The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anton Chekhov · a drama in four acts · first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre, January 1901 · scored on Chekhov’s Russian in the text he revised after the first production, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Drama near comedy; domestic tragedy, social satire and metaphysical conversation in one action, the catastrophes kept offstage
Mythos
Three sisters as a structure of three answers; Moscow as lost paradise and promised city at once; the house usurped by the newcomer; the army leaving the town as the gods leave the city
Phase
One house across years: a noon name day in spring, a winter evening at carnival, two in the morning on the night of a fire, an autumn departure in the garden
Presentation
Drama; four acts, each in one place, a large ensemble with no single protagonist, the fire, the duel, Protopopov and Moscow itself never seen
Register
From Chebutykin’s music-hall refrain and Kulygin’s school Latin to Vershinin’s centuries, Masha’s confession and Olga’s last speech
Scale
One family, one house, one town, a span of years; a class displaced, and the future argued over by men who cannot act
Governing Proposition
Three sisters in a provincial garrison town, a year after their father’s death, plan their return to Moscow; over four acts they do not go, their brother mortgages the house, his wife takes it room by room, the brigade that was their society leaves, and the youngest’s fiancé is killed in a duel offstage. The wager of the play is that people organise the present around a life elsewhere, Moscow, the future, work or love, and that the organising is how the present is lost; and that only a form which shows four moments and leaves the deciding years between them can let an audience feel time pass as the sisters feel it, without anyone choosing it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The first act is set in the drawing room of the Prozorov house, in a provincial garrison town, at noon in spring. It is Irina’s name day, and it falls a year to the day after the death of the sisters’ father, a general. Olga opens the play on that anniversary. The grief of a year ago and the party of today are in the room together from the first speech, and the play will not separate them for four acts.
The play was written in 1900 and first staged by the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1901, under Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was published in Russkaya mysl in 1901, and then in Marks’s edition of Chekhov’s works, with the revisions he made after the first production; that revised text, which survives whole, is the work scored here, as a text for performance. There are four acts, each in one place: the drawing room at noon in spring; the same room on a winter evening at carnival time; Olga’s and Irina’s room past two in the morning, on the night of a fire in the town; and the garden of the house in autumn, as the brigade leaves the town.
The persons are many and no one of them is the protagonist. Olga teaches at the school; Masha is married to Kulygin, a schoolmaster; Irina is the youngest. Their brother Andrei marries Natasha, who arrives in the first act in a sash of the wrong colour and ends the play in possession of the house. Around the family stand the officers of the battery: Vershinin, its commander, Baron Tuzenbach, Solyony, and the junior officers Fedotik and Rode; Chebutykin, the old army doctor; Anfisa, the old servant; and Ferapont, the porter from the council. Protopopov, Andrei’s chairman and Natasha’s lover, is spoken of throughout and never appears. Each sister is a different answer to one question, and Andrei is the fourth.
Movement II
“В Москву! В Москву!”
(To Moscow! To Moscow!). The cry is not a plan. Moscow is the place of the sisters’ childhood and the place they mean to go: the lost paradise and the promised city at once. Every act measures its distance, and in four acts nobody books a ticket. The play shows people arranging the present around a life elsewhere, and shows that the arranging is how the present goes.
The name-day lunch carries a dozen voices at once, each with its tic. Solyony has his scent and his Lermontov pose. Kulygin has his school and his Latin: “Omnia mea mecum porto”
(all that is mine I carry with me). Chebutykin has his newspaper. He is the old man who may have loved the sisters’ mother, the doctor who forgets his medicine, and he is the play’s conscience of indifference. Every one of these voices is a character and an argument, and the dialogue talks past itself.
Irina, in the first act, puts her hope in work. The play will show what work is: drudgery without poetry, at the telegraph office and then at the council. Andrei, the brother with the gifts, will become a clerk of that same council. The hopes of the first act are not refuted by any event; they are worn away between the acts, in time the audience does not see.
