Three Sisters

When the Three Sisters of Antoni Chekhov first appeared on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater, and it was on January 31, 1901, they did not immediately turn out to be another success of the playwright, on the scale of the earlier Seagulls or Uncle Vana. From the very beginning, the work on this text was extremely difficult for the author. Chekhov narrowly missed the first reading attempt, unable to bear praise for a “brilliant tragedy”, while after all he wrote a “cheerful comedy”. Just in case, he went abroad before the premiere and did not give his address. In the letters he wrote that “If art does the trick, I will go to Monte Carlo and play to the last penny.”

Chekhov captured a certain particular nerve of the human condition of the turn of the century. Behold, the clock has passed the cut-off date of centuries and... nothing happened. And it must be remembered that the hysteria of the expectation of the end of history was then much stronger than at the turn of the millennium a hundred years later! Instead of an apocalyptic boom — a couple in the whistle. The accumulated emotions of a humanity locked in anticipation of the impending end flowed like from a hot teapot — with a slow, drawn-out, irritating squeak. Chekhov flawlessly managed to weave these moods into the gallery of characters of his work, sewing from them a timeless and universal story. Thanks to this, we can still find in it threads and topics close to us. The current year shows that the couple from the whistle has not yet completely escaped. It seems to still float between people, only acquiring a new and greater toxicity. Therefore, we should not be surprised by the often hysterical reactions of the title heroines of the play. Almost completely locked up at home (at most with the possibility of leaving for work and back), quarantined under the military regime, cut off from the outside world, in the very first act they learn from the newspapers about the smallpox epidemic raging in the remote Tsikara—a province inhabited mainly by Chinese, Manchurian and Mongols. On the other hand, in the third act, Natasha informs that there is “influenza” in the city, fearing that her children will not get infected with the ubiquitous influenza virus... Especially since the doctors are for a cure!

It is worth remembering that at the time when Chekhov was writing his work, our modern thinking about man was taking shape. With the theories of Nietzsche, Freud or Darwin, almost all the most important foundations of the contemporary world were violated - with science, medicine and religion at the forefront. All this translates into the heroines of the play. Trapped in their own home, in their own city, they dream of a new, better life, a return to the mythologized Moscow from which they come. They are reluctant to return to the past, which, moreover, is easily blurred and covered with oblivion. Dissatisfied with the present and unable to change it, they devote all their life energy to designing an uncertain and even unrealistic future. Meanwhile, we know, thanks to the aforementioned three patrons of the world of Chekhov's time, that our life is determined mainly only by the sexual drive, the necessity of procreation and the fear of death. And Chekhov wanted to make a comedy out of it... good to himself!

What to do? How to live in this situation of complete helplessness and helplessness? How to endure the overwhelming awareness of one's own finiteness, loneliness and limitations? Chekhov gives neither consolation nor solutions. “Nothing can be done,” as Samuel Beckett would write half a century later in Waiting for Godot. And who is now surprised at the actors, reading in January 1901 the still fresh text of “The Three Sisters”, who instead of smiling at it, began to cry?

Michal Mizera