Chekhov’s Three Sisters and its Dostoevsky’s pretext
Authors:   Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kibalnik Sergei A. 
Published: November 2024

The late Chekhov is closely connected with Dostoevsky, especially with his top works and, first of all, with the novels of the so-called Great Pentateuch. At the same time, polemically interpreting the works of French writers, primarily Maupassant, in his decision on the topic, Chekhov, as a rule, relied on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot served as one of the pretexts for Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. The elder sister Olga Prozorova resembles the eldest daughter of the Yepanchins, Alexandra. The younger sister Irina belongs to the same type of women as Aglaya. The main characters of these works, Baron Tuzenbach and Prince Myshkin, are the most similar. With his rare noble title, Baron Tuzenbach stands out among all the characters of Russian classics. It may be his belonging to “barons” that brings him a little closer to Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin. Moreover, his own name is Nikolai Lvovich. It was a tradition in German families to call their son after his grandfather. In this sense, Baron Tuzenbach could be the son of Prince Myshkin. The tragic end also brings them closer. Undoubtedly, there is a “great distance” between them. Chekhov was by no means trying to present the ideal of a “positively beautiful person” in the image of Tuzenbach. There seems to be nothing remarkable in this character (Myshkin is by no means an ideal image as well). Nevertheless, there is something in common between the baron and the prince. In Three Sisters, it is Tuzenbach who could claim to be the protagonist (there is none in the play, however): it is both the most sympathetic of the characters and the victim, which always causes additional sympathy. Most importantly, both of these aspects are tacitly autobiographical. As in the case of Chimsha-Himalayan, a character of Chekhov’s “small trilogy,” the features of the author also vaguely appear in Tuzenbach. However, Chekhov would not be Chekhov if he had not simultaneously given some of his own features to a completely different character that is gradually losing himself – Andrey Prozorov The relationship between Tuzenbach, who is passionately in love, and Irina, who succumbed to his courtship but remained cold to him, reminds of the love vicissitudes in Guy de Maupassant’s popular novel Fort comme la mort (1889). In the literature of the late 19th century, André Mariolle’s fiery speeches addressed to Michèl de Burne became a kind of a cliché for expressing hopeless love. Many episodes of Chekhov’s The Seagull echo these speeches. Partly the cliché is Tuzenbach’s dialogue with Irina. However, Tuzenbach’s speeches also contain purely Chekhovian notes that sound in his letters to Knipper at the time of the creation of the play. Thus, Tuzenbach has a lot in common with the main character of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, which shows Baron Tuzenbach as a kind of Chekhov’s version of a “positively beautiful person” – simply a “good person” who loves one specific woman with ordinary love, driven by the desire for ordinary human happiness with her, and not the desire to save someone. – who resembles Chekhov, just like Prince Myshkin resembles Dostoevsky.