SOURCE: “Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov's Three Sisters,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, December, 1989, pp. 485-501.

In the following essay, Tufts praises the satirical elements of The Three Sisters.

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,”¹ 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...