A Tale of Two (or Three) Sisters: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Zhukova, Tur, Khvoshchinskaya, and Chekhov

This article reconstructs Russia’s sororal literary tradition by reintegrating women novelists into the narrative. Between Alexander Pushkin’s famous Larina sisters ( Evgenii Onegin ) and Lev Tolstoy’s Shcherbatskys ( Anna Karenina ) a wave of female-authored novels and novellas focused on sisterhood, many named Two Sisters or Three Sisters . These works depict a familial values system that places primary emphasis on blood kin, de-emphasizing romantic love. Using Mariia Zhukova’s and Evgeniia Tur’s Two Sisters as case studies, the essay explores the unique dynamics of Russian love triangles in which two sisters fall in love with the same man. In depicting sisters resisting rivalry in the face of a shortage (of lovers), Russian women writers made the same case that men would articulate more explicitly two decades later in response to Charles Darwin’s ideas about competition: scarcity leads to unity and cooperation, not struggle. This same values system recurs in novels about three sisters, where the elder give up their prospective wealth to ensure the success of the youngest. The article closes with an exploration of this dynamic in the novella The Brother by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and then explores the way Anton Chekhov reworked Khvoshchinskaya’s plot in his Three Sisters .