Three Sisters- A Play in Four Acts by Anton Chekhov- 1900- translated by Constance Garnett

 Three Sisters- A Play in Four Acts by Anton Chekhov- 1900- translated by Constance Garnett

I was motivated to read Chekhov's play by the chapter devoted to it in Viv Groskup's marvelous book, The Anna Karenina-Life Lessons from Russian Literature, "How to Live with the Feeling That the Grass is Always Greener: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov".

Born: January 29, 1860, Taganrog, Russia

Died: July 15, 1904, Badenweiler, Germany

Spouse: Olga Knipper (m. 1901–1904)

Three Sisters along with The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull are considered Chekhov's best plays. The play was written for the Moscow Art Theatre and it opened on 31 January 1901, under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.

The three sisters, twenty something live in a provisional town but they long to move to Moscow.

Their parents are deceased, they have been left a comfortable house and enough money to have servants. The oldest sister, Olga is at 28 considered a spinster. She works as a teacher but wishes she could be a wife instead, even "to an old man". She functions as the matriarch of the family.

Marsha, the middle sister is married to a teacher who she despises for his pettiness. She has an affair. The youngest sister Irina, 20, longs for love. Their brother Andrei, whose ill-advised romance and compulsive gambling wreaks havoc on the family finances and eventually forces them out of their home. Weary of their small-town surroundings, the Prozorovs long to return to Moscow, the bustling metropolis they left eleven years ago. Unfortunately, ground down by disappointment, debt, and the oppressive ordinariness of their daily lives, they’re never able to get there. There is an army camp nearby and a number of officers visit.

Here is Viv Groskup's take on the lesson to be learned from Three Sisters. 

"The problem is, no matter how good we have it, the grass genuinely does seem greener elsewhere. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, where all the three sisters really want in life is to get back to Moscow, scene of their childhood. Moscow represents a reaction against their present life – which they don’t want – and a promise of something better. They want Moscow, Moscow, Moscow. They say it enough times. But what they also want, crucially, is to be somewhere else other than where they are right now. Sound familiar?"

One of the factors I enjoyed in the play was that the Sisters seemed aware there was a growing demand for social change directed at ending the vast inequalities in Russian society.

"Chekhov’s brilliance lies in capturing something important about a life change that was happening at the time he was writing: people were starting to be able to affect their own lives, change their class, break out of the confines of their gender". Viv Groskup