The goal of the paper is to examine A. Chexov's Three Sisters through the prism of Jurij Lotman's theory of plot movement. On the one hand, Lotman's theory provides a key to the play's dramatic structure and to the problems connected with its stage productions. On the other hand, the play exemplifies Lotman's productive (and self-acknowledged) inconsistency. According to Lotman, plot is organically tied to the picture of the world, which, for Lotman, signifies, first and foremost, a point of view: the semantic field of the text's world is subdivided into binary subspaces by the personages. Plot movement occurs through events. An event takes place when a mobile personage crosses the border between the binary subspaces, opposite and mutually exclusive. However, Lotman's notion of the border between these subspaces turns tentative when he discusses the center/periphery binary: center and periphery do not constitute a binary opposition--periphery is the border between "us" and "them." Therefore, one may conclude that the battle between "us" and "them" takes place on the periphery, which is a more or less fluid space. Anyone who has read or seen Three Sisters is most likely to remember the line, which became the play's slogan and symbol: "To Moscow! To Moscow!" Moscow is the non-existent center of the play's world, the conglomeration of the protagonists' hopes and aspirations. Although the play presents a complex world, partitioned according to multiple binaries, the relationship between Moscow and the Prozorov household informs every partition. Yet it is an essentially false center-periphery relationship. The impossibility of leaving the periphery epitomizes the movement of Chexovian plot in general, the riddle of which this paper attempts to solve.