Movement III
The second act is the same room on a winter evening, at carnival time. The mummers are expected, and they are turned away. Natasha is now the wife of the house, and the house is beginning to be hers. Masha has a line of Pushkin in her head that she cannot place, the opening of the fairy-tale prologue to Ruslan and Lyudmila: “У лукоморья дуб зелёный”
(by the curved shore a green oak). Myth recurs in the play as a phrase someone cannot get rid of.
Vershinin, the battery commander, philosophises about life in two or three hundred years, as he did in the first act, and over some of the same ground. Tuzenbach argues with him, and speaks of a coming storm of work. The argument about the future is conducted by men who cannot act in the present: Vershinin cannot leave his own marriage for Masha, whatever the centuries hold. Between the two of them runs a smaller rise, Masha’s whistled exchange with Vershinin.
Chebutykin, here as throughout, has his music-hall refrain: “Тарарабумбия”
(Tararaboomdeay). Each rise in the play is cut by it, or by Kulygin’s fussing. Chekhov refuses grandeur on principle, and the refusal is part of the knowledge: the trivial goes on beside the serious and does not know it.
Movement IV
The third act is the summit. It is past two in the morning, in the room Olga and Irina share. The town is burning offstage, and the house fills with the homeless and with an exhausted family. The fire alarm is heard. The space of the play has narrowed: from the drawing room to a bedroom, with the household’s privacy given up to strangers.
Chebutykin, drunk, smashes the mother’s porcelain clock. Irina breaks down over the Italian she has forgotten: the languages the sisters were taught, three or four of them, are going, and they have no instrument against Natasha in any of them. Andrei admits that he has mortgaged the house. And Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin. Each of these is a small event in a dark room, and together they are the play’s height.
The fire is never seen. It burns in the town, and the act stays in the room, as the duel will stay out of sight in the last act and Protopopov out of sight through the whole play. The swerve from the drama of the strong event is complete here: the catastrophe is the condition of the scene, not its subject, and the subject is what a family says to one another at two in the morning.
Movement V
The last act is the garden, in autumn, and the brigade is leaving the town. The sisters are outside the house now, which they no longer own in any sense that matters. Natasha plans to cut down the fir avenue. Irina has accepted Tuzenbach, a marriage of resignation, and he is to fight Solyony. His last words to her before the duel are about coffee he has not drunk. The duel happens offstage; the cranes pass over; the news comes.
The band plays as the brigade marches out. Tuzenbach is dead, and the three sisters stand together. Olga says that the music plays so gaily and one wants to live, and the play ends on her question: “Если бы знать, если бы знать!”
(If only we knew, if only we knew!). The hope for the generations to come is held so ambiguously that the last meaning is a question, not a statement.
Chekhov insisted that the play was close to comedy, and his first audiences took it for gloom. It has been played both ways for a century and a quarter, and the questions it leaves have not closed: whether Vershinin’s future is sincere or a consolation, whether Chebutykin’s thought that perhaps we only seem to exist is the play’s nihilism or a drunk’s evasion, whether the sisters are the victims of their stasis or its authors. The form gives no answer. It shows four moments in one house and leaves the years between them to do what years do.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds very little. Each sister is a different answer to one question: Olga by duty, Masha by passion, Irina by work and then by a marriage of resignation; and Andrei is the fourth answer, the talent that becomes a council clerk with a mortgaged house. Natasha is required as the force that takes the house room by room; Vershinin as the philosopher of the future whose love for Masha cannot leave his own marriage; Tuzenbach and Solyony as the triangle around Irina that ends in the duel. Remove an act and the erosion jumps a step. The margin: Fedotik and Rode are nearly interchangeable, and Vershinin’s two speeches on the centuries ahead cover overlapping ground.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: people organise their present around a life elsewhere, and the organising is how the present is lost. “В Москву! В Москву!” (To Moscow! To Moscow!) is not a plan; in four acts nobody books a ticket. Two further disclosures stand with it. Work, Irina’s promised salvation, is shown as drudgery without poetry at the telegraph office and the council. And one class displaces another without a villain’s melodrama: Natasha takes the bedrooms, dismisses Anfisa and plans to cut the fir avenue, and sisters educated in three or four languages have no instrument to resist her. Held below the top because part of what is shown is a mood the Russian stage already knew, and the last term is a question.