between himself and the unhappily married Masha. Andrei, the family’s one hope for a distinguished, scholarly future, instead drifts toward a provincial marriage with Natasha, whose steady, unopposed rise to authority over the household across the play’s four acts – and four years – becomes one of Chekhov’s most quietly devastating studies of how a family’s fortunes can be lost not by any single blow but by attrition, complacency, and other people’s untroubled self-interest.

3 The play’s structure follows the classic Chekhovian method: the apparent plot (Irina’s engagement prospects, the garrison’s eventual departure, Andrei’s marriage and decline, a fatal duel late in the action) proceeds almost entirely offstage or between the lines, while the stage itself holds conversation, waiting, and the accumulation of small disappointments. Its most quoted lines – Vershinin’s speculations on the unknowable future, Chebutykin’s refrain that "it doesn’t matter" (translated here by sense rather than echoing any one prior rendering), Olga’s closing insistence that their suffering must someday mean something – are spoken by characters who are, by the play’s own logic, almost certainly wrong about what is coming; the soldiers march off to a band’s cheerful tune, and Moscow is never reached. This first drafted installment covers Act One in full: the name-day gathering at the Prozorov house, the arrival of Vershinin and Kulygin, and Andrei’s proposal to Natasha, overheard by no one who matters and witnessed only, at the curtain, by two startled officers.

4 A note on names for readers new to the corpus: Chekhov’s characters go by surname, by first name and patronymic together (a formal register: "Ivan Romanych" for Dr. Chebutykin), and by diminutive (Masha for Maria, Olya for Olga) more or less simultaneously, and the shifts between registers are themselves a form of information about who is speaking to whom and how intimately – preserved here rather than flattened to a single English form.