Reading Order
Three Sisters Reading Order
Three Sisters (1900) by Anton Chekhov is the most emotionally devastating of the four great Chekhov plays — the Prozorov sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina, and their brother Andrei, in a provincial Russian town, sustained through four acts by the dream of returning to Moscow, and never going. The play's structural irony is total: the audience understands from the beginning that the sisters will never get to Moscow, that their various strategies (waiting, working, marrying, hoping) will all fail, and that the play's arc is not toward Moscow but toward the gradual extinction of the hope that made the dream possible. Chekhov wrote the play in 1900 for the Moscow Art Theatre and for Olga Knipper (whom he married in 1901), who played Masha — the sister who has the most intense experience of the play because Masha knows, most clearly of the three, that Moscow is not coming. The play contains the most famous stage direction in Chekhov: the Baron Tuzenbach's exit in Act Four to fight the duel from which he will not return, and the sound of the three sisters' final speech: 'If only we knew, if only we knew!'
Where to start
Three Sisters (1900) — any modern translation; Michael Frayn's is widely regarded as the most theatrical, Chekhov's biographer Rosamund Bartlett's the most faithful. Best Chekhov reading order: The Seagull → Uncle Vanya → Three Sisters → The Cherry Orchard
Complete Three Sisters Book List
- 1Buy
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov·1900·The most emotionally devastating of the four great Chekhov plays — Olga, Masha, Irina, Andrei, and the dream of Moscow that is never fulfilled. Written in 1900 for the Moscow Art Theatre; premiered under Stanislavski's direction; the founding text of modern theatrical naturalism alongside The Cherry Orchard - 2Buy
The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov·1904·The companion and the last play Chekhov completed — the Ranevskaya family's loss of the cherry orchard, which is sold at auction and the trees felled at the play's end. The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are the companion late Chekhov plays: both are organized around a loss that is coming and cannot be prevented, and both end with the loss complete and the characters scattered - 3Buy
Uncle Vanya
Anton Chekhov·1899·The companion — Vanya's long years of service to the professor Serebryakov and the devastating recognition that the service was wasted. Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters are companion Chekhov plays about people organized around an illusion (Vanya's belief in Serebryakov; the sisters' belief in Moscow) and the devastation of its removal - 4Buy
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov·1896·The earlier companion — Nina, Trigorin, Treplev, and Arkadina at the country estate. The Seagull and Three Sisters are companion Chekhov plays about aspiration and its disappointment: Nina's aspiration is for a career on the stage; the sisters' aspiration is for Moscow. Both ask what remains after the aspiration has failed - 5Buy
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill·1946·O'Neill's companion — the regulars at Harry Hope's bar and the pipe dreams that sustain them. Companion investigations of the same philosophical problem: can people live without the belief that tomorrow will be different? Chekhov and O'Neill both answer no, but where Chekhov's characters face their hopelessness with a kind of elegiac sadness, O'Neill's are destroyed by the attempt to live without illusion - 6Buy
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett·1953·Beckett's companion in the theatrical tradition of the play organized around waiting and the gap between hope and its fulfillment — Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. The sisters waiting for Moscow and Didi and Gogo waiting for Godot are companion theatrical images of the same condition: the human need to believe that something is coming that will change everything, and the evidence that nothing is coming - 7Buy
The Years
Virginia Woolf·1937·Woolf's companion in the literary tradition of the novel organized around a family across decades and the question of what is lost in the passage of time — the Pargiter family from 1880 to the 1930s. The Years and Three Sisters are companion investigations of the same question: what happens to aspiration across time, and what remains after the life that was hoped for has not materialized - 8Buy
A Taste of Honey
Shelagh Delaney·1958·Delaney's companion in the theatrical tradition of the play about people who are unable to escape the circumstances of their lives despite wanting something different — Jo, her mother Helen, and Jo's pregnancy in Salford. A Taste of Honey and Three Sisters are companion plays about people who want more than their circumstances can offer; the difference is class and register: Chekhov's sisters are educated and express their disappointment in the language of aspiration; Delaney's Jo is working-class and expresses hers in the language of survival
Three Sisters — Frequently Asked Questions
Why do the three sisters never go to Moscow in Chekhov?
The sisters never go to Moscow because Chekhov's play is not a story of obstacles preventing them from going — it is a study of the nature of the longing itself, and what that longing does to people who organize their lives around it. There is nothing preventing the sisters from going to Moscow; they have money (at the beginning), Andrei later marries, the army officers who provide their social world could facilitate a move. But the Moscow of the play is not a geographical destination — it is the idea of a life that would have been different, would have been better, would have made everything that has been suffered worthwhile. The longer the sisters don't go, the more freighted with meaning the idea of Moscow becomes, and the more impossible any actual Moscow could be. Chekhov understood that what people long for is not the thing itself but the longing — the sense that somewhere there is a life that would have suited them better than the one they are living. When Masha says in Act Four 'I'm going to forget everything... already I'm forgetting... you'll be forgotten' and then the three sisters say 'If only we knew, if only we knew!' — the Moscow of the play has dissolved into the question of what life means, which is what it always was.
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