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The elevation is real, recurrent and deliberately undercut. The third act is the summit: the town burns offstage, the house fills with the homeless and the exhausted, Chebutykin, drunk, smashes the mother’s porcelain clock, Irina breaks down over the Italian she has forgotten, and Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin. The close rises again, the band playing as the brigade marches out, Tuzenbach dead, the three sisters standing together, and Olga saying that the music plays so gaily and one wants to live. Lesser rises: Masha’s whistled exchange with Vershinin, the cranes in the last act. Held at 8.6 because Chekhov refuses grandeur on principle, and the first two acts rise rarely.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetypes are built, not alluded to. Three sisters is a pattern older than the play, the three daughters of the tale and the three fates, and Chekhov constructs it as a structure: the eldest who serves, the middle one who loves wrongly, the youngest who waits for her true love and accepts the wrong one. Moscow is the lost paradise and the promised city at once, the place of childhood that is also the goal, and every act measures its distance. The house invaded by a newcomer who displaces the children of the house is the cuckoo’s myth in realist dress. Held below the high eights because the pattern is made of ordinary life on purpose, and the archetype carries the plot less fully than it does at the top of the desk.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The swerve is from the well-made play and the drama of the strong event. The events are offstage: the fire, Protopopov, the duel, Moscow itself. The protagonist is distributed across a group, dialogue talks past itself, and the time between acts is where lives happen. The cost was real: the first audiences and some of the cast at the Art Theatre took the play for a gloom Chekhov did not intend, and he insisted it was close to comedy. Held in the middle eights because the decisive turn belongs to the series rather than to this play alone: The Seagull (1896) and Uncle Vanya made the departure first, and Three Sisters widens it, carrying the group protagonist and the offstage catastrophe further.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. A novel would narrate the decline continuously and explain it; the play shows four moments years apart and leaves the decisive events in the gaps, so that the audience experiences what the sisters experience, time passing without anyone choosing it. The seasonal shape, spring name day, winter carnival, night of fire, autumn departure, is the law of the action. The polyphonic dialogue, where one person’s hope and another’s indifference sound in the same moment, is the form of the disclosure. The space narrows from drawing room to bedroom to the garden outside a house the sisters no longer own in any sense that matters. Held below 9 by a few scenes of plain exposition, Vershinin’s second speech and Kulygin’s Latin among them.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: a hundred and twenty-five years of productions that read the play opposite ways and keep finding it, from Stanislavsky’s elegiac realism and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Art Theatre production of 1940 to Peter Stein’s in Berlin and many radical rewrites in English and German since. The critical questions have not closed. Is the play a tragedy, or the drama near comedy its author called it? Is Vershinin’s future sincere, or the self-consolation of a man who cannot act? Is Chebutykin’s thought that perhaps we only seem to exist the play’s nihilism or a drunk’s evasion? Are the sisters victims or authors of their stasis? Held below the top because the well yields chiefly in performance and in one family of questions about hope and inertia.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is European drama around 1900. The intrinsic force is high: with the other three major plays, Three Sisters reorganised what a play could be, by subtext, the group protagonist, the action of not acting, and the comic and the grievous inside one scene. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Moscow Art Theatre’s practice, and Stanislavsky’s system with it, was formed in staging these plays; Shaw subtitled Heartbreak House a fantasia in the Russian manner and named Chekhov in its preface; Brian Friel made his own Three Sisters (1981) and later wrote Dancing at Lughnasa on a household of sisters in a closed place; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig answers it by name. Charged: much of that reach is Chekhov’s theatre as a whole, and the first impact was The Seagull’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A hundred and twenty-five years since the premiere. The text survives whole, revised by its author after the first staging, and nothing is charged on form or fabric. Presence is continuous and wide: one of the most performed plays of the modern repertory in Russia, Britain, Germany and America, translated into the major languages, constantly retranslated into English, and taught. The surface is fixed to a moment, a garrison town under the late empire, a brigade’s posting, a provincial gentry’s French and Italian, and the play has outlived that moment entirely; its subject is time and hope, which do not date. Held at 9.1 rather than higher because its presence, though wide, is chiefly theatrical and academic rather than the general reading presence of the most read novels.