I can’t believe that in over 400 blog posts I haven’t once mentioned Anton Chekhov, to my mind one of the three best playwrights of all time.* Because of his early death, his oeuvre is unfortunately limited. The Cherry Orchard, his last play, is fittingly his masterpiece. Uncle Vanya, although I love the play, I could never teach because it always moved me to tears. Today, it is The Three Sisters, his next-to-last play that I wish to direct your attention to.
Olga, Masha, and Irina, the title characters, together with their brother, Andrey, are members of a gentle family left behind in a provincial Russian city after their father, an army general, died a year before the play begins.
During the course of the play Andrey marries Natasha, a jumped-up peasant, who eventually dominates the household. We join the play in Act III [translated by Gerard R. Ledger].
ANFISA. (Exhausted.) Dear Olya, my dearest one, don't get rid of me, please don't get rid of me!
OLGA. What nonsense you are talking, nanny. Nobody is going to get rid of you.
ANFISA. (Puts her head on Olga's breast.) My dear child, my darling one, I toil away, I keep working… But I'm getting weak, and everyone is saying 'She should go'! But where would I go to? Where? I'm eighty years old. I'm in my eighty second year.
OLGA. Sit down nanny. You're tired, you poor thing. (Makes her sit down.) Rest awhile, nanny dear. How pale you are!
(Natasha enters.)
. . .
(Coldly, addressing Anfisa.) How dare you sit down when I am here! Stand up! Leave this room!
(Anfisa leaves. A pause.)
I don't know why you keep that old bag. I just don't understand.
OLGA. (Horrified.) Pardon me, but I also do not understand…
NATASHA. She's absolutely no use here. She's a peasant and she ought to go and live back in the country. Why all this . . . cosseting? I like to see order in the house. . . .
[S]he could easily live at home in the country.
OLGA. She's been with us for thirty years.
NATASHA. But look, now she's incapable of work! Either I do not understand you, or you deliberately choose not to understand me. She's not fit to do any work, she only sleeps and sits around the place.
OLGA. Then let her sit.
*
Can there have been a more humane line in literature than “Then let her sit”? Contrast this with Natasha’s response:
NATASHA. (In astonishment.) What do you mean 'Let her sit'? She is after all a servant. (Tearfully.) I do not understand you, dear Olga. I already have a nanny, there is a wet nurse, we have maidservants, we have a cook… Why should we need this old woman? Why? Why?
Transactional Natasha considers only her “need.” Anfisa is old and redundant; thus, she should go.
***
A new biography of William Buckley, Jr. has unfortunately brought his face back before the public. I wrote about him previously here: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/10/charming-billy-consciences-and.html
Buckley acknowledged that he benefited from a pampered life:
It simply happens to be the case that I have never in my entire life been without servants, maids, and chauffeurs.**
Growing up, Buckley and his nine siblings lived on an estate populated with “tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, a French mademoiselle, and Mexican nanas.” ***
Visitors to the household remarked on the relaxed atmosphere of the Buckley estate: It was
alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife. . . . Buckley’s prep school roommate described “a vast gaggle of smiling, brilliant children, all chattering—in several languages—at once, playing the piano, but, above all, laughing with each other … the whole place rang with music and laughter.”
But it wasn’t all sweetness and light.
One night in 1937, four of Bill’s older siblings burned a cross outside a Jewish resort in Amenia, New York. Bill was upset that he hadn’t been included.**
Years later, his sisters defaced a nearby Episcopal church.***
In 1954, Julia Child
received a letter from Aloise Buckley Heath, a fellow Smith College alumna and the sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., the prominent conservative author and proponent of McCarthyism. Heath had written to Child, and to other Smith graduates, urging them to withhold donations to the institution until the college had sacked five professors suspected of being Communists. An enraged Child replied, “In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and our freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.”****
So what are we left with? Charming Billy and his smiling, chattering siblings were at bottom a bigoted, anti-democratic clan. Louis Menand summed up Buckley, Jr. as follows:
Since democracy is pretty much the essence of the American experiment, it seems fair to say that Buckley was, at bottom, anti-American.
This is often the case with people who make a big show of patriotism. We can “make America great again”—if we only get rid of due process, or judicial review, or the separation of powers, or birthright citizenship, or the freedom of the press. We might be great if we got rid of some or all of those things. But we would no longer be America.**
***
* Shakespeare and Sophocles are the other two.
** https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/buckley-sam-tanenhaus-book-review
*** https://newrepublic.com/article/195954/buckley-conservative-intellectual-laid-groundwork-trump
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