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LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND INFIDELITY IN CHEKHOV’S THREE SISTERS

While Three Sisters is today widely regarded as Chekhov’s masterpiece (Karlinsky 155,

Valency, “Vershinin” 218), literary critics and commentators alike have, almost without

exception, alluded to the “elusive” and “indefinable” quality of its theme (Valency, “The Three

Sisters” 186) and have complained that it is “extraordinarily difficult to determine exactly what

the play is about” (Kramer 6), asserting that “it would be extravagant to pretend that its meaning

is, or ever has been, clear ” (Valency, “Vershinin” 218). However, as Valency has himself pointed

out in regard to the play, “on the surface it appears deceptively translucent, not to say

transparent” (“Vershinin” 218), suggesting that a superficial reading of the play is not sufficient

to unearth its deeper meaning. This paper will suggest that if the play is read archetpyally—that

is, at its deepest level—as well as against the backdrop of Chekhov’s own life, it is possible to

discern a very definite theme that holds the play together from beginning to end and gives it

meaning and significance, a theme that will help us to understand the central role that love,

marriage, and infidelity plays in Three Sisters.

The Theme

It has been customary to assign a central role in the play to the “Moscow” motif and to

the sisters’ dream of returning to that city one day (Valency, “Vershinin” 228). Accordingly,

critics have thought that the play is about the essentially destructive nature of illusions (Kramer

61) or the wasted lives of provincial upper-class Russians (Styan 117) or the “tragicomic

ambivalence” of “socially determined inevitabilities” (Esslin 143).

However, if we do not use the Moscow motif as the filter through which to view Three

Sisters, the play takes on a quite different significance. At its deepest level, Three Sisters is almost

certainly about the painful transition from “Innocence” to “Experience” (in William Blake’s

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sense of these terms). It is about having one’s eyes opened to the true nature of the human

condition, as the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened after they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the

Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). The serpent in the three sisters’

Garden of Eden is their longing for true love (that is, love conceived of through the eyes of

innocence), and their eye-opening experience is the realization is that true love is nothing more

than an illusion. As the play opens, the relative peace and tranquility of their little Paradise—

their family estate—is disrupted by the appearance of the new battery commander, Vershinin,

“the lovesick Major.” He awakens in Masha, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to the boring

schoolteacher Kulygin, the repressed desire for true love. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden,

Masha cannot resist the temptation to taste the Forbidden Fruit. Her resulting act of infidelity

has fateful consequences, both for her and for the people with whom her life is inextricably

intertwined.

In an archetypal reading of the play, then, Moscow is still a powerful symbol, but not

one of illusory peace and happiness in some imaginary future. Rather, it symbolizes the

innocence of the three sisters’ childhood—their past. Olga’s wistful longings [“I wanted so

much to go home again. Go home to Moscow!” (Six Plays 227)], expressed very early in the play,

are telling. For the tree sisters, Moscow is not the Promised Land of the future; it is their only

link to the Innocence of their past. In their desire to go back to that Innocence, there is clearly a

presentiment of the Experience into which they are about to be initiated in the course of the

play. It is not surprising, then, that in the face of that painful initiation into life, they should

want to go back to the safety and security of Innocence. Moscow is, moreover, as Irina points

out, the place where their mother is buried (Six Plays 234). How like little children the three

sisters are, clinging to their mother—despite Masha’s protestations to the contrary [“I’m even

beginning to forget what she looked like” (Six Plays 234)]—afraid to face the world! Seen in this

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light, the sarcastic and derisive background comments of Chebutykin and Tusenbach [“A small

chance of that!” and “Of course, it’s nonsense” (Six Plays 226)] in reaction to Olga’s declaration

begin to make sense. There is no reason why it should not have been possible for the sisters to

return physically to Moscow. What the two men are actually hinting at is that there is no going

back to the Innocence of childhood. The sisters must face the rude awakening of Experience that

lies ahead of them.