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the original as far as it can be carried; the sound of the Russian line is neither credited nor charged. The command of the medium is at the highest level for its kind. The ensemble dialogue is orchestrated like a score: the name-day lunch of the first act carries a dozen voices at once, each with its tic, Solyony’s scent and his Lermontov pose, Kulygin’s school and his “Omnia mea mecum porto” (all that is mine I carry with me), Chebutykin’s newspaper, and every voice is a character and an argument. Exits and entrances are timed to the turn: Tuzenbach’s last words to Irina before the duel are about coffee he has not drunk. Sound is structural: the fire alarm, the band, the guitar, the humming. Charged: Andrei’s set speeches of self-justification and Vershinin’s philosophising are plain exposition.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs from the noon name-day party to the duel: time passes, hope is deferred, and comedy and grief happen in the same breath. Take the two most distant elements, Kulygin’s foolishness and Tuzenbach’s death; both obey the law of the play, which is that the trivial goes on beside the catastrophe and does not know it. Chebutykin’s “Тарарабумбия” (Tararaboomdeay), the music-hall refrain, is that law in one word. The range is wide, farce, romance, social satire on Natasha, metaphysics and grief, and nothing breaks the frame. Charged a little: Solyony’s melodrama, the duel and his threat that a happy rival will be killed, belongs to an older theatre the play elsewhere refuses, though Chekhov keeps the duel offstage to bring it inside.
Score: 8.9 / 10
A single play, judged as a play, and the orders it holds are many. The family across generations: the father’s death, the children’s lives, Natasha’s children. The house as property, mortgaged by Andrei. Labour, at the school, the telegraph office and the council. The army as an institution in a town. Marriage, adultery and love. Class, in the displacement of the gentry by a new provincial bourgeoisie; culture and education as a burden; history and the future, in Vershinin’s centuries and Tuzenbach’s coming storm of work; the natural order, in the fir avenue, the birds and the seasons; death, in the father, the fire and the duel. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, the sacred and labour itself are glimpsed rather than held, and all of it is seen from one household’s rooms.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Made at 9.0, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 8.9. A text whole and staged continuously for a century and a quarter in the major theatre languages; ensemble dialogue orchestrated like a score; a disclosure about the life lived for elsewhere that holds; a form that leaves the deciding years between its acts; questions about hope and inertia still open in performance; and one law under which the trivial and the catastrophe go on side by side.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: family, property, labour, the army, class, history, nature and death are held through one house, while the state, the sacred and labour itself are glimpsed rather than held, and everything is seen from one household’s rooms, the bound of the chosen form. Next above it, at 8.6, The Inevitable, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve: two near-interchangeable officers and an overlapping second speech on the future; heights deliberately cut and rare in the first two acts; archetypes built in plain dress; and a swerve that widens a turn <i>The Seagull</i> had already taken. The music of the Russian line is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Anton Chekhov’s Три сестры (Tri sestry), a drama in four acts: written in 1900, first staged by the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1901 under Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, published in Russkaya mysl in 1901, and then in Marks’s edition of Chekhov’s works with the revisions he made after the first production. It is scored as the single play, a text for performance, in that revised text, which survives whole; productions are evidence of its life, and none of them is the work. Every score is judged on the play in Chekhov’s Russian, which is not in hand. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian and Latin are quoted on this page only where the words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Ronald Hingley’s version (Oxford) and Michael Frayn’s (1983) were used for sense, with Constance Garnett’s in the background. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged or credited to the play. The Russian is known here in phrases, not as a whole text heard aloud, so the sound of its line is neither credited nor charged beyond what is known of its plainness and its rhythms of interruption. Names follow the usual English forms. References are by act. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact span of years between the first act and the last, the length of the text, the wording of Tuzenbach’s last lines and of Chebutykin’s answer to the news of the duel, the business of Kulygin in the last act, the words that cross Olga’s in the first, the names of some later productions, and the line from this play to particular dramatists of the waiting stage, are not given.