SOURCE: "Three Sisters, Or Taking a Chance on Love," in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, New York University Press, 1981, pp. 61-75.

In the essay below, Kramer traces "the variety of responses to love" among the main characters of Three Sisters.

For all the talk about Three Sisters, it is still extraordinarily difficult to determine exactly what the play is about. One prominent school places the emphasis on the sisters as inevitably ruined creatures. Beverly Hahn, for instance, speaks of the "inbuilt momentum towards destruction" in the sisters' world.¹ Another commentator claims that we cannot avoid contrasting the success of Natasha and Protopopov with the failures of the sisters.² We might do well to examine just what the first two do achieve: a house, an affair, and a businesslike manipulation of the professional positions of the others. It would, of course, be absurd to...