Three Sisters, Time, and the Audience

Three Sisters, Time, and the Audience WILLIAM BABULA • IN AN OTHERWISE EXCELLENT ESSAY on Chekhov's dramaturgy, Robert Corrigan once made the following comment upon Chekhov's audience and the process of time: "We have no real sense of time passing."l To put it flatly, I disagree. In Three Sisters - a play which Corrigan specifically includes in his generalization - that is precisely what we do have: an intense consciousness that time is swiftly passing by. It is a feeling shared by the characters on the stage and the audience in their seats. Further, I submit that we sense time fleeting not by noticing that the ages of Olga, Masha, and Irina are respectively twenty-eight, twenty-two, and twenty at the start of Three Sisters and thirty-two, twenty-six, and twenty-four at its conclusion, nor by noting the verbal allusions to time and change - though these references certainly have their effect - but by experiencing a carefully contrived series of changes that take place on the stage. Through Chekhov's artistry we shall share, during an evening of dramatic action, in Tchebutykin's experience of a "life [that] has flashed by like lightning."2 Time matters in the world of the Three Sisters. But, as noted above, the verbal allusions to time do have their effect. Indeed, the play is full of verbal reminders of the passage of time. The day of Act I is both a name-day and the anniversary of the death of the father of the three sisters as Olga informs us in the opening lines of the play: "Father died just a year ago, on this very day - the fifth of May, your name day, Irina." (I, p. 121) Another year has been marked as past just as the interrupting clock strikes twelve to lnark the diurnal passage of time. Physical changes, part of the effect of the time process, are also 365 366 WILLIAM BABULA noted. Olga remarks upon her brother and herself: "Andrey would be nice-looking, but he has grown too fat and that does not suit him. And I have grown older and ever so much thinner." (I, p. 122) When Vershinin, the Battery-Commander, enters, the sisters remember him as a lieutenant from Moscow and Masha sadly complains that he looks so much older now. Kuligin, Masha's foolish husband, appears with a gift for Irina's name day: "The history of our high-school for fifty years, written by myself ." (I, p. 133) Like Tchebutykin's inappropriate gift of a silver samovar the book serves to remind the characters and the audience just how easily so much time can slip by. Finally Masha laments that she has even begun to forget the face of their late mother. Perhaps all of our watches seem to run with the speed of the relentless clock in this household: "seven minutes fast" (I, p. 135). Such verbal allusions - I admit the necessary redundancy - to time and change continue to appear throughout the rest of the play. Though Vershinin can speak of the positive aspect of time, it can bring progress for humanity over the centuries, and the would-be Russian Tusenback can see in time an eternity of love with Masha, various comments by Andrey and the sisters suggest how much they have lost to time. Andrey complains of his life: "How strangely life changes and deceives one! ... Me, a member of the local Rural Board, while I dream every night I am professor of the University of Moscow." (II, p. 142) It is too late; the speeding clock has broken his dreams. Similarly, Irina comments : "I am getting thin and old and ugly and there is nothing, nothing, not the slightest satisfaction, and time is passing." (III, p. 168) Like all the other characters she is changing physically. But Chekhov, as I suggested above, does not only verbalize this sense of the passage of time; he creates dramatic images of change that force us to have experiences parallel to those of the characters on stage. The life of the drama slips by the audience as life itself slips by the characters. Allusions to time and change only reinforce our actual...