ABSTRACT
An artist would compare this play to a study in light and shadow and quiescence; a musician might liken it to a composer improving his memories in lamplight. The critic is tempted to describe it as a play in which the dramatist comes under a spell, the bewitchment of his own characters. There is a carnival, but we do not see it. There is a fire, but only its distant refulgence fills the sky and a distant sound of a firebell. There is a duel, but only the faint echo of a shot reaches us. It all means much to the three daughters of the dead Colonel Prozorov, living in their brother Andrey's mortgaged home rather by sufferance of his dominating wife Natasha. But the picture remains static, and the three sisters, Olga, Marya, and Irina, fill it in with a beauty that belongs not so much to life as to what the artist calls still life. The characters spring out of a phrase by their creator. Characterization is so much more than action. Here action is evanescent and unimportant; character remains to arrest our imagination and mystify. . . . They come to life at the touch of the dramatist's pen and seem to fade in and out of the chiaroscuro, in which no one colour and no one note predominates. And the regiment that is heard distantly marching off, leaving everything ‘to go on in the same way.’ The humour, the pathos, the frustration and tragi-comedy of it all underline poor Tusenbach's remark, ‘What trifles, what little things suddenly apropos of nothing acquire importance in life.’