By the end of the play, expelled from their Garden of Eden by their scheming sister-in-

law Natasha, the three sisters are a little older and a little sadder, but considerably wiser about

love and life as a result of their shared experience. As the curtain falls on the final act, Olga,

Masha, and Irina are no better off in love than they were when the play began, but they have a

new perspective on love and on its place in life. They have come to a “gradual acceptance of the

hard, cold, often painful facts of reality” (Lindheim 56). Olga’s final lines, “If only we knew, if

only we knew!” (Six Plays 288) as the curtain comes down at the end of the play, are, as Durkin

has pointed out, “not cries of epistemological despair as some critics have thought, but the start

of a journey to an elusive goal” (130). This goal is the embracing of the Experience of mature

adulthood. Olga’s words stand in poignant counterpoint to Chebutykin’s nihilistic ravings in

the background: “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters!” (Six Plays 288). Though the three sisters

have been no more successful in love than Chebutykin has, they have not retreated into the

destructive cynicism in which he finds refuge (Kramer 74). They have learned that, in the

immortal words of Tennyson, it is “better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at

all” (In Memoriam, xxvii).

The Significance of the Number Three

Why three sisters? That is the question we must now consider as we turn our attention to

the play itself. In his essay, “Circles, Triads, and Parity in The Three Sisters,” Bristow provides a

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detailed analysis of the occurrence of the number three in the play, showing how Chekhov

deliberately used “trinomial combinations” (84) at various levels to create certain effects or

carry forward the momentum of the play. But Bristow does not address the question of why

Chekhov chose to have three sisters, not two or four.

A possible answer might be found in Kramer’s analysis of the relation between the

sisters in the opening scene of the play. Kramer points out that at this juncture in the play each

sister has a different outlook on life and a different orientation in time: Olga is oriented to the

past, Masha to the present, Irina to the future (70). This threefold distinction might also be

applied to the sisters’ perspectives on love. Olga’s perspective is Love That Might Have Been. She

says wistfully, “[…] if I had married and stayed at home it would have been better […] I would

have loved my husband, very much” (Six Plays 227). Masha’s perspective is Love That Is. She

declares: “I’m in love, in love […] I love Vershinin” (Six Plays 270). Irina’s perspective is Love That

Is to Come. To Olga she confesses: “I’ve been waiting all this time, expecting that we’d be moving

to Moscow, and that there I’d meet the man I’m meant for. I’ve dreamt about him and I’ve loved

him in my dreams […]” (Six Plays 269).

Chekhov balances this triad of sisters with another triad: the three powerful forces of

Love, Marriage, and Infidelity, which form an “Unholy Trinity” in the sister’s lives. In their

various permutations and combinations, these three forces become the seemingly cruel agent of

the sisters’ initiation as they search for happiness in the course of the play. Olga has forgone

marriage, so infidelity is not an option open to her, and we can safely infer that she has not

experienced love either. That she is untouched by the “Trinity” is necessary for her supportive

role in the play. Masha has tasted marriage, but has found it bitter. Love eludes her until the

arrival of Vershinin. In order to taste love (and attain the happiness she is seeking), she must

risk infidelity. Like Olga, Irina has not yet tasted marriage, so infidelity is not open to her either,

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at least not yet, and she, too, has not experienced love. Knowing that happiness may still elude

her, she decides to risk marriage—perhaps in the hope that when her Prince does come some

day, she will be brave enough then to risk infidelity, as her sister has done. By the end of the

play, through their struggle with the three forces, the three sisters come to the realization that

happiness is not to be found in either love or marriage or infidelity—perhaps not to be found at

all. This conclusion was almost certainly Chekhov’s own conclusion about life.

Love, Marriage, and Infidelity in the Dramatic Structure of the Play

A close analysis of the dramatic structure of the play reveals that Chekhov constructed

Three Sisters with extreme care. At one time he actually gave it the sub-title: A Drama in Four Acts.

Why four acts? Because Chekhov intended to devote each of the first three acts to a specific

theme, and to bring the three themes together in a climax in the fourth. It can be shown quite

clearly that the three themes that Chekhov had in mind were Love, Marriage, and Infidelity.

Act I: Love

It is no accident that it is spring when the play begins (Styan 119)—spring, when “a

young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” (Tennyson, Locksley Hall l. 19). It is midday

and brilliant spring sunshine floods the scene. Spring has long been associated with love, and

Chekhov uses this device deliberately to suggest to the audience the theme of his first act.

