Summary
Vershinin tells the group that he heard a rumor that the brigade is getting transferred. "I've heard the same thing. The town will be completely deserted." Suddenly, Chebutykin drops a clock and it breaks. Irina is upset, noting that it was their mother's clock. Chebutykin is not contrite and says, "Maybe it only seems I did." He then tells them that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov, but nobody even notices.
Vershinin tells a story about the fire, how he arrived home and found his two daughters without their mother. He philosophizes about the fact that in two or three hundred years, people will look back on their lifestyles with "horror and contempt." In the middle of his philosophizing, he notices that everyone has fallen asleep. He begins to laugh and sing, and Masha sings along.
Fedotik enters, dancing and laughing, saying that the fire burnt all of his belongings. Solyony then comes in, but Irina sends him away. When Solyony confronts her about the fact that Tusenbach is allowed in, Vershinin says they ought to be going and leaves with Solyony and Fedotik.
Tusenbach wakes up from a dream and comments on the fact that he's going to work in the brickyard soon. He asks Irina to come away with him, and says that they can work together. Masha sends him away, and he is startled to realize he's there. Before he leaves, he tells Irina, "If only I had the chance to give my life for you."
When Tusenbach leaves, Masha tells Kulygin to go home. He tells her how much he loves her after seven years of being married. Abruptly Masha mentions that Andrei has mortgaged the house to the bank and Natasha has taken all the money. Kulygin tells her not to even talk about it. "So he's in debt up to his ears. That's his business," he says. Masha tells him, "I don't need anything for myself. It's the injustice of it all that infuriates me," before telling Kulygin to go again.
Kulygin tells her he will wait for her downstairs and leaves. Irina speaks up, agreeing with Masha about the fact that Natasha has turned Andrei "into a shallow, petty old fogy." She begins to cry as she talks about the fact that Andrei did not even care about the fire, and played his violin while everyone stepped in to help.
Olga enters as Irina becomes very upset about the fact that she has been working for so long and is losing her innocence and beauty. Olga tells Irina to marry Tusenbach, even though she does not love him. "I'd marry anyone who asked me so long as he was decent," Olga says, resigned.
Then, Masha tells her sisters that she is in love with Vershinin, and he with her. Olga is so offended by the extramarital feelings that she goes behind her screen. "In a novel it all seems so obvious and trite. Then you fall in love yourself, and you realize nobody knows a thing, we each have to make our own decisions," says Masha.
Andrei comes in with Ferapont, and asks Olga for the key to the strongbox. He then asks his sisters why they are angry with him. When Vershinin calls to Masha, she excuses herself. When she is gone, Andrei delivers a monologue to Olga and Irina about the fact that they do not like Natasha, calling her an upstanding person. He then tells them that he likes being a member of the District Council, even though they want him to be a scholar. Finally, he addresses the fact that he mortgaged their house to pay off his debts—35 thousand rubles—and that he rationalized it because the sisters all get an income from their father's pension.
Kulygin enters, looking for Masha, as Andrei begins to weep about his dashed dreams. Both of the men exit, and Irina complains to Olga that the soldiers are being sent away and they will be left all alone in town. She then tells Olga that she will marry Tusenbach, but that she wants to move to Moscow.
Act 4. The garden of the house. Chebutykin is there with a walking stick. Irina, Kulygin, and Tusenbach are standing on the terrace, saying goodbye to Fedotik and Rodet. Irina insists that they will see each other again, but Fedotik thinks they will not. Fedotik takes their picture and gives Kulygin a notebook with a pencil to remember him by. He and Rodet go off to bid farewell to the area, Rodet calling "Yoo-hoo" to the trees.
Chebutykin tells Irina that he is leaving the next day, retiring the next year, and will start drawing his pension, before living out his life near them in the country. "You really should turn over a new leaf. And I mean it. And soon," says Irina.
Chebutykin and Irina comment on the fact that Kulygin shaved his mustache, and looks bad. Andrei enters with a baby carriage, as Irina asks Chebutykin about the fact that Tusenbach and Solyony met in the boulevard and insulted one another. Irina talks about the fact that she and Tusenbach are leaving town the next day for the brickyard, where she will work at a school, and her new life will begin.
They talk about the fact that Olga is the headmistress now and Irina says that she has decided to marry Tusenbach because he is a "extraordinarily good."
Analysis
There is a tension in the play between the concrete world and the abstract world. After Chebutykin breaks the fine clock that belonged to the Prozorov sisters' mother, he defends himself by saying, "But maybe I didn't break it; maybe it only seems I did." He hides behind abstraction and suggests that no one is noticing anything. He then suggests that people never notice anything of consequence, alluding to the fact that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov. "You sit there with your eyes shut," he says contemptuously, alluding to the ways the characters selectively acknowledge and process information.
The characters, Vershinin in particular, love to philosophize and linger in abstraction, zooming out to make sweeping statements about the state of humanity and the hypothetical future. Vershinin tells a traumatic story about finding his family in the midst of the fire, and uses it as a reference point for considering the ways we think about the past—how human beings imagine the past as somehow brutal or difficult, but that in another hundred years, people will look at their lives that way. The play is peopled by very specific individuals who, as much as they are wrapped up in their own personal dramas, are also constantly thinking about the ways that they fit into a much larger human history.
Masha is often the bearer of bad news, the least contented of the characters. While Irina is also discontent, she is hardly as sharp and cutting about her disappointments. In the wake of the fire, Masha baldly dismisses her husband and complains about the fact that Andrei has mortgaged the house and kept the money for Natasha. She then reveals that she is in love with Vershinin. Of all the characters, Masha is the most willing to speak the unspeakable, to bring the truth to light, but tragically enough, these truths are nearly all impossible to fix.
For the first time since the beginning of the play, we witness a scene between the three sisters alone. They each reveal their respective suffering in confidence. Irina has a breakdown about the fact that her life is passing her by, sobbing, "As time goes by, I find myself pulling away from what makes life beautiful and real..." Olga advises her sister to marry the baron Tusenbach from a place of regret for having not gotten married herself. Then Masha reveals that she is in love with Vershinin, even though their union is ill-advised and anyway impossible. The three sisters reveal their deepest confidences and secrets to one another.
In this final act of the play, it seems that, while she may not make it to Moscow, Irina has a new life on the horizon, one that will deliver her from the life of stagnancy and boredom that has so tortured her throughout the play. Having decided to embrace the goodness of the baron Tusenbach, in spite of not being in love with him, she has taken him up on his proposal to move away and work together. For the first time in the play, Irina's angst seems relieved for a moment and a new possibility promises to save her. She is on the brink, hopeful and expectant.
