# Three Sisters: every role by lines, words, and stage time

> Anton Chekhov, translated by Julius West. 16 speaking roles, 17,351 words, about 124 minutes of speech.

- URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/three-sisters
- Last updated: 2026-10-08

**Vershinin** has the most to say in Three Sisters: about 277 lines and 2,439 words, 14.1% of the play. Three Sisters follows the Prozorov sisters in a provincial garrison town as their hopes of returning to Moscow slip away. The load is unusually even: no role holds more than 14% of the words, and the eight largest parts all speak in every act. Vershinin has the most words, with Irina, Tuzenbach, Masha, and Olga close behind.

- Speaking roles: 16
- Scenes: 4
- Words: 17,351
- Speech time: 124 min

## Every role, largest first

| Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Vershinin | 277 | 2,439 | 14.1% | 17.4 | 4 |
| Irina | 273 | 2,138 | 12.3% | 15.3 | 4 |
| Tuzenbach | 219 | 1,828 | 10.5% | 13.1 | 4 |
| Masha | 228 | 1,800 | 10.4% | 12.9 | 4 |
| Olga | 211 | 1,676 | 9.7% | 12.0 | 4 |
| Andrey | 189 | 1,650 | 9.5% | 11.8 | 4 |
| Natasha | 165 | 1,452 | 8.4% | 10.4 | 4 |
| Kuligin | 171 | 1,450 | 8.4% | 10.4 | 4 |
| Chebutikin | 168 | 1,289 | 7.4% | 9.2 | 4 |
| Soleni | 85 | 652 | 3.8% | 4.7 | 4 |
| Anfisa | 39 | 331 | 1.9% | 2.4 | 4 |
| Fedotik | 35 | 286 | 1.6% | 2.0 | 4 |
| Ferapont | 37 | 261 | 1.5% | 1.9 | 4 |
| Rode | 15 | 97 | 0.6% | 0.7 | 3 |
| Andrey’s voice | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 |
| Vershinin’s voice | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 |

## Who speaks in which scene

Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: Act 1 = Act 1; Act 2 = Act 2; Act 3 = Act 3; Act 4 = Act 4.

- **Vershinin**: Act 1 (915), Act 2 (773), Act 3 (472), Act 4 (279)
- **Irina**: Act 1 (680), Act 2 (374), Act 3 (537), Act 4 (547)
- **Tuzenbach**: Act 1 (617), Act 2 (590), Act 3 (253), Act 4 (368)
- **Masha**: Act 1 (512), Act 2 (543), Act 3 (362), Act 4 (383)
- **Olga**: Act 1 (717), Act 2 (82), Act 3 (582), Act 4 (295)
- **Andrey**: Act 1 (292), Act 2 (453), Act 3 (401), Act 4 (504)
- **Natasha**: Act 1 (102), Act 2 (682), Act 3 (392), Act 4 (276)
- **Kuligin**: Act 1 (472), Act 2 (98), Act 3 (369), Act 4 (511)
- **Chebutikin**: Act 1 (325), Act 2 (177), Act 3 (271), Act 4 (516)
- **Soleni**: Act 1 (160), Act 2 (354), Act 3 (52), Act 4 (86)