Love is, indeed, in the air, for almost as soon as the play opens we are introduced to “the

lovesick Major,” Vershinin, who confesses: “I was in love then. It’s different now” (Six Plays

233). We learn from Chebutykin that he was once in love with the girls’ mother (ibid. 231). We

also learn from Olga that Andrey “thinks he’s in love” (ibid. 235). In a playful mood, the sisters

dub Andrey the “lovesick fiddler” and the “lovesick professor” (ibid. 236). Twice in the act,

Chebutykin quotes the line “Nature created us for love alone” (ibid. 236, 241) and Kulygin

reminds us of the old belief that “[w]hen there are thirteen at the table, it means that someone’s

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in love” (ibid. 242). The act ends with Andrey’s passionate declaration of love for Natasha: “I

love you, I love you as I’ve never loved anybody …” (ibid. 243). It is Irina’s birthday—a festive

occasion. Everyone is in high spirits (except Masha) and a superficial air of happiness abounds.

Thus Chekhov makes it clear from the very beginning that this act is about love. By

treating love comedically, however, he presents it in its innocent—even naïve— aspect. He does

this deliberately, because he wants to show, as the play progresses, how deluded this view of

love really is. At this point, love is ostensibly the source of happiness and pleasure and the

cause for merriment and celebration. In the somewhat discordant note of Masha’s mood,

however, we find a foreshadowing of the awakening that is to come.

Act II: Marriage

Act II is about marriage, and about the deleterious effects it has on love. The action takes

place at night. The mood is dark and in stark contrast to the midday sunshine of Act I. Gone are

the festive atmosphere and the celebration. An air of domesticity, subdued and stale, pervades

the Prozorov household. We realize that between Act I and Act II a wedding has taken place:

Andrey has got married to Natasha. But already their love has gone sour. It is carnival week,

but the “hausfrau” Natasha has contrived to stop the carnival people from coming over on the

pretext that her son Bobik is ill. Marriage seems to have taken all the fun out of life.

Through the course of Act II, there is a great deal of talk about marriage as Chekhov

reveals the inner secrets of Andrey’s unhappy union as well as of the other two marriages in the

play: Masha’s (to Kulygin), and Vershinin’s (to an off-stage character). We learn from the

mouths of Andrey, Masha, and Vershinin, that their marriages are quite intolerable.

Chebutykin, who is in the habit of announcing bits of trivia gleaned from the newspaper at odd

moments in the play, adds his voice to the chorus by informing us, somewhat irrelevantly, that

Balzac was married in Berditchev (Six Plays 251). It is worth noting, however, that Irina repeats

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his observation, as if to underscore for the audience Chekhov’s intention for this act, namely, to

explore the theme of marriage.

By the end of the act, the audience has gained new insight into to characters’ views on

marriage. This growing insight is parallelled by an awakening that is taking place on stage among

the characters themselves: it is beginning to dawn on the sisters that their innocence is gradually

slipping away and that it is Andrey’s marriage to Natasha that has precipitated this process. The

curtain falls on Irina, alone and dejected, crying out desperately for a return to the happiness and

security of an irretrievable past: “Oh, to go to Moscow! To Moscow! Moscow!” (ibid. 259).

Act III: Infidelity

If one’s marriage is unhappy, then the only possibility for experiencing happiness is

infidelity (divorce not being an option for Chekhov or his characters). Chekhov takes up this

theme in Act III, against the backdrop of the fire that is raging through the town. It is clear that

Chekhov wanted the fire to have significance, for in his stage directions he indicates: “A

window, red with the glow of the fire, can be seen through the open door” (Six Plays 260). Fire

is a fitting symbol for this theme, for the fire of love and passion can burn brightly, but it can

also be terribly destructive. As the flames consume the homes of the townsfolk, so infidelity is

eating away at the three marriages in the play.

Although Natasha’s infidelity is hinted at earlier in the play, in this act for the first time

it is made explicit when the drunken Chebutykin confronts those present with her “disgusting

affair” (Six Plays 265). They ignore his remarks and turn their attention back to the fire. Later

that night, Masha makes her confession to her sisters of her own infidelity. She defends herself

by saying that it is her “fate,” her “destiny,” and then asking rhetorically: “Is it wrong?” (ibid.)

She is not ashamed. “You’ve got to make your own choices,” she says (ibid.). She is obviously

maturing gradually into Experience.

