A Scary tale: the archetypal content of A.P. Chekhov's drama "Three Sisters"

The object of the study is A.P. Chekhov's drama "Three Sisters" – one of the most popular and at the same time mysterious plays. For several months, Chekhov scrupulously worked on the text of this work, making edits even during rehearsals of the theatrical production, striving for a more accurate correspondence of the play to the original idea. Interpretations that reduce Chekhov's plan to a certain idea, as a rule, seem extremely one-sided, while the drama "Three Sisters" is complex and multi-layered. It can be assumed that by saturating the play with random, at a superficial glance, but significant details in a holistic perception, Chekhov forms a super-ideological meaning, thanks to which the work acquires deep psychologism and does not lose its relevance. The supersense that stands above other ideas and attitudes is the archetype – the image of the collective unconscious, which even before the emergence of fiction was embodied in myths and fairy tales. If we consider the drama "Three Sisters" from the standpoint of archetypal analysis, then much of what seems strange in the play gets a fairly clear explanation, and the details that seem "accidental" occupy an important place in the overall structure of the work. Archetypal analysis also provides an answer to the question of why the author himself called the drama "Three Sisters" "vaudeville" and "funny comedy". The comic in the play goes back to the theory of inconsistency formulated in the works of I. Kant and G.V.F. Hegel. Chekhov creates a phantasmagoric world, a half-tale, in which the problem of man's collision with mortality and the temporary nature of all things is comprehended: all the experiences and troubles of the heroes eventually devalue, turn into nothing.

the archetype of the sister, Anton Chekhov, drama, archetypal analysis, the nature of the comic, the theory of inconsistency, the theme of death, fairy tale, random detail, magical realism