The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [311]
The one thing everyone remembers about the heroines of The Three Sisters (1901) is that the three girls, trapped in a dreary provincial town where their father had been commander of the military garrison until his death a year earlier, are perpetually dreaming of the day when they might return to Moscow. As so often in stories, the great city teeming with life and significance (Paris in so many French novels, New York in American stories, London in Dickens or Tom Jones or Dick Whittington) is an externally projected symbol of the Self: the `centre' to which little provincial heroes and heroines aspire as the place where they will `find themselves'. It is no accident that all Chekhov's plays are set in the provinces. The remoteness of their characters from the `centre' is an external reflection of the fact that none have any inner centre. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the symbolic role played by Moscow in The Three Sisters. As Olga, the schoolmistress, puts it to her sisters at the play's beginning: `if only we could go back to Moscow'. They are obsessed with the thought of that distant place where they imagine they might at last find life, love, meaning, purpose: everything they are deprived of in this suffocating little corner of nowhere.
The draining away of their hopes is symbolised in the decay of their brother Andre whom they have imagined to be so talented that, if only they could reach Moscow, he would surely be made a professor. But after he marries the boorish, insufferable Natasha she becomes the play's dominant figure, taking over the household like a monstrous cuckoo. She treats the family's old nurse Anfisa like dirt. She pushes Olga out of her bedroom, to make a nursery for the baby Bobik she dotes on with such mawkish sentimentality; then drives her from the house altogether. Meanwhile her pitiful husband, running up gambling debts, falls to pieces.
The only palliative for the girls' misery is the presence of the officers from the garrison, filling the house with their genial chatter. Masha, though married to a dull schoolmaster, falls for the equally unhappily married Vershinin, the new garrison commander, given to rambling on about how, in the distant future, `life will be different. It will be happy'. Irena eventually agrees to marry Baron Toozenbach, as a way out of her misery. Then comes the order that the soldiers are to leave town. On the eve of their departure, Toozenbach fights a duel and is killed. Irena and Masha have each lost the only man who had given them hope. Echoing the general despair, the doctor asks rhetorically `What does it matter? Nothing matters.' To which Olga replies, in the closing words of the play, `if only we knew. If only we knew!'
In his final `comedy' The Cherry Orchard (1904), written just before his early death, the dominant figure is the ageing Liuba Ranyevskaia, returning to her Russian estate after five years away in France. She has run up a mountain of debt living carelessly abroad with a drunken lover, her feckless brother and her daughter, and returns to find reality staring her in the face. Lopakhin, the former estate serf who has become a successful businessman, tells her the only hope of paying off her debts is to sell the once-magnificent cherry orchard in front of the house, to build a mass of summer villas for newly-prosperous city dwellers. The canny nouveau riche Lopakhin is the most positive character in Chekhov, because at least he is focused on becoming rich, according to the hard, down-to-earth commercial reality which is shaping Russia's future. Liuba, with her empty, wasted life, represents the past whose day is over. Despite all Lopakhin's friendly efforts to get her to face reality, she simply cannot do so. How could she possibly agree to the felling of the beautiful cherry orchard; the pulling down of the old house in which she grew up, with all its bittersweet memories? Surrounded by her family and dependents, she is lost in a dream world. Even after the auction, when the house and the whole estate are sold, inevitably to Lopakhin,