Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and the Man with a Camera: Remediating Photography in Three Sisters

Abstract Several key moments in Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters ( Tri sestry ) center on the act of taking photographs. By repeatedly dramatizing the work of a photographer, the play invites us to compare photography and theater as two distinct modes of realist visual representation. Photography held a particular charge in the original 1901 production of Three Sisters , directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, at the Moscow Art Theater (MAT). On a discursive level, Chekhov’s early stories and plays were dismissed by critics as too “photographic,” and similar charges would be brought against Stanislavsky’s early naturalistic productions at the MAT. On a material level, advances in camera technology were transforming theatrical photography at the turn of the century. This article argues that the photography scenes throw into relief the competing approaches to realism at work in this production. This plays out in two different ways: in the intermedial encounters between theater and photography and between Stanislavsky’s and Chekhov’s differing approaches to theatrical realism. Stanislavsky champions the realism of the MAT’s approach as superior to the exaggerated poses, reminiscent of the theatrical gestures of melodrama, that the camera elicits, whereas Chekhov pierces Stanislavsky’s naturalist illusion by treating the camera as a metatheatrical device to expose the conventions of theater. The meditation on realism and theatricality in these scenes offers an early contribution to the debates on the realist and conventionalized stage that would shape Russian theater in the new century.