Three Sisters: Chekhov’s Warning
By: Alison Christy “Knowledge is of no value,” said Anton Chekhov,“unless you put it into practice.” The fin de siècle had arrived in Russia, bringing with it sweeping reforms and rapid industrialization. Chekhov wrote Three Sisters at a time when Russians were forced to confront modernity. The play is set not in a metropolis, but in the provinces. The three Prozorov sisters moved there with their father eleven years before and still dream of returning to Moscow. They long for the Moscow that they left, not for the urban center that Moscow had become. During their absence, Moscow had been transformed into a modern city. Industrialization had arrived in the city and brought with it new ideas, wonder and misery. The sisters never lose sight of their goal of returning, though they do little to achieve it. Chekhov, a contemporary writer writing for a new theatre, presents the sisters’ situation to the audience as warning: embrace modernity or forever remain in stagnation. With this idea, the playwright creates a world wherein time is difficult to measure, characters are trapped in the past and change, if it occurs, only creates more conflict. Moscow was unlike any other Russian city. Though it was no longer the political capital, it was still considered the cultural capital, the home of the Russian soul (russkaya dysha). The city was home to the Tretyakov Gallery, a museum strictly for Russian art, the Bolshoy Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre. The theatre was founded in 1897 by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. At a lively meeting lasting eighteen hours, the men “rebelled against theatricality, against false pathos…against the whole system of production, and the contemptible repertoire, in theatres at that time” (Allen 37). They decided to found a new theatre, one that would be “committed to the idea that the theatre should reach out to the masses by producing pieces about contemporary life” (Figes 205)....