Recommendations
Books Like Three Sisters
Best books to read after Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's 1900 masterwork — Olga, Masha, and Irina Prozorov dreaming of Moscow in a provincial Russian town, with their brother Andrei and the military officers who come and go — is the most emotionally devastating play in the Russian theatrical tradition and the most influential drama of the twentieth century. These recommendations extend the experience through Chekhov's other major plays, through the European theatrical tradition that Three Sisters transformed, and through fiction that shares its elegiac treatment of unfulfilled desire and provincial life.
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The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
The companion masterwork and Chekhov's final play — the Ranevskaya family's estate and its cherry orchard that cannot be saved, Lopakhin the merchant who buys it, Varya and Anya and their impossible futures. The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are the two great Chekhov plays and the two poles of his mature vision: Three Sisters is organized around a desire that is never fulfilled (Moscow); The Cherry Orchard is organized around a loss that has already been determined before the play begins.
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Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
The earlier companion — Vanya's ruined life given to the wrong cause, Astrov's frustrated idealism about forests, Sonya's unrequited love. Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters are the two plays in which Chekhov is most nakedly identified with the provincial experience of people whose exceptional qualities cannot find adequate expression in the world they inhabit; both end with the characters remaining in the place they cannot escape, facing a future that will give them no more than the past has given.
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The Seagull
by Anton Chekhov
The earliest of the mature plays — the estate beside the lake, Konstantin's failed experimental play, Arkadina and Trigorin, Nina's destroyed ambition. The Seagull is the play in which Chekhov first fully developed the ensemble structure and the technique of talking past each other that Three Sisters extends to its fullest development; it is the best starting point for readers new to Chekhov's theater.
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Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's 1941 companion (published 1956) — the Tyrone family's terrible day and night of accusation and recognition. Long Day's Journey into Night and Three Sisters are organized around the same formal structure: a family trapped together in a place they cannot leave, moving through a continuous time, whose entrapment progressively reveals the depth of each character's isolation. Both are the most emotionally devastating plays in their respective national traditions.
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Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
The most direct inheritor of Chekhov's formal method — Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot who never comes, the language that fills the gap. 'Nothing to be done' is the Beckettian translation of 'To Moscow, to Moscow': a refrain that names the desire that cannot be fulfilled and that the play is organized around waiting for. Beckett acknowledged his debt to Chekhov, and Waiting for Godot is the completion of what Three Sisters begins.
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The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
The contemporary British companion — Wilde's 1895 play is the great comedy of its decade as Three Sisters is the great tragedy of its decade, and reading them together illuminates both: where Wilde's characters are comic because their desires are too easily fulfilled, Chekhov's are comic because their desires can never be fulfilled, and the gap between those two comic visions tells the whole story of the difference between Victorian and Modernist consciousness.
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A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
The defining precursor in the European theatrical tradition of the play about women's unfreedom — Nora Helmer's recognition that she has been a doll in her husband's house. Three Sisters and A Doll's House are companion investigations of women trapped in domestic structures, but Chekhov's sisters lack even Nora's final act of self-liberation: they cannot slam the door because they have nowhere to go except the Moscow that remains forever out of reach.
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Heartbreak House
by George Bernard Shaw
Shaw's 1919 companion in the tradition of the gathering that reveals a class in dissolution — Captain Shotover's household on the eve of the First World War. Shaw subtitled the play 'A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,' acknowledging the direct influence of Chekhov; both Heartbreak House and Three Sisters are organized around a group of people gathered in a house as the world they know comes to an end.
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