Free Back to Moscow by Guillermo Erades

Drama in Four Acts
is not a story of sweeping mad love or
tragedy. It’s about boredom and dullness and the futility of pursuing happiness.
    Olya, Masha and Irina live in a small town, absorbed in the insignificant tasks of daily life, watching time pass by, reminiscing about a happier past and dreaming about a brighter future. For
the three sisters, who feel they don’t belong in the provinces, there is only one way out of their dull existence: Moscow.
    Moscow is the place where they could be happy again.
    The three sisters, each in their twenties, had left Moscow eleven years earlier, when their father – a general, now dead – had been awarded the command of a regiment in the
provinces. They have a brother, Andrey Sergeyevich, who plans to return to Moscow to become a university professor, taking his sisters with him.
    At the beginning of the play, Irina, the youngest, is radiant and hopeful. While her older sisters can’t help being moody, Irina’s dreams infuse her naive soul with endless optimism.
It’s in Moscow, she believes, that she will find true love and they will all be happy.
    To the great disappointment of the three sisters, their Moscow plans never seem to take off. As the play advances and the sisters begin to understand that they might be stuck in the provinces,
Moscow becomes less real, more ethereal. A spiritual aspiration.
    Moscow represents where they want to be, both the past and the future. Moscow is everywhere, except here and now.
    In
Three Sisters
, Anton Pavlovich exposes the very human weakness of believing that both the past and the future are better places to be. And holding on to the illusion that things will
get better is our way of coping with life’s dullness.
    A series of visitors, mostly military officers from the battalion in town, come to see the three sisters. Among them is Vershinin, a colonel, who at the beginning of the play has just arrived
from Moscow and impresses the sisters with his sophistication.
    Masha, the second sister, married at eighteen, is now bored of her husband. Whining about her life, she says that if only she lived in Moscow she would not even care about the weather. In
response, Vershinin tells her the story of a French political prisoner who writes with passion about the birds he sees from the window of his cell, the same birds he never noticed when he was a
free man. In the same way, Vershinin tells Masha, you will not notice Moscow once you live there again. We want happiness, he concludes, but we are not happy and we cannot be happy.
    Masha, deeply impressed, starts an affair with Vershinin.
    Irina talks about finding meaning in life through labour. But when she starts work at the local telegraph office she realises her life has no more meaning than before. Time goes by and Irina,
too, loses her spark, drifting into ennui. As the dream of Moscow evaporates, she accepts her sudba and agrees to marry an officer she doesn’t love.
    At one point, Masha realises that she can hardly remember the face of her dead mother. Their own mother, who died young and is buried in Moscow, is being forgotten. And we will all be forgotten
one day, Masha says. Yes, Vershinin replies, they will forget us. That’s our destiny, our sudba: things that we believe serious, meaningful, very important, there will come a time when they
will be forgotten or will seem unimportant.
    At the end of the play the local battalion moves out of town and Vershinin has to leave with the other officers. Masha returns to her husband, who accepts her back despite his knowledge of the
affair. This being Chekhov, there is no judgement, no punishment.
    The sisters realise they will never go back to Moscow. They will grow old in the provinces. And they accept their destiny – settling for less than they had hoped for.
    If life has meaning, it’s not something within the grasp of Chekhov’s characters. They are imperfectly human, shortsighted, and yet fully aware of their own