Losing Your Home!
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
How Anton Chekhov's dark play “The Three Sisters” is an old narrative in which a family is slowly pushed out of their home on to the streets.
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“You say life is beautiful. Yes, but what if it only seems so! Life for us three sisters has not been beautiful, it has stifled us, like weeds .... Now I have tears in my eyes, I mustn't….” {quickly dries her eyes and smiles} laments the sister of Irina, in one of Anton Chekhov's most popular plays “The Three Sisters.”
By weeds she implies the boredom, vulgarity, and stifling oppression in the rural village they have dwelt in for the past 11 years. The atmosphere in the village feels stifling and suffocating to the point of sheer despair. And neither work in school or for the local government offers them a reprieve. Their brother Andrei states that their education which consists of three languages is as useless as a sixth finger. Nobody needs or wants their education! The three sisters dream of escaping to a better life in Moscow where they believe they'll be more appreciated and accepted.
How might we view Chekhov's play “The Three Sisters?” Is it just a play about three sisters falling into despair from their disenchantment with how their lives have badly turned out? Wouldn't the title “The Three Whiners”' be a more apt title for the play? Shouldn't they just suffer in silence and take more radical action? I don't think the play was intended as a moral sermon condemning the impotence of the sisters. If we lived their lives we could well be also endlessly complaining. You can look at the play from so many angles.
However, an advocate for the homeless would surely be familiar with one of the dark plots of the play where their new sister-in-law who married their brother Andrei slowly takes over their home and practically puts them out on to the streets by the end of the play. How often have we heard the old story of so many people being cheated out of their homes through signing illegal documents? Those victims tend to be the most vulnerable people: the old, addicts and very naive people who believe a con-artist is a white night who loves them.
There is no doubt that the three sisters count as vulnerable people who, being naive and too nice, are losing their home. The worst thing is the culprit is their own brother who has illegally mortgaged their home to the bank giving all the rights to his new wife. Andrei had fallen into debt through gambling. He makes this transaction without their consent.
No wonder Chekhov's short stories and plays have never lost their relevance and resonance! The theme of subtle fraud is timeless. The play could easily be set in the 21st century.
Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays are compelling because he did not hesitate to depict all the appalling reality of constant humiliation, abuse and suffering of the underdog all around him. As a trained doctor who often treated patients for free, he had direct experience of the harsh life in the villages. He was not one to idealize the peasants or the country life of the nobility. One of the most important things an artist should strive for is to be honest and down to earth. He did not like it when strangers approached him pretending to be someone else they were not. He tried to get them to relax and just be their normal selves in front of him. When three women tried to ask 'intellectual questions' he broke the ice by telling them how he loved to eat fruit pastilles. They then enjoyed a conversation about fruit pastilles.
The author Maxim Gorky once wrote, “It seems to me that in the presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simple, more truthful, more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which Russians, in their anxiety to appear Europeans, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves with shells and fish teeth.” {page 11 of “Anton Chekhov,” by Maxim Gorky, from Anton Chekhov's selected works Volume One Stories, 1979 edition, Moscow: Progress Publishers}. Maxim Gorky recalls how Chekhov sincerely sought to improve the bad conditions of schoolteachers and prisoners.
It is sad that most people know about Chekhov the playwright and not the short story author. The popularity of his plays have overshadowed a rich reservoir of short stories. Those short stories inspired writers such as Raymond Carver and Katherine Mansfield to name but a few. One of Chekhov's most moving and poignant stories is about an unhappy teacher in a village who is worn out by the hardship around her. The story, “On The Cart,” narrates how she wonders if the man who appears to be following her and paying attention to her might offer her either a better or worse life.
But the play “The Three Sisters” addresses many themes in both a comical but tragic way. Unless you have a very sick sense of humor you'd never make the claim this is a comedy. It is far from it. It is a play where the three sisters of their father who died, are living in a village where they can't fit in or live happily. They feel intimidated by the ignorance, rudeness and cruelty of the people around them. One of the sisters, Masha, who is unhappily married, complains, “I don't speak about my husband, I've grown used to him, but among coarse, impolite, ill-bred people. coarseness upsets and offends me, I suffer when I see a man is not fine enough, gentle enough, courteous. When I happen to be among teachers, my husband's colleagues, I am simply miserable.”
