SOURCE: "The Three Sisters," in Prefaces to the Experience of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967, pp. 28-36.

In the following essay, Trilling ruminates on Chekhov's insistence that Three Sisters is a comedy, speculating that when Chekhov maintained "that Three Sisters was a comedy, even a farce, he was not talking to critics or theorists of literature but to actors, and he was trying to suggest what should be brought to the text by those who put it on the stage, a complexity of meaning which the text might not at first reveal."

Three Sisters is surely one of the saddest works in all literature. It is also one of the most saddening. As it draws to a close, and for some time after Olga has uttered her hopeless desire to know whether life and its suffering have any meaning, we must make a conscious effort if we are not...