Customer Reviews

The Three Sisters (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Checkov was a master of composing life's largest problems into beautiful language and ordinary situations which the entire world could understand. Granted he wrote them a long time ago but the underlying situation exists everywhere today. Here are three sisters completely unable to move on with their lives. They are unhappy, they are desperate for a change of scene, they are forced to give up anyone they love to someone else but yet they remain glued to the exact place where all of this occurs. Olga has passed her prime, Masha loves someone other than her husband, and Irina has no idea what could possibly make her happy and all they do is talk about change, but never do anything active. And in the end it all comes full circle and we as an audience, a reader, need to decide how to not fall into such a life rut, to learn by their actions as we do from Aesop's fables. This play is just written a great deal better, with a little more comedy and tugging at the heartstrings.

"Three Sisters" has lasted over a hundred years in the fickle world of dramatic literature for one simple reason; because it matters. This is a play that touches on the very essence of what it means to be human, and how our choices (or lack thereof) can make life feel like prison. Through a large ensemble cast Anton Chekhov gives us many different prisms to choose to view life through. The trick is that regardless of which ideology or prism you value, you still have to actually live your life. It does not just happen to you.
The play revolves around the Prozorov home in provincial Russia late in the 1800s. In this house we see the lives of four siblings (a brother and the three sisters of the title) their in-laws and other relatives, soldiers, lovers, servants, and coworkers played out over a 4-5 year period. What is so astonishing to the reader is how static and stationary their lives seem to be, and yet when you reflect on your own life most of us will find the similarities unnerving, and possibly quite unpleasant. Chekhov seems to be saying that life is the everyday simple things that happen to us. What makes life either grand or mundane is how we react to everyday things. This is something that every self aware adult struggles with on their journey through this world.
One could write entire papers about the philosophies of life and existence contained in this play. I won't attempt it here. I will simply say that this is a very powerful theatrical experience in the hands of a superior theatre company. It would be deadly dull in the hands of amateurs, so be careful where you view it. However, reading it on your own (or even better in a book club) will yield many pleasant discoveries about yourself and force you into some serious self reflection. Not bad things at all.
A side note on the new version by actress/ writer Susan Coyne. It is a lovely translation with some modern vernacular that makes the play slightly more accessible to an English speaking audience.

Life like a passing, migrating flock of birds, is an absurd existence where alot happen--wars, births, fights, deaths, jobs, marriages, and yet everything can seem transient, vapid and disappointing.

The 'Three Sisters' is another Chekhov depiction of life's pains, disappointments, hopes , illusions and moments of beauty. It is once again as in the 'Seagull' life in the provinces which is a central villain depriving the heroines of what they believe would be a fuller more realized life in the city. Each one of the sisters does not come to the Love and realization in life that they dreamed. Olga the schoolteacher ends up as the mistress of her school, but this is not her heart's desire. Masha longs for a richer kind of love with one wiser than the husband she has outgrown .Irina dreams of an escape she can never make. Their brother Andrei who marries the peasant woman Natalya and has two children with her , sees her take over his life and drive out the sisters from the ancestral home.
The characters as is usually the case with Chekhov are not one- dimensional but are complex mixtures .Though the play ends in the seeming failure of all , a speech of sister Olga suggests that 'hopelessness' is not the last word for Chekhov, but dream and delusion maintain us to the end.

"We shall be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us; but our sufferings will pass into joy for those who will live after us, happiness and peace will be established upon earth, and they will remember kindly and bless those who have lived before. Oh, dear sisters, our life is not ended yet. We shall live! The music is so happy, so joyful, and it seems as though in a little while we shall know what we are living for, why we are suffering... If we only knew--if we only knew!"