None of the three sisters feel they are developing their talents and skills. On the contrary, they feel their intelligence and skills is declining. Masha falls in love with Colonel Vershinin. He also expresses his love for her. The military who are visiting the town are viewed as a kind of cultural oasis in this town. Unfortunately, Vershinin does not take the initiative in this illicit affair. In fact, Vershinin is unaware of what is going on around him. He does not know that one unstable and unpleasant character wants to fight a duel and kill a baron who is due to be married to one sister, Irina.
But it is the response to a fire which breaks out which reveals a sharp contrast in attitudes to those who are made homeless. While the sisters are prepared to offer the rooms in their house to the homeless, the new wife of Natasha is scared she and her children will catch a fatal disease from the homeless. Instead, she advocates setting up a 'committee' to aid the homeless. There is no sincere desire to help the homeless but only to 'do her duty.' It is more about boosting her social standing than genuinely helping others..
She even suggests to the sisters to throw out an old servant they have had for years because she is 'useless.' Masha is not off her mark when she describes Natasha as an arsonist who destroys everything in her path: 'She goes about looking as if it were she who had started the fire.'
In fact, Natasha slowly takes over the home of the three sisters by insisting they give up their rooms for her children. Olga is asked to move out of her room to share it with one sister. Even Andrei's days in his own home are numbered. This is because he has foolishly mortgaged the house to a bank and surrendered all the financial rights to his wife Natasha. This means effectively that Natasha can evict all the three sisters and her husband from their own home. There are also possible hints that she has a secret lover on the side. He is allowed to visit the house. Masha rightly complains about the dark predicament they face.
Things have got even worse than at the start of the play. We hear Masha say, “Bored, bored, bored...{Sits up} I cannot get it out of my mind.... simply revolting. It's there, like a nail in my head, I can't remain silent. I mean about Andrei.... He's mortgaged this house to the bank and his wife got hold of all the money; and after all, the house doesn't belong to them alone, but to the four of us! This is something he ought to realize, if he is a decent man.'
Andrei did this all behind their back! The irresponsible action of Andrei and the devastating results remind me of the homeless people we constantly encounter in Moscow. A relative of the family can illicitly and illegally sign an agreement with black real estate agents to feed their addiction. An addiction pushes people to take rash action to feed their habits. In Andrei's case it is an addiction to gambling. In many cases we encountered it was alcoholism or drug addiction.
I recall meeting a middle-aged French teacher, Galina, who had lost her flat to black real estate agents after signing agreements. Daniel Ogen, an advocate for the homeless told me how he had met a homeless woman outside McDonalds who told him how her son, who was in prison, had sold her apartment so he could buy drugs. The result was she ended up on the streets. She told Daniel her son was “really a good boy who just has terrible problems.”
So clearly those stories about people taking over apartments have a long history which writers such as Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov were well aware of. In Bulgakov's novel “The Master and Margarita,” the character Woland states, “The housing problem spoils the character of people here.”
Some Muscovites are anxious about how to avoid a hapless marriage made by a naive Andrei. Chekhov, through his play “The Three Sisters” conveys a warning! Whoever said the study of literature was impractical? They should read Chekhov!
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Recommended reading:
Anton Chekhov, “The Major Plays,” Translated by Ann Dunnigan, 2006 edition, New York: Signet Classics. You can read these great and telling works of drama: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, the Cherry Orchard—as well as a great foreword! But nothings beats watching a performance on stage!
Anton Chekhov, “About Love and Other Stories, A new translation by Rosamund Barlett, 2004, Oxford World's Classics, New York: Oxford University Press. I'd read all the short stories of Chekhov! He avoids most of the sentimental notes of some works of Russian literature and is not as preachy as other Russian authors.