## The longest speeches

| Speech | Scene | Words | Lines |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Vershinin: “Yes. How strange everything really is! When the fire broke out, I hurried off home; when I get there I see the house is whole, uninjured, and in no danger, but my two girls are standing by the door in just their underclothes, their mother isn’t there, the crowd is excited, horses and dogs are running about, and the girls’ faces are so agitated, terrified, beseeching, and I don’t know what else. My heart was pained when I saw those faces. My God, I thought, what these girls will have to put up with if they live long! I caught them up and ran, and still kept on thinking the one thing: what they will have to live through in this world! I come here and find their mother shouting and angry. And when my girls were standing by the door in just their underclothes, and the street was red from the fire, there was a dreadful noise, and I thought that something of the sort used to happen many years ago when an enemy made a sudden attack, and looted, and burned. … And at the same time what a difference there really is between the present and the past! And when a little more time has gone by, in two or three hundred years perhaps, people will look at our present life with just the same fear, and the same contempt, and the whole past will seem clumsy and dull, and very uncomfortable, and strange. Oh, indeed, what a life there will be, what a life! Forgive me, I’ve dropped into philosophy again. Please let me continue. I do awfully want to philosophize, it’s just how I feel at present. As if they are all asleep. As I was saying: what a life there will be! Only just imagine. … There are only three persons like yourselves in the town just now, but in future generations there will be more and more, and still more, and the time will come when everything will change and become as you would have it, people will live as you do, and then you too will go out of date; people will be born who are better than you. … Yes, today I am quite exceptionally in the vein. I am devilishly keen on living. …” | Act 3 | 394 | 40 |
| Andrey: “I’ll only say this and go. Just now. … In the first place, you’ve got something against Natasha, my wife; I’ve noticed it since the very day of my marriage. Natasha is a beautiful and honest creature, straight and honourable—that’s my opinion. I love and respect my wife; understand it, I respect her, and I insist that others should respect her too. I repeat, she’s an honest and honourable person, and all your disapproval is simply silly … In the second place, you seem to be annoyed because I am not a professor, and am not engaged in study. But I work for the zemstvo, I am a member of the district council, and I consider my service as worthy and as high as the service of science. I am a member of the district council, and I am proud of it, if you want to know. In the third place, I have still this to say … that I have mortgaged the house without obtaining your permission. … For that I am to blame, and ask to be forgiven. My debts led me into doing it … thirty-five thousand … I do not play at cards any more, I stopped long ago, but the chief thing I have to say in my defence is that you girls receive a pension, and I don’t … my wages, so to speak. …” | Act 3 | 224 | 23 |
| Andrey: “Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to me full of hope. Why do we, almost before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy. … This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never been, now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a passionate desire to be imitated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then they die … more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to go silly from boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly backbiting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one another as their fathers and mothers. … What do you want?” | Act 4 | 223 | 23 |
| Vershinin: “Well, I say! You know a lot too much! I don’t think there can really be a town so dull and stupid as to have no place for a clever, cultured person. Let us suppose even that among the hundred thousand inhabitants of this backward and uneducated town, there are only three persons like yourself. It stands to reason that you won’t be able to conquer that dark mob around you; little by little as you grow older you will be bound to give way and lose yourselves in this crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; their life will suck you up in itself, but still, you won’t disappear having influenced nobody; later on, others like you will come, perhaps six of them, then twelve, and so on, until at last your sort will be in the majority. In two or three hundred years’ time life on this earth will be unimaginably beautiful and wonderful. Mankind needs such a life, and if it is not ours today then we must look ahead for it, wait, think, prepare for it. We must see and know more than our fathers and grandfathers saw and knew. And you complain that you know too much.” | Act 1 | 202 | 21 |
| Chebutikin: “Devil take them all … take them all. … They think I’m a doctor and can cure everything, and I know absolutely nothing, I’ve forgotten all I ever knew, I remember nothing, absolutely nothing. Devil take it. Last Wednesday I attended a woman in Zasip—and she died, and it’s my fault that she died. Yes … I used to know a certain amount five-and-twenty years ago, but I don’t remember anything now. Nothing. Perhaps I’m not really a man, and am only pretending that I’ve got arms and legs and a head; perhaps I don’t exist at all, and only imagine that I walk, and eat, and sleep. Oh, if only I didn’t exist! The devil only knows. … Day before yesterday they were talking in the club; they said, Shakespeare, Voltaire … I’d never read, never read at all, and I put on an expression as if I had read. And so did the others. Oh, how beastly! How petty! And then I remembered the woman I killed on Wednesday … and I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and everything in my mind became crooked, nasty, wretched. … So I went and drank. …” | Act 3 | 190 | 19 |
