Three Sisters

Masha is the second-oldest Prozorov sister, and she is the most pessimistic and the saddest of the three. When she was only 18, Masha married Kulygin. At the time, he was a high school teacher, and Masha had just graduated from school. From her fresh-faced, naïve perspective, she saw him as brilliant and sophisticated. However, after several years of marriage, Masha has grown up and started to see Kulygin with less idealistic eyes, and she is now disappointed in the man she married. In Act I, as the sisters await their military guests for Irina’s birthday party, Masha cannot stop crying, and her sadness annoys her sisters. Like her sisters, Masha is dissatisfied and bored; She is unhappy in her marriage and desperate for a purpose. While Olga looks to the past and Irina looks to the future, Masha remains mired in the present. As Kulygin’s wife, she doesn’t work, but she is reportedly a talented pianist. However, at a suggestion that Masha play in a benefit for the fire victims, Kulygin comments that he would have to ask his headmaster if it would be appropriate. His attitude suggests that Masha’s talents and artistic expression are stifled, implying that this is why she has not played in four years. Masha finds fleeting happiness in her affair with Vershinin, but their love is necessarily short-lived since both parties are married and Vershinin must go to Poland with the rest of the brigade at the end of the play. Masha confides in her sisters about her affair, although Olga disapproves and doesn’t want to hear about it. Masha tends to speak with brutal honesty and is often unconcerned with tact. When Vershinin leaves at the end of the play, Masha collapses in grief, not bothering to stifle her reaction in front of Kulygin. However, Kulygin is so devoted to Masha that he is happy to overlook her affair as long as she returns to him.

Irina, who turns 20 in Act I, is the youngest sister and the most optimistic of the three. She too longs for something to give her life meaning and yearns to go to Moscow. At the start of the play, Irina feels hopeful for the future. She badly wants to experience falling in love, and she imagines that if she and her sisters can only go back to Moscow, she will certainly find love there. During her birthday party in Act I, Irina announces that she has realized that the meaning of life and the key to happiness is work. She decides that she will find a job that will give her purpose and fulfillment. However, the job she takes at the telegram office only makes her miserable and even makes her less compassionate. However, she remains optimistic and is certain that she has simply chosen the wrong job. As the youngest sister, Irina has trouble convincing others to treat her as a woman rather than a child, although she still becomes excited when visitors bring her little childish gifts. She also has suitors among the soldiers, most notably Tusenbach and Solyony. Irina is repulsed by Solyony and harshly rejects his advances, but at Olga’s urging, she decides to marry Tusenbach even as she explains to him that she cannot love him. At the end of the play, Irina is excited about her future; she has taken a job as a teacher, and Tusenbach has found employment in a brick factory. They are prepared to leave the province for their new life, but Tusenbach dies in a duel at Solyony’s hand, and Irina’s plans for a new future are snatched away. However, Irina decides to become a teacher anyway although she knows that the family will never return to Moscow.

Andrey is the fourth Prozorov sibling. He is introverted and does not appreciate the constant traffic of guests in the house. He opts to spend most of his time in his room, studying, working, and playing his violin. At the beginning of the play, he and his sisters expect that he will become a professor and a scholar as their father wanted. This career plan would necessitate the four siblings’ long-desired move to Moscow. However, Andrey’s dreams are derailed when he falls in love with Natasha, a meek local girl with a terrible fashion sense whom his sisters believe to be too provincial. He proposes to Natasha at the end of Act I in a grand romantic gesture as she cries over the sisters’ teasing. However, by Act II, he has become the suffering husband who feels trapped by his now assertive and domineering wife and the baby she dotes on. Unlike the sisters, Andrey doesn’t speak so openly about his feelings of despair and growing dread about his miserable marriage and Natasha’s increasingly overbearing manner. Andrey also starts gambling and loses large amounts of money, eventually mortgaging the house to pay his mounting debts. With no confidante, Andrey resorts to unloading his worries on Ferapont, whom he knows is unable to hear him. Andrey admits that instead of fulfilling his dreams, he is now stuck in this small town with his vindictive wife and two children, and his highest aspiration is to gain a full-time position on the District Council. When he desperately confides to Chebutykin, the doctor tells him in no uncertain terms that he needs to run away. However, it is clear that Andrey will not take action any more than the other characters will, and he is doomed to a prison of unhappiness as he clings to the vague hope that the future will be better.

