Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov' s Three Sisters

Abstract

Chekhov signals his audience from the very beginning. As the curtain rises on a set divided into a "drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom," a set which is itself a stage within a stage, we see the Prozorov sisters, each dressed in a costume that is emblematic of her situation in life and her view of herself, and each fixed in the posture that will characterize her throughout the play: "OLGA, wearing the dark-blue uniform dress of a teacher in the girls' high school, is correcting student exercise books the whole time, either standing or walking to and fro. MASHA, in a black dress, sits with her hat on her knees and reads a little book. IRINA, in a white dress, stands lost in thought" . In the ballroom behind the columns, Chebutykin, an army doctor, and Tuzenbakh and Solyony, two officers of the brigade stationed in the sisters' provincial town, carry on a conversation which the audience cannot yet hear.