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Like Act II, Act III closes with Irina. She announces her intention of marrying the Baron

even though she does not love him. She will marry him on one condition though: “I’ll agree to

marry him, if only we can go to Moscow!” (ibid. 272). Here the cry for Moscow in not a cry for

the return to innocence. Rather, it is an expression of hope that she will still meet her true love

there, and then she too will be ushered into the forbidden pleasures of infidelity. Thus, the act

confronts the theme of infidelity head on, and closes with the prospect of further infidelity, as if

to reinforce the point that has just been made.

Act IV: Epilogue

The final act takes place in the autumn: the season associated with maturation and

harvest. Chekhov could not have chosen a more appropriate season, for the three sisters are to

be initiated into maturity and Experience by the end of this act, which is also the end of the

play. They are also about to reap a bitter harvest, for such is the nature of Experience. The act is

dominated by leave-taking. As it begins, good-byes are already being said. Good-byes are

repeated throughout the act, some considerably more painful than others. Behind these on-stage

good-byes, there are more subtle good-byes: good-bye to Love for Masha; good-bye to Marriage

for Irina; good-bye to Happiness for all three sisters. The act ends with the most painful good-

bye of all: the good-bye to Innocence.

The act is set in the garden, not inside the house (as the other three acts are), and at one

point in the act, Masha cries out “I am not going into that house, ever again!” (Six Plays 285),

suggesting that the sisters’ expulsion from the Paradise of Innocence is now complete. For the

three sisters, “Paradise Lost” is not just the loss of their home. It is the loss of their youthful

dreams and optimism, the loss of their illusions about love and marriage, the loss of their

Innocence. Masha has been denied both Love and Infidelity, and Irina has been denied Marriage

and the possibility of future Love. That is the harsh reality of their fate. Olga is there to prop them

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up as they deal with this crushing realization. As they stand outside their former home, the three

sisters have a new perspective on life. As Pitcher has pointed out: “The sisters feel perhaps closer

to one another now than they have ever done before” (quoted in Kramer 70). They have moved

“from both naïve faith and despair to a heightened awareness of possibilities in life […]” (ibid.), or,

in the language used in this analysis, from Innocence to Experience.

Love as Portrayed in the Play

Love gets a great deal of attention in Three Sisters and is presented in a variety of forms

and incarnations. Chekhov gives us a hearty mix of love triangles, unrequited love, idealized

love, forbidden love, lustful love, blind love, sublimated love, “love gone awry” (Kramer 62).

Love triangles are not uncommon in Chekhov’s plays, notably in The Cherry Orchard

(Pitcher 102) and in The Seagull (Styan 108). However, while Chekhov’s love triangles are often

comic, as in The Cherry Orchard (Pitcher 102), the triangles in Three Sisters have tragic

undertones. As Bristow has pointed out (78-79), there are two sets of three love triangles in the

play. The three primary love triangles are between (1) Irina, Tuzenbach, and Solyony; (2)

Masha, Kulygin, and Vershinin; and (3) Natasha, Protopopov, and Andrey. The subsidiary love

triangles, each involving at least one off-stage character, are between (1) Masha, Vershinin, and

Vershinin’s wife; (2) Irina, Tuzenbach, and the man of Irina’s dreams; (3) the sisters’ mother,

General Prozorov, and Chebutykin. This maze of overlapping love triangles is Chekhov’s

device for bringing the three sisters to a more mature understanding of love. Love is not as

simple, pure, and innocuous as it appears at first. There is a dark side to love, namely, that it is

not always reciprocated and can therefore cause pain. Ironically, love can also be used as an

opiate to dull the pain caused by life’s other disappointments (Valency, “Vershinin” 231), as

both Masha and Vershinin (and Chebutykin before them) have discovered.

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This “mature” view of love is an undercurrent throughout the play. Love triangles

imply the sad fact of unrequited love, and several of the characters in the play fall victim to it.

