Censorship was more severe for the stage than for print, and consequently the Russian theater was dominated by the innocuous, by irreproachable patriotic spectacles, by well-worn melodramas, diverting musical plays, and safe imports.

The Russian stage that Chekhov would transform was derivative, stultifying, and moribund in the 1880s and 1890s when he began as a dramatist. By doing so Three Sisters fundamentally challenged the accepted stage assumptions of its day, while establishing a new dramatic logic and procedure that have influenced and shaped the drama that followed it. Almost a century before Jerry Seinfeld promoted a situation comedy in which “nothing happens,” Chekhov offered a tragicomedy on the same terms: keeping the expected dramatic climaxes offstage, concentrating instead on the interior drama just below the surface of the routine and ordinary. Half a century before Waiting for Godot, Chekhov based his play on waiting for something that never happens, in which decisive actions and resolvable conflicts-essential ingredients of conventional drama-are replaced by paralysis, ennui, and the inconsequential. Contemporary audiences and readers now familiar with the dramatic lessons of futility and frustrated expectations by such playwrights as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter may overlook just how radical and trail-blazing Three Sisters was. It is in many ways the archetypal modern drama that pioneered a new dramatic vision and method for the stage. Chekhov’s contemporary Maxim Gorky memorably praised its initial production in 1901 as “music, not acting,” and considered Three Sisters the most profound and effective of Chekhov’s plays. Regarded by many as the playwright’s masterwork, Three Sisters-the third of Anton Chekhov’s four major full-length dramas-is his longest and most complex play. Leonid Andreev, “Three Sisters,” in The Complete Collected Works And in Three Sisters, this pressure is brought to the limit, beyond which it will explode-and don’t you actually hear how life is seething, doesn’t its angrily protesting voice reach your ears?

Like steam, life can be compressed into a narrow little container, but, also like steam, it will endure pressure only to a certain point. Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters

The three sisters by chekhov