Kulygin, who is Masha’s husband, insists at every opportunity that he is exceedingly happy and satisfied with his life and marriage. Kulygin clearly adores Masha and when Masha was young and naïve, she once loved and respected him, seeing him as a brilliant teacher. Now, however, Masha is older and less idealistic, and she is disappointed by what she sees in her husband. Kulygin enjoys his job as a teacher and is well-liked by his students, but he prefers to maintain the illusion that Masha still loves and esteems him. Kulygin’s willful ignorance of Masha’s unhappiness sometimes inadvertently borders on cruelty, for Masha’s despair is perpetually unseen and unaddressed. Kulygin also makes a fool of himself as he continues to profess his happiness with his marriage while Masha indulges in an affair with Vershinin. At the end of the play, however, he subtly suggests that he has always looked away and allowed this affair to continue, perhaps as a kindness to his wife, and he is now content in the knowledge that with Vershinin’s departure, Masha will return to him. Kulygin comments at one point that if he hadn’t met Masha, he could have happily married Olga instead. Although he rushes to reassert his love for Masha, the narrative implies that he and Olga may have made a better, happier match.

In Act I, Natasha is shy and awkward. She never wears the right clothes and badly wants the approval of Andrey’s sisters. She is a local girl, and the sisters see her as uncultured, unworldly, and unworthy of their attention and their brother’s love. By Act II, Natasha has become Andrey’s wife and the mother of his first child, and she likewise undergoes a comically stark transformation that is made to appear instantaneous by the fact that Act II is set approximately one year after Act I. Gone is any trace of meekness or a sweet nature, for Natasha has now become a full member of the Prozorov household, and her newfound social status is compounded by her children. The Prozorovs have clearly underestimated Natasha, for she forcefully takes control of the household with all the subtlety of a Russian winter. While the Prozorov siblings are worrying about Moscow and the meaning of life, Natasha systematically drives each of them, along with their nurse, out of the house. Andrey is left confused about the nastiness he never saw in the woman he married, and he is left to try to convince himself that Natasha is still a good woman. At some point, Natasha begins to have an affair with Protopopov, a small-town politician whom the Prozorovs dislike and look down upon. Natasha represents the hard-boiled resilience of the working class, for she easily moves in and takes the house from the soft-handed nobility, thereby highlighting The Decay of the Aristocracy.

Vershinin arrives as a new officer in town, introduces himself to the Prozorovs, and quickly becomes another fixture in their house. He too is imprisoned in a miserable marriage that began with deep romance and love. Ironically, he complains that his wife speaks pretentiously about philosophy even as he does the same, and he often pontificates about the meaning of life among the Prozorovs and his fellow officers. He has two daughters with his wife, and he is often frustrated by his wife’s frequent suicide attempts, which he sees as more attention-seeking than earnest. Vershinin starts an affair with Masha that lasts several years; the connection ends when he must leave town with the rest of the brigade. Vershinin and Masha’s affair suggests that a relationship can be passionate and happy even if it is only temporary.

Tusenbach is a lieutenant in the army. He is in his late 20s, and he is deeply in love with Irina. Like Irina, he has lived a life of privileged nobility, and he therefore joins her in the conviction that work (which he has never done) must be the key to happiness and fulfillment. Tusenbach decides to resign from his military office to become a laborer, and although Irina openly admits that she doesn’t love him, she decides to marry him, acting on Olga’s advice. Unlike Kulygin, who has perfected the art of selective perception, Tusenbach is bothered by the knowledge that Irina cannot return his love. Tusenbach will also become a worker in a brick factory, although he either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know that manual labor is grueling, thankless, and boring rather than profound and meaningful. His decision to marry Irina regardless of these difficulties suggests that he is doomed to a marriage just as miserable as those of his companions. Because Tusenbach is no longer in the military, he is not bound to honor Solyony’s challenge to a duel, but rather than refusing and going on to live his life with the woman he loves, he agrees to the duel and is summarily killed offstage.

Solyony is an army captain who follows the other officers to socialize at the Prozorov home, and the implication is that he would certainly never be invited for his own sake. In every scene, he is highly unpleasant and shows his ineptitude at the niceties of social decorum, and he is also prone to expressing unprovoked malice. In every social interaction, Solyony is unflinchingly inappropriate, sometimes clucking like a chicken or commenting about frying babies for dinner. He doesn’t merely say the wrong thing; instead, he makes blatantly vulgar statements that perplex his companions. Out of an obligatory sense of polite hospitality, the Prozorovs do not turn him away from their gatherings, but they do find his presence to be irksome. Solyony is perpetually angry, but only on rare occasions does he manage to articulate why. He acknowledges that he has trouble socializing in groups, and he also reveals that some of his anger arises from his love for Irina. When he confesses his feelings, he asserts that she understands him as others do not, but Irina is thoroughly horrified by the entire interaction. Because he cannot make her love him, he promises to kill any rivals for his love, thereby tacitly ensuring that he will destroy her future happiness. Having won several duels, Solyony is a formidable opponent who often gets into fights, and his declarations of violence foreshadow the fact that he will kill Tusenbach in a duel at the end of the play.