With all the benefits of education, a loving home, and creature comforts, the sisters stagnate, not simply because they live in the sticks but because they keep deferring any activity that might give meaning to their existence. Chekhov scholar and the translator of the play version that I read, Laurence Senelick, in his introduction to the play, describes this predicament thus : Their lives, of course, change across the play, and some of the changes are interesting, but the sisters don’t seem to be happy about it. Interestingly, the play also touches on the inability of the sisters to do anything about their predicament – they continue to live their life (which according to them is dreary), while longing for what they have lost and contemplating on what might have been. One can also identify with the sisters’ predicament – of having moved from a cultural centre to a small town, and yearning for the cultural sophistication that they have left behind. I know that life there would have changed in the intervening years, but I would like to atleast go back and visit my favourite haunts (if, fortunately, they are still there), and find out what the people I knew then are doing now. I, myself, have missed every city that I have lived in, since childhood, and have yearned to go back.

I also remember other friends who went to work abroad yearning to come back to their homecountry (and paradoxically, if they come back to their homecountry, yearning to go back abroad!). I remember one of my friends who left Delhi to live in a smaller city, yearning for the life she had left behind. It is a romantic yearning which a lot of people have. One could identify with the yearning of the sisters to move to a place where they had lived during their childhood, and which is also a cultural centre which has sophisticated people. The play also touches on the contrast between the dream life that the sisters and their brother want to live and their dreary everyday existence, and their yearning for Moscow where they had spent their childhood and to which they want to return back. The story follows the life of the three sisters and their brother and their relationships with different people across a few years. Their brother Andrey also lives with them. The sisters befriend some of the army officers. The play is about three sisters – Olga, Masha and Irina, who live in a small Russian town, which has an army garrison.

I got inspired by our conversation and thought I will read ‘Three Sisters’. I haven’t read any of Chekhov’s plays before, though I have read some of his short stories. One of my Russian friends told me recently that she played a part in a performance of the Anton Chekhov play ‘Three Sisters’.

Chekhov a visit to friends book