The most obvious of these is Kulygin, whose love for Masha is not returned. Likewise, Andrey’s

love for Natasha is a one-way affair. Irina’s outright rejection of Solyony makes him a victim

too. Irina does not love Tuzenbach either, and though she finally agrees to marry him, this fact

does not make him any less a victim. Irina herself is in some senses a victim, since she is unable

to experience the love of her dream man. Initially Vershinin’s love for Masha is unrequited as

well. But Masha grows to love him—by a strange and rather circuitous route: first she thinks

him strange, then she pities him, and then she finally falls in love with him (Six Plays 270). We

do not know if Vershinin’s wife loves him or not, but if she does, her love is certainly not

returned. Likewise, we are not sure whether Chebutykin’s love for the sisters’ mother was

returned, since Chebutykin claims he cannot remember (ibid. 277), but if it was not, then he is

the final victim; if it was, then General Prozorov is.

Other forms of love provide a rich texture to the play: Irina’s love for her dream man is

idealized love. Vershinin’s love for Masha and hers for him are both forbidden love, since they

are both married. We can conclude that Natasha’s love for Protopopov is probably lustful love,

since her second child is probably his, given the fact that he is assigned to look after this child in

Act VI (Six Plays 286). Andrey’s love for Natasha is blind, as is evidenced by the fact that he

refuses to see her infidelity and admits that he does not know why he fell in love with her and

still loves her (ibid. 279).

Olga’s love is of the sublimated variety: she has sublimated her love into performing her

family duties, teaching, and doing social work. As Kramer has pointed out, “she expresses her

love in her readiness to help with both clothing and lodging for those who have been left

homeless by the fire” in Act III (69). In this respect she comes closest of all the characters in the

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play to Chekhov himself, who did much the same thing with his own love. Forgoing marriage

until the age of 41, he looked after his tubercular brother Nikolai until Nikolai’s death in1889

(Clyman 22-23) and took an active part in social work, labouring tirelessly on two occasions to

help victims of famine and cholera (Yarmolinsky 11).

While Olga sublimates her love into social work, Solyony, the quixotic captain,

transmogrifies his love into a bizarre form of sadistic humour. Of Bobik (Andrey’s son) he says:

“If that child were mine, I’d fry him in a pan and eat him” (Six Plays 252); and to Vershinin’s

query about what the wine they are drinking is made of, he replies: “Beetles!” (ibid. 241). In

Solyony, as in Olga, we find echoes of Chekhov’s own way of dealing with love. As his letters to

Lika Mizinova reveal, Chekhov used the language of Mock Romance (Pitcher 96) and sadistic

eroticism (Eekman 266-67) as a defense against his fear of the commitment that love requires.

Solyony fancies himself a second Lermontov (Six Plays 254), and like Lermontov imagines that

love is a matter than can be settled by a duel. Unlike Lermontov, who actually met his death in a

duel over a woman, Solyony survives his duel with Tezenbach, but remains a lost soul.

For the characters in Three Sisters, as for Chekhov himself, love is a messy business. It

never works out right. It gets distorted by the mundane realities of life. Thus, by the end of the

play, the characters (and the audience) have a somewhat better understanding of the true nature

of love, but are still unable to pin it down. Like happiness, it remains elusive to those who would

reach out to grasp it, being snatched away from them by the cruel hand of unrelenting Fate.

Marriage as Portrayed in the Play

In Three Sisters love and marriage stand in opposition to each other. This is clear from

Olga’s remarks in Act IV: “After all, people don’t marry for love, but to fulfill their duty. At

least, I think so, and I’d marry even if I weren’t in love, I’d marry anyone that proposed to me,

as long as he was a decent man. I’d even marry an old man” (Six Plays 269). Olga’s view of love

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and marriage is very different from the one Chekhov expressed in a letter to his brother

Alexander dated August 28, 1888, namely, that marriage should be based on love (Eekman 265).

It is clear that Chekhov had changed his mind by the time he wrote Three Sisters a decade later,

for the standoff between love and marriage pervades the play. For example, in Act II,

Chebutykin tells Andrey how marriage had come between him and the woman he loved: “I’ve

never had time to get married […] I was always very much in love with your mother and she

was married […]” (Six Plays 256).

In the view of Chekhov and his characters, marriage changes everything for the worse—

even love. Irina observes that, “Andrey has become awfully dull. He’s getting old and since he’s

been living with that woman he’s lost all his ambition!” (ibid. 268). That theme of change for the

worse is echoed in Masha’s comments to Vershinin: “[…] You see, I was married when I was

eighteen. I was so afraid of my husband because he was a teacher, and I had just finished school

myself. He seemed terribly brilliant then, very learned and important. But now, unfortunately, it’s

quite different” (ibid. 246).

