THE THREE SISTERS
A monologue from the
play by Anton
Chekhov
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NOTE: This monologue is reprinted
from The Moscow Arts Theatre Series of Plays. Ed. Oliver
M. Sayler. New York: Brentanos, 1922. |
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ANDREI: Oh, what has become of my past and where is
it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think
and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to
me full of hope. Why do we almost before we have begun to live,
become dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy?
. . . This town has already been in existence for two hundred
years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom
is in any way different from the others. There has never been,
now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar,
an artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse
envy or a passionate desire to be emulated. They only eat, drink,
sleep, and then they die . . . more people are born and also
eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to become half-witted out of
sheer boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly
back-biting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive
their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing
and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses
the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and
they become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one
another as their fathers and mothers . . .
MORE
MONOLOGUES BY ANTON CHEKHOV |
