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A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"
A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"
A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"
Ebook41 pages32 minutes

A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 3, 2016
ISBN9781535840033
A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"

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    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" - Gale

    1

    The Three Sisters

    Anton Chekhov

    1901

    Introduction

    Chekhov referred to The Three Sisters as a drama, preferring to avoid the more confining labels of either comedy or tragedy, although later critics have argued for both of those labels. It is one of the four major plays that he wrote at the end of his life. Chekhov was an accomplished fiction writer, one of the one of the most influential short story writers of all time. At the time that his plays were being produced there was some criticism that his dramas too closely resembled the style of fiction. Traditionalists found the action too cramped and the characters too inexpressive, noting that there were too many people on the stage at any one time, doing nothing, for audiences to be able to register the significance of it all. Contrary to expectations, though, Chekhov’s plays were very popular in Moscow, where they were staged by the famous Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Constantin Stanislavsky.

    The Three Sisters was the first play that Chekhov wrote specifically for the Moscow Art Theatre, having experienced commercial success in his previous collaborations with the company, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Like many of Chekhov’s works, it is about the decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search for meaning in the modern world. In the play, Olga, Masha, and Irina are refined and cultured young women in their twenties who were raised in urban Moscow but have been living in a small, colorless provincial town for eleven years. With their father dead, their anticipated return to Moscow comes to represent their hopes for living a good life, while the ordinariness of day-to-day living tightens its hold. First performed in 1901, The Three Sisters is a perennial favorite of actors and audiences.

    Author Biography

    Although Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was trained as a physician and practiced as one, he came to dominate not just one field of literature, but two: plays and short stories. He was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a provincial town in the Ukraine area of Russia that was similar to the one described in The Three Sisters. His family had a small grocery business that went bankrupt, forcing them to move to Moscow in 1876, although Chekhov stayed behind in Taganrog to finish his education. With a scholarship to Moscow University, he studied to be a doctor of medicine, going into practice in 1884. At that time he started publishing short humorous sketches in the Moscow newspapers, though he had no serious artistic aspirations. His writing career became earnest when he moved to St. Petersburg in 1885 and befriended the editor

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