That things change for the worse after marriage is probably so because the characters in

Three Sisters see marriage as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In other words, they

have got married for the wrong reasons. While Chebutykin, who never did get married, sees it

as an antidote for loneliness (Six Plays 256), both Andrey and Irina see it as a means of escape

from the unbearable realities of their lives. In seeking refuge in escapism, they are no different

from most of the characters in Chekhov’s other plays (Corrigan xxii). Andrey seeks to escape

from his responsibility to his sisters by marrying Natasha (Kramer 62, 63) and Irina agrees to

marry Tusenbach even though she does not love him because she cannot bear living with

Andrey and Natasha any longer: she is bored, she hates the room she lives in, and she cannot

stand having her nose rubbed in Natasha’s infidelity (Six Plays 276-77).

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The irony is that while marriage can be a means of escape it can also be a trap. In a letter

dated March 3, 1887 to his friend Kiseleva, Chekhov wrote that he considered the noose an

appropriate “symbol of love and marital happiness” (Clyman 22). For all three, Andrey, Masha,

and Vershinin, marriage turns out to be a trap. Early in the Act II, Andrey confides in the

somewhat deaf porter, Ferapont: “I’ve got to talk to someone, and my wife doesn’t seem to

understand me […]” (Six Plays 245), and later he confides to Chebutykin: “I do love Natasha,

but sometimes she seems so completely vulgar, that I don’t know what to think, and then I can’t

understand why I love her—or why I ever did love her […]” (ibid. 279). In Act VI he declares: “I

hate my life as I am living it now […]” (ibid. 282). Masha feels equally trapped in her marriage

to Kulygin, telling Vershinin: “When I’m with my husband’s colleagues, I’m simply miserable”

(ibid. 246). Her subconscious repetition throughout the play of Pushkin’s line about the green

oak with the gold chain around it aptly conveys her sense of being bound by the chains of

marriage and recalls vividly Chekhov’s own image of the noose, mentioned earlier. No less

disillusioned with marriage, Vershinin despises his wife and complains to Masha about her

intolerable quarrelsome behaviour that morning (ibid. 247).

The three marriages in Three Sisters have broken down because the husbands and wives

are unable to communicate at any deeply personal level with each other. This inability to

communicate seems to be a stock feature of Chekhov’s characters in all his plays (Styan 109).

His characters seem to be unable “to establish a close relationship with another” (Kramer 62)

and this uncertain relationship to others seems to be related to the individual’s “uncertainty of

his relationship to himself” (Corrigan xxii). Andrey articulates the problem in Act VI as follows:

“The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie to their wives, and pretend they don’t

see or hear anything […]” (Six Plays 282). In Three Sisters wives are presented either as scheming

and manipulative or distant and uninvolved. Thus, Natasha manipulates Andrey into gradually

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displacing the sisters from their house and Vershinin’s wife tries to “frighten” (ibid. 259) him by

continually threatening to commit suicide. The only other wife in the play, Masha, appears

detached and distant from her husband, dismissing his offers of love and suggesting, by her

mocking conjugation of the Latin verb amo (ibid. 267), that his love is all academic, that is, in his

head, not in his heart. Perhaps she is justified in this accusation, because Kulygin is indeed

rather bookish and academic, like Andrey and so many of Chekhov’s other male characters

who, otherwise intelligent, seem strangely inarticulate when it comes to matters of the heart

(Styan 109). Kulygin’s repeated avowals of love for his wife (Six Plays 239, 240, 264, 267, 275,

276) come across as strangely suspicious. One wonders whom he is trying to convince.

Whatever the case, though, the husbands and wives in the play do not communicate very well

with each other. Thus the standoff between love and marriage is closely paralleled by the

standoff between husbands and wives. It is no wonder then that wives, in the words of

Vershinin, “wear” their husbands out and husbands “exhaust” their wives (ibid. 247).

All three marriages in the play are hopelessly dysfunctional. The message is clear:

marriage is undesirable. Chekhov had already hinted at this in Act I, when he makes Vershinin

say: “Well, if I could begin my life all over again, I wouldn’t marry. […] No, no!” (Six Plays 238).