| Irina: “When I woke up today and got up and dressed myself, I suddenly began to feel as if everything in this life was open to me, and that I knew how I must live. Dear Ivan Romanovitch, I know everything. A man must work, toil in the sweat of his brow, whoever he may be, for that is the meaning and object of his life, his happiness, his enthusiasm. How fine it is to be a workman who gets up at daybreak and breaks stones in the street, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster, who teaches children, or an engine-driver on the railway. … My God, let alone a man, it’s better to be an ox, or just a horse, so long as it can work, than a young woman who wakes up at twelve o’clock, has her coffee in bed, and then spends two hours dressing. … Oh it’s awful! Sometimes when it’s hot, your thirst can be just as tiresome as my need for work. And if I don’t get up early in future and work, Ivan Romanovitch, then you may refuse me your friendship.” | Act 1 | 185 | 19 |
| Kuligin: “Oh, drop it! Today the soldiers will be gone, and everything will go on as in the old days. Say what you will, Masha is a good, honest woman. I love her very much, and thank my fate for her. People have such different fates. There’s a Kosirev who works in the excise department here. He was at school with me; he was expelled from the fifth class of the high school for being entirely unable to understand ut consecutivum. He’s awfully hard up now and in very poor health, and when I meet him I say to him, “How do you do, ut consecutivum.” “Yes,” he says, “precisely consecutivum …” and coughs. But I’ve been successful all my life, I’m happy, and I even have a Stanislaus Cross, of the second class, and now I myself teach others that ut consecutivum. Of course, I’m a clever man, much cleverer than many, but happiness doesn’t only lie in that. …” | Act 4 | 158 | 16 |
| Tuzenbach: “It is curious how silly trivial little things, sometimes for no apparent reason, become significant. At first you laugh at these things, you think they are of no importance, you go on and you feel that you haven’t got the strength to stop yourself. Oh don’t let’s talk about it! I am happy. It is as if for the first time in my life I see these firs, maples, beeches, and they all look at me inquisitively and wait. What beautiful trees and how beautiful, when one comes to think of it, life must be near them! It’s time I went. … There’s a tree which has dried up but it still sways in the breeze with the others. And so it seems to me that if I die, I shall still take part in life in one way or another. Goodbye, dear. … The papers which you gave me are on my table under the calendar.” | Act 4 | 155 | 16 |
| Tuzenbach: “How well I can understand that craving for work, oh God! I’ve never worked once in my life. I was born in Petersburg, a chilly, lazy place, in a family which never knew what work or worry meant. I remember that when I used to come home from my regiment, a footman used to have to pull off my boots while I fidgeted and my mother looked on in adoration and wondered why other people didn’t see me in the same light. They shielded me from work; but only just in time! A new age is dawning, the people are marching on us all, a powerful, health-giving storm is gathering, it is drawing near, soon it will be upon us and it will drive away laziness, indifference, the prejudice against labour, and rotten dullness from our society. I shall work, and in twenty-five or thirty years, every man will have to work. Everyone!” | Act 1 | 153 | 16 |
| Kuligin: “Today is Sunday, the day of rest, so let us rest and rejoice, each in a manner compatible with his age and disposition. The carpets will have to be taken up for the summer and put away till the winter … Persian powder or naphthaline. … The Romans were healthy because they knew both how to work and how to rest, they had mens sana in corpore sano. Their life ran along certain recognized patterns. Our director says: “The chief thing about each life is its pattern. Whoever loses his pattern is lost himself”—and it’s just the same in our daily life. Masha loves me. My wife loves me. And you ought to put the window curtains away with the carpets. … I’m feeling awfully pleased with life today. Masha, we’ve got to be at the director’s at four. They’re getting up a walk for the pedagogues and their families.” | Act 1 | 148 | 15 |

## Small roles that can be doubled

These pairs of small roles never speak in the same scene, so one actor could play both. Check entrances and silent appearances in your script before you cast it this way.

- Rode and Vershinin’s voice
- Andrey’s voice and Vershinin’s voice

## Questions actors ask

### Who has the most lines in Three Sisters?

Vershinin, with about 277 lines and 2,439 words, 14.1% of everything spoken in the play. Irina is next, with about 273 lines (12.3%).

### How long is Three Sisters?

The full text has 17,351 spoken words, about 124 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary.

### How many speaking roles are in Three Sisters?

16 named roles speak in this edition, across 4 scenes. 6 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled.

## How we count

Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anton-chekhov/three-sisters/julius-west) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).