How It All Goes Down
Three Sisters mainly follows the story of—wait for it—three sisters: Olga, Masha, and Irina Prozorov. They live with their brother, Andrey, in a big house on the edge of a small Russian town. The townspeople are kinda backward and boring compared to their educated and culture-lovin' family, so this set of sibs is not too fond of the town to begin with.
Believe it or not, the only halfway interesting people around are the guys in the military. Basically, the Prozorov kids are worldly, well-educated army brats. And being in the army in Tsarist Russia pretty much meant you were in with the aristocracy and, once you got through the fighting stuff, probably developed a taste for the finer things in life. So ever since the family moved from Moscow eleven years prior (with their father, now dead), the sisters have obsessed over the dream of moving back to the big city.
But guess what? It's not happening. Olga, the eldest, is a spinster schoolteacher and eventually becomes a headmistress living with her elderly maid. Masha, the middle sister, is married to another schoolteacher, Kulygin, whom she despises for his small-mindedness. She has an affair with the officer Vershinin because he's given to just the sort of philosophizing that really starts her engines. And guess what happens: the affair ends in heartbreak.
Poor Irina, the youngest, has fanciful ideas about the value of work, but soon realizes that, in reality, work sucks the life out of her. She's also in love with the idea of love, but doesn't get to experience it. Finally she comes around to saying "yes" to Baron Tuzenbach, a friendly but ugly man who's been after her for years. On the day they're leaving to get married, he gets shot in a duel. Bummer.
Andrey, the brother, gives up his intellectual dreams to pursue a town girl, Natasha. They marry, have kids, and little by little she takes over the estate. At the end of the play, the upper-class Prozorovs are pretty much evicted from their own house, while Natasha, a symbol of the working class, is on the rise. Allegory, much? For anyone not already reaching for the history books, this was just a few years before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—and you better believe smart Ruskies like Chekhov could already sense some storms on the horizon.