Tragicomic Vision in Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters

Abstract

The tragicomic vision is one of the interests of Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist who longs to portray and present it authentically and honestly in his play the Three Sisters. It is the realistic vision of life which includes in it the tragic and comic sides of man's life, especially modern man's life. Being a realist, Chekhov is one of those dramatists who perceive life as a mixture of tragedy and comedy. This realization represents the realistic vision of life. For such an end, he wrote plays of mixed moods in which he combines two genres of tragedy and comedy. This form of dramatic writing is called tragicomedy that Chekhov adopts in his play. Believing that the comic and ridiculous can become an effective means of expressing the serious, in other words the tragic. For that, he includes in his play tragicomic scenes that include comic characters and situations as an effective technique for such purpose. The paper aims to deal with that. In the modern time, it is difficult to distinguish between the tragic and the comic. So that, Chekhov reflects those tragic and comic aspects of the human conditions by bringing together, the tragic and the comic in a mixed form. According to Chekhov, man finds himself among meaningless, trivial and empty world, so he has no other choice only to face and survive by laughter and comic response to his tragic life. In this sense, he shares the contemporary absurdist dramatists like Samuel Beckett, in their concern with the meaninglessness that lies at the heart of existence. In Three Sisters, Chekhov shows people laughing at their miseries and life's contradictions. So, The laughter became an effective way to express the serious and the painful simultaneously..