Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov's Three Sisters

Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov's Three Sisters CAROL STRONGIN TUFTS Chekhov signals his audience from the very beginning. As the curtain rises on a set divided into a "drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom,"J a set which is itself a stage within a stage, we see the Prozorov sisters, each dressed in a costume that is emblematic of her situation in life and her view of herself, and each fixed in the posture that will characterize her throughout the play: "OLGA, wearing the dark-blue uniform dress ofa teacher in the girls' high school, is correcting student exercise books the whole time, either standing or walking to andfro. MASHA, in a black dress, sits with her hat on her knees and reads a little book. IRINA, in a white dress, stands lost in thought" (I, p. 103). In the ballroom behind the columns, Chebutykin, an army doctor, and Tuzenbakh and Solyony, two officers ofthe brigade stationed in the sisters' provincial town, carry on a conversation which the audience cannot yet hear. The occasion for this gathering is the celebration ofIrina's name day, and the date reminds Olga that: Father died exactly one year ago. on this very day, the fifth of May.... It was bitter cold, it was snowing at the time.... 1 remember, as they took Father to the cemetery, the band was playing; at the graveside they fired a salute. He was a general.... given command of the brigade, and together we all left Moscow eleven years ago. I can remember perfectly well the beginning of May in Moscow. By this time in Moscow everything is in full bloom, it's warm, everything is bathed in sunlight. Eleven years have gone by, and I remember everything there as if we had just left yesterday. Dh, dear God in Heaven! This morning I woke up, I saw at once the sunlight everywhere, I saw at once that it was springtime and I felt my heart would break with joy. I wanted desperately to go home again. (I, pp. 103- 104) Yet just as the audience is becoming caught up in Olga's rhapsodic longing for CAROL STRONGIN TUFfS Moscow, Chekhov breaks the mood, letting us hear a fragment of the conversation that has been going on in the ballroom as Chebutykin suddenly exclaims, "The hell you say!" probably in response to Solyony. "Of course, it's all nonsense," adds Tuzenbakh, not only underscoring Chebutykin's inaudible comment to Solyony, but joining the ironic counterpoint to Olga's vision of Moscow as an earthly paradise (I, p. 104). Now, as Olga and Irina go on to speak passionately of the "one dream [which] keeps growing stronger and stronger, one dream.... To leave for Moscow. To sell the house, put an end to everything here, and go off to Moscow.... Yes! As soon as possible, off to Moscow," Chebutykin and Tuzenbakh laugh in the ballroom behind the columns, the stage within the stage (I, p. 104). And it is by setting up this visual image ofhis characters as themselves actors on separate stages where anumber of dramas are being performed simultaneously that Chekhov puts his audience on their guard, letting us know from the start that Moscow is neither the lost Eden of which the sisters dream nor a place to which they will ever return and that no character is necessarily to be taken at his or her own word. Thus Chekhov encourages his audience to temper emotional identification with critical reflection, employing a method here similar to the one he used in his fiction, a method which he described in a letter to Alexei Suvorin, his friend and publisher: "When I write I count upon my reader fully , assuming that he himself will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the telling.'" And in The Three Sisters Chekhov relies on the acuity of his audience to pick up the clues he gives them and so discover the ironic counterpoint against which to judge what the characters do and what they say about themselves and each other. Much of that counterpoint, when...