In Act II, Andrey tells Chebutykin: “One shouldn’t marry. One shouldn’t marry, it’s so boring

(Six Plays 256). This negative attitude to marriage is hardly surprising from Chekhov. It is not

likely that he was ever exposed to models of happy and successful marriages, that of his own

parents being characterized by his father’s tyranny. His longing for the ideal marriage and his

simultaneous skepticism that such a thing even exists can be seen in the unmistakably sarcastic

tone of a remark he made in a letter to Maria V. Kiseleva from Rome in 1891, dated April 1:

“[…] I want to marry a Dutch girl and be painted with her beside the spotless little cottage on a

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tray” (Portable Chekhov 623). For him, good marriages were as absurd and divorced from reality

as the kitschy souvenirs that portrayed them.

Infidelity as Portrayed in the Play

The theme of infidelity is made explicit in the play in a most unusual way. In Act II,

Chebutykin returns home quite drunk, picks up a clock, and then quite deliberately—it seems—

drops it, commenting nonchalantly, and with no remorse whatsoever: “Smashed to

smithereens!” (Six Plays 265). The clock belonged to the woman he once loved: the sister’s

mother. It is not clear why Chekhov added this detail into the play. Kramer suggests that

Chebutykin is attempting “to destroy time itself” since it is time that is separating him from his

love (the woman to whom the clock belonged) or that he might be denying that his love for her

ever existed (64). Lindheim suggests that it is the shattering of the sister’s illusions (56). Bristow

speculates that Chebutykin may in fact have had an affair with the sister’s mother and that

Irina, of whom Chebutykin is extremely fond, may in fact have been Chebutykin’s biological

daughter (79). If this was indeed the case, then the sister’s mother’s fling with the young doctor

was the first act of infidelity. And Chebutykin’s breaking of the clock might signify his

denunciation of that youthful indiscretion. It is interesting to note that while Chebutykin

declares his love for the sister’s mother three times during the course of the play, when Masha

corners him in the final act with the question: “Did she love you?” he pauses and then says: “I

can’t remember any more.” (Six Plays 277). What could account for this strange lapse of

memory? Could it be that he was protecting her and the girls, that he did not want the girls’

memory of her to be marred by the stain of inifidelity?

Whatever the case, right after breaking clock, Chebutykin confronts the assembled

group with Natasha’s infidelity. “Natasha’s having a disgusting little affair with Protopopov,

and you don’t see it” (ibid. 265). Of course, the others have seen it, and Chebutykin knows that.

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What he is condemning is the fact that nobody has done anything about it. They have chosen, in

typical fashion, to look the other way and pretend that nothing is amiss. While Chebutykin

condemns Natasha’s liaison with Protopopov as “a disgusting affair” (Six Plays 265), he is

strangely understanding of Masha’s love for Vershinin. In the final act, he gives it tacit approval

when Masha asks him: “Is my man here?” and he, understanding correctly that she means her

lover, not her husband, says: “Not yet” (ibid. 277). When Masha goes on to speak of the stolen

moments of happiness she has had with the man she loves, his silence is significant: he has no

condemnation to make.

The sisters themselves are not particularly enamoured of Natasha, and while they are

aware of her infidelity and disapprove of it because Natasha has made their brother a

laughingstock, they are too genteel to talk about it: when Kulygin asks what Protopopov’s

troika is doing outside the house, Irina responds: “Don’t ask me questions, please. I’m tired.”

(Six Plays 259). Yet, when Masha confesses her own infidelity, Irina allows herself to be drawn

into Masha’s embrace and Olga makes only a half-hearted attempt at protesting (Six Plays 270).

