The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov – the greatest author of short stories http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/short-stories-by-anton-chekhov-ladies.html - 10 out of 10

 

The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov – the greatest author of short stories http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/short-stories-by-anton-chekhov-ladies.html

10 out of 10

 

 

One of the best ways to meet The Three Sisters would be to search for the adaptation of the play that has been directed by Laurence Olivier, wherein he also plays Ivan Romanovich Chebutykin, the doctor that would reveal in a coup de theater reveal the affair that Natasha – what a loathsome character that, talk of good versus evil, you have that personified here, in a woman that cares only for herself and to hurt all around, ‘you give your room to my baby, and then about that old woman, who is a thief, all she does is sits around, she will be sent out and what if she has been with the family for thirty years’…she maries Andrey and enters the family as quite a social climber and once inside, she takes over, she becomes the small Putin of the house, orders all about and imposes her cruelty on everyone.

 

Olga is the eldest of the sisters, she is a spinster that has a good heart, she is traumatized when Natasha tells her – no, this should be edited to read Natasha screams at her – that the old servant must go, just after Olga and the old woman had had a conversation, with the spinster assuring the servant that nobody would send her out, which is just what mean Natasha has in mind, she wants everybody to march to her tune, and f one is too feeble to do that, too bad, for she is the despot now, in control and what she says goes, to the point where she takes the money from the mortgage, albeit the house is not hers, not even her husband’s, when there are more heirs, property is divided if justice is done…

Olga is a teacher and Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin, who is also a teacher of Latin, says at one point that he would have married her, if it had not been for Masha…as it is Masha, the middle sister, is married to Fyodor Ilyich, she had been enthused at the beginning, admiring the knowledge of her husband, thinking him destined to achieve great things, but now she is disappointed, insists on the fact that she is bored and in that, she reminds one of Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/02/an-unfinished-piece-for-mechanical.html and seems to represent so much of the Russian soul, looking for the Meaning of Life and then dejected putting Putin in power…

 

Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin is the lieutenant colonel that is in charge of the military unit stationed in this small town, played by wondrous Alan Bates in this adaptation that I talk about here, he had known the sisters when they were very little and they called him the Lovesick Major, for he was a major back then, and later, he would represent the hope that Masha has a for a different future, one that has promise, it could be animated by love, instead of the tedious, bleak present that she has, in the house where Natasha takes the reins at one stage and everything becomes oppressive, especially when Andrey plays at cards, loses a fortune and the home is endangered because of debts and the fact that the small tyrant, Natasha, had taken over…

 

Irina Sergeyevna Prozorova is the youngest of the sisters, the one who is only twenty years old when we meet her, as she celebrates her name’s day, the doctor brings a samovar as a gift – he is a bachelor, but used to love the sisters’ mother decades ago – and they have guests in the house, the future seems bright, but what happens is not…she hopes they move back to Moscow, away from this backwater, where all their skills, knowledge, reading, foreign languages seem to be good for nothing, for there is nobody to talk Italian, German or French to here and nobody could appreciate the piano music – well, a few could, but this is a very small town and if the military is moved, there could be no one left at the same level as Vershinin – but her exclusive concentration on the move to Moscow could be deceptive.

First, I cannot remember who said that the problem with travel is that we take ourselves along, or something like that, but more importantly, second we have the Hedonic Adaptation phenomenon, described in the psychology classic Stumbling On Happiness, by marvelous Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/stumbling-on-happiness-by-david-gilbert.html where we learn that we know so little about what makes us happy, just like Irina, we assume that we would be mirthful, if only we were to move to California, an island in the Pacific or the Caribbean, not Moscow, no way…

 

Only once we move in one of those paradisiacal places, we adapt to the good things and start noticing and getting annoyed by the many flaws, such as the terrible wild fires in California, where there has been such a draught for many years – due to Climate Change, there are so many places affected by calamities – that water use is limited and in places, taking a bath is forbidden and usage is restricted, whereas the islands have their own problems, from hurricanes, to power cuts and ultra expensive items, electricity and many others…on the other hand, with the war in Ukraine, prices have rocketed almost everywhere.

We could change lenses and take a perverse, debauched view of the whole thing and say that this beano proves that ‘there is something rotten in the state of Russia’ (not Denmark as in the original quote from Hamlet) and take these characters and say that the feeble Three Sisters show why they have gone from one mad, cruel czar – Ivan the Terrible for instance, but even the glorified Peter the Great has tortured and killed his own son, together with many others, and the then look at the many crazy things he did abroad and his own lands – to another and ended up with perhaps a couple of decent rulers, one of them Catherine the Great and even about her we have quite a few controversial stories…as for tyrants, I took part in the 1989 Revolution that took one down, check this out: http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Masha is rebellious, Irina keeps dreaming hopelessly for the much cherished Moscow, while Olga is so vulnerable as to break down when Natasha screams at her and orders the poor old servant to go and die elsewhere (in the country) equivalent to saying let her expire in the street, for how can she tell if there is a place for her ‘in the country’, the poor old woman had been with this household for decades, it is all she has, and looking at the narrative of The Three Sisters and the other figures involved, we could have an explanation for…Putin, the desperation, the boredom, the sense of futility, the Learned Helplessness that seems to plague the Russians – we learn about this and Learned Optimism from a marvelous book by the co-founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, who talked about how dogs used in experiments learned to stop resisting or looking for a way out, once they got used with abuse and having no exit from the situation http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/07/learned-optimism-by-martin-seligman.html

 

The alternative is to Learn Optimism, perhaps using the technique exposed here:

http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world