STRATFORD, CONN.--If took an awfully long time for Russia to make major contributions to world literate and music. But when its time came, in the 1820's and 1830's, Russia exploded into global significance with a dazzling roster of great figures in both fields.

In the realm of letters, Pushkin and Lermontov were giants in poetry. The novel reached lofty heights with Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev, and others--and a level unsurpassed in any other country or time with Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Some of these wrote for the theatre too, but the chief dramatists were Griboyedov, Ostrovsky, Gorky, and -- above all -- Anton Chekhov.

Although Chekhov is Russia's supreme playwright, he did not devote the bulk of his efforts to the theatre. He was a physician, but spent most of his time turning out a stream of short stories--a field that paid well and paid quickly, important factors for Chekhov, who had a large family to support. In a life restricted to forty four years by the ravages of tuberculosis, he penned short stories totalling, I believe, close to a thousand. At any rate, he is universally considered Russia's greatest short-story teller, and by many the foremost practitioner of the short story in the world.

Compared with this, his theatrical output was rather small. His eminence and influence have come, really, from only four plays--the last four: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. It is not correct, as often claimed, that Chekhov became interested in the theatre only in his last years. In his youth, in fact, he enjoyed quite a reputation as an actor in both professional and non-professional undertakings, which gave him a good deal of practical knowledge of the stage.

Besides a batch of one-act plays, mostly light "vaudevilles," Chekhov wrote a total of nine full-evening, four act plays. Of the first two, penned when he was 18, we know only the titles: The Fatherless, and Laugh It Off If You Can. At 21, he wrote the sprawling but remarkable Platonov, which turned up only long after his death, in the Soviet period. In his late twenties, he turned out Ivanov, a flawed but great and vastly underrated work capable of packing a tremendous wallop in performance; and the tentative, transitional The Wood Demon, which later also provided much of the plot of Uncle Vanya.

In truth, Chekhov did not feel any strong inner drive to write for the theatre. He composed his plays only when he felt they had a good chance of imminent performance; and, furthermore, he wrote his parts for specific players--an idea that finds few advocates today, although it is precisely what Shakespeare had done. None of Chekhov's plays was fully understood and appreciated at its first performance, and he was repeatedly plagued with self-doubts. On occasion he vowed never to bother with the stage again. And he got into heated interpretational conflicts with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the two heads of the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre, whose influence still plagues Chekhov's works.

Almost everyone concedes that each of the last four Chekhov plays is a masterpiece, and hands the first prize to The Cherry Orchard. I happen to belong to the small group that views The Three Sisters as the summit of all Russian drama. (On Chekhov's own admission, it was the play that caused him the most trouble to perfect.) And this is the work that the American Shakespeare Festival has chosen to round out the current season, thus departing from the fifth time in its history.

Mature Chekhov is unbelievably difficult to do well in performance. Amateur productions can almost always be counted on to fail; professional productions fail far more often than not. This Three Sisters, as directed by Michael Kahn, must be adjudged a success; only one of the leading roles comes off less than satisfactorily.

In Platonov and Ivanov, for instance, Chekhov dramatized an individual, and one tremendous performance can bring them off. From The sea Gull on, however, Chekhov was portraying a group; a star or two will not suffice. Here Chekhov has done away with the clear spine that drives through the play from one exciting event to another, from one "sock on the jaw" (Chekhov's phrase) to another; he has turned his back on the technique of say, Ibsen and Strindberg. He has, in effect, turned from the solo concerto with orchestra to the more subtle and contrapuntal interplay of chamber music.

In The Three Sisters there is a spine, but it is submerged well below the surface--like almost everything else in the play. The work requires a lot from its audience, which may easily choose to be just as board as some of Chekhov's characters claim to be. People say there is no plot. In a way they are right. Instead, there is a congeries of tiny plotlets, ever so delicately and carefully contrived.

Chekhov once wrote of playwriting "in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are--not on stilts.... Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life." This is a prescription for utter naturalism; and, if followed exactly, it would yield only tedium.

But Chekhov in his late plays fused the "as it is" with "as it should be"; he took a moral position. True, he did adopt a quasi-realistic diction with its illogicalities, its wandering directions, its repetitions; but he was skillful enough to infuse it with a marvelous rhythm and a sort of poetic evocativeness. (This technique strongly affected the plays of our own O'Neill, Odets, and Hellman.) The director and the players--and, indeed, the audience-- must be able to catch unspecified implications, to apprehend not so much what is said as what is consciously or subconsciously thought and not said. In addition, Chekhov has woven a host of verbal and tangible symbols into his texture, which makes the result richer than any mere slice-of-life.

There is a special emphasis on objects in The Three sisters, which rules out the use of stylized settings. In the huge cavernous space of the Festival theatre, one couldn't just construct the usual box of three walls and a ceiling. William Ritman has solved the problem nicely by having us face the living-room (and dining-room beyond) from the diagonal. And he has carefully included objects that tell us much about the characters of the household--little vases of lilacs or lilies-of-the-valley, framed pictures, an old square piano with a tasseled shawl, candle brackets by the main door, a writing desk and accoutrements, a folding screen, antimacassars on the backs and arms of chairs, and so on. Hovering over everything in the back are gray tree branches suggestive of tentacles that keep the inhabitants rooted to their provincial garrison town although they long to go to Moscow and its supposedly greener grass. (But Chekhov himself is careful again and again to poke holes in the characters' absurd vision of Moscow as an alleged paradise. Furthermore, I wish the cast would agree on a pronunciation of the city's second syllable.)

Although Chekhov is depicting a group of people, almost everyone of them is decidedly lonely, and frustrated in one way or another. And they are all ordinary, unexceptional people, essentially failures. Yet they are not carbon copies of each other--except in bad productions. Director Kahn and his players have managed to assure that every single one of these average people is unique, is an individual, is a three-dimensional character, with a past, a present, and--this is important--a future. Chekhov envisions a happier future for later, generations, and underlines the necessity of hard work and hope. The play has a moderately upbeat ending -- though many don't seem to realize it. The Three Sisters is not a tragedy (a label Chekhov never used: it, like Ivanov, is a "drama"; The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard are "comedy"; Uncle Vanya is called "scenes from country life"). The Three Sisters is two parts pathos and one part comedy. Much in the play is funny, much is witty--and Kahn has not let this get obscured.

The play has fourteen speaking parts. Of these only the two lieutenants Fedotik and Rode are minor (Kahn, in a felicitous touch, has given Fedotik a bit of extra business with his camera at the end of the first act, when Natasha and Andrey kiss). This means that there are twelve vitally important roles, with the subtlest web of interactions.