Andrey’s and Kulygin’s reactions to their wives’ infidelity are quite different. Andrey

refuses to admit that Natasha is being unfaithful, although he knows this to be true deep down

inside. In Act III, he confronts his sisters much against their wish, on several issues, the first of

which is their attitude to his wife. He declares: “I repeat: she’s an honest, honorable person, and

all your complaints against here—and I must say this—are all in your imagination, and nothing

more […]” (Six Plays 271). This vehement denial is in stark contrast to Kulygin’s magnanimous

acceptance of Masha’s love for Vershinin. In the final act, as Masha breaks down under the

strain of her wrenching good-bye with Vershinin, Kulygin reassures her with comforting

words: “Never mind, let her cry, let her […] My good Masha, my dear, sweet Masha […] You’re

my wife, and I’m happy in spite of everything […] I’m not complaining, I won’t blame you—

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Olga is my witness […]We’ll start our life over again just like it used to be, and I won’t say a

word […] Not a word […]” (Six Plays 285).

Infidelity was not an uncommon subject with Chekhov. He talked, wrote, and joked

about it quite frequently. Early in adult life, he had written to a friend:

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity. (Quoted in Yarmolinsky 5).

Yarmolinsky wryly comments: “Eventually the mistress came to supplant the wife” (ibid.) While

Chekhov did not have a literal mistress in real life, as far as we know, he did talk a great deal

about infidelity with his literal wife, Olga Knipper. Just before they were married in 1901, he

wrote to her, in a letter dated March 16:

You are unfaithful to me because, as you write, you are a human being and a woman; oh, very well, be unfaithful, only be the good, splendid person that you are. I am an old geezer, it is impossible to keep from being unfaithful to me, I understand that very well, and if I happen to be unfaithful to you, you will excuse it, because you realize that though the beard turns gray, the devil’s at play. Isn’t that so? (Portable Chekhov 629).

One cannot help but see a parallel in these comments to Kulygin’s reaction to Masha’s infidelity

(discussed above), and one cannot help wondering if Chekhov perhaps modelled Kulygin after

himself. What Chekhov seems to be suggesting here (and in the play as well) is that infidelity is

part of human nature and that it is therefore a necessary part of the initiation into Experience that

everyone must go through to reach maturity. For the three sisters, this maturity is reached in the

final act—anticlimactic though this denouement might appear to be.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Chekhov’s Three Sisters is carefully constructed around the trinity of

Love, Marriage, and Infidelity. The play introduces us to love in all its various forms: idealized

love, forbidden love, unrequited love, love lost, love as yet unborn. It shows us through the

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device of a series of love triangles how little love really has to do with the social institution of

marriage, that in fact the two stand somewhat in opposition to each other. The only way to

bridge the gap between love and marriage is to resort to infidelity. Through the interplay of

these three forces, we are brought from the “Innocence” of childhood to the “Experience” of our

mature years. We also come to the realization that the search for happiness is illusory and that

happiness itself is elusive; that happiness is certainly not to be found in either Love or Marriage

or Infidelity; that when we realize that bitter truth about the nature of life, we will be initiated

into true maturity.

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WORKS CITED

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Clyman, Toby W. “Chekhov: A Biography.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby W.

Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 17-33. Print. Chekhov, Anton. Six Plays of Chekhov. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1962. Print. Eekman, Thomas. “Chekhov as Correspondent.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby W.

Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 255-271. Print. Esslin, Martin. “Chekhov and the Modern Drama.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby W.

Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 135-145. Print. Karlinsky, Simon. “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests, and Three Sisters.” Chekhov’s Great Plays:

A Critical Anthology. Ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli. New York: New York University Press, 1981. 144-160. Print.

Kramer, Karl D. “Three Sisters, or Taking a Chance on Love.” Chekhov’s Great Plays: A

Critical Anthology. Ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli. New York: New York University Press, 1981. 61-75. Print.

Lindheim, Ralph. “Chekhov’s Major Themes.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby W.

Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 55-69. Print. Rayfield, Donald. “Chekhov and the Literary Tradition.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed.

Toby W. Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 35-51. Print. Styan, J. L. “Chekhov’s Dramatic Technique.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby W.

Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 107-122. Print. Terras, Victor. “Chekhov at Home: Russian Criticism.” A Chekhov Companion. Ed. Toby

W. Clyman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 167-183. Print. Valency, Maurice. “The Three Sisters.” Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov. Ed. Thomas A.

Eekman. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co. 1989. 186-192. Print. Valency, Maurice. “Vershinin.” Chekhov’s Great Plays: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Jean-

Pierre Barricelli. New York: New York University Press, 1981. 218-232. Print.

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Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, ed. The Portable Chekhov. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin

Books, 1975. Print.