Uncle Vanya

Summary

Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar. Now the professor has retired to the estate with his beautiful young second wife, Helena, and the household's routine is upset by his late hours, his complaints of gout and his demands. Vanya, at forty-seven, has decided that the professor is a mediocrity who wrote about art without understanding it, and that his own life of devoted work has been wasted; he is also in love with Helena. The local doctor, Michael Astroff, worn out by his practice among the peasants, haunted by a patient who died on his operating table under chloroform, and drinking more than he should, is the only person who still has a passion: he plants trees and draws maps showing how the district's forests, wildlife and villages have declined over fifty years. Sonia, plain, hard-working and devout, loves Astroff without hope. Act II is a sleepless night in which the professor complains, Vanya and Astroff drink, and Sonia and Helena are reconciled. In Act III Helena, sounding out Astroff on Sonia's behalf, discovers that he has no feeling for Sonia and is attracted to her instead; Vanya walks in on them embracing. The professor then gathers the family to propose selling the estate, which belongs to Sonia through her mother, and investing the money to give himself a larger income. Vanya explodes, cries that he might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky, and fires a revolver at the professor twice, missing both times. In Act IV, Astroff discovers that Vanya has taken a bottle of morphine from his medicine case and, with Sonia, persuades him to give it back. The professor and Helena leave, reconciled with the household on the old terms; Astroff departs, not to return until summer; the old nurse Marina, Vanya's mother and the poor neighbour Telegin settle back into their habits. Vanya and Sonia sit down to the accounts, and Sonia, kneeling beside him, promises that after a life of patient work they will rest and see heaven. Chekhov reworked the play from his earlier comedy The Wood Demon (1889), published it in 1897, and saw it staged in the provinces before the Moscow Art Theatre production of 1899. The library text is Marian Fell's 1912 translation, which spells the names Serebrakoff, Astroff and Sonia.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: Afternoon tea in the garden

  Astroff tells the nurse Marina of a typhoid epidemic and a patient lost under chloroform; Vanya mocks the professor; Sonia repeats Astroff's case for the forests and he explains it to Helena, who intrigues both men.

• Act II: A sleepless night

  The professor, kept awake by gout, torments his wife and then Marina; Vanya declares his love to Helena and is rebuffed; Astroff and Vanya drink; Sonia and Helena make peace, and Sonia's hope for Astroff is raised and dashed.

• Act III: The family council

  Astroff shows Helena his maps of the district's decline; she learns he does not love Sonia and he kisses her as Vanya enters; the professor proposes selling the estate, and Vanya fires at him twice and misses.

• Act IV: Departures

  Astroff and Sonia make Vanya return the morphine he has taken; the professor and Helena leave; Astroff goes back to his practice; Vanya and Sonia return to their ledgers, and Sonia speaks of the rest to come.

Characters

• Ivan Petrovich Voitski (Uncle Vanya), manager of the estate

  Forty-seven, sardonic and despairing, he has spent his life serving a man he now despises and loves a woman who does not want him.

• Sonia, the professor's daughter

  Owner of the estate through her mother, hard-working and devout, she loves Astroff without return.

• Alexander Serebrakoff, retired professor

  An elderly scholar of art, querulous about his health and his neglect, who lives on the estate's income.

• Helena, the professor's young wife

  Beautiful, bored and faithful, she attracts both Vanya and Astroff and leaves without yielding to either.

• Michael Astroff, country doctor

  An overworked physician and passionate forester, drinking and growing cynical, who still cares for the land.

• Marina, the old nurse

  A calm, pious old woman who knits, pours tea and comforts everyone.

• Mme. Voitskaya, Vanya's mother

  A widow who reveres the professor and reads pamphlets on the emancipation of women.

• Ilia Telegin (Waffles), impoverished landowner

  A gentle hanger-on with a pockmarked face who plays the guitar and lives on the family's kindness.

Lessons

• A life given away

  Vanya has worked for twenty-five years to support the professor's career, and when he decides that the professor is a fraud he concludes his own life has been wasted. The play does not settle whether the sacrifice was foolish or whether only the idol was false. Chekhov shows how disappointment in another person can turn into contempt for one's own past.

  • What exactly does Vanya think he has lost by serving the professor?
  • Is his claim that he might have been another Schopenhauer to be believed?
  • Was Vanya's work for the estate wasted if it supported Sonia and the household?

• The forests and the future

  Astroff's maps in Act III record how the district's woods, wildlife and villages have shrunk over fifty years, and he plants trees for people who will live long after him. He hopes that descendants two hundred years on will remember the work, though he doubts it. His care for the land is the one hopeful passion in the play.

  • Why does Astroff care so much about trees he will not live to see grown?
  • What does Marina's answer, that God remembers, add to his doubt about being remembered?

• Idleness and beauty

  Astroff says a human being should be beautiful in face, clothes, mind and thoughts, and that an idle life cannot be pure. Helena's boredom unsettles the whole house, and when work stops, drinking, gossip and longing fill the time. The play's last image is a return to the ledgers.

  • How does the arrival of the professor and Helena change the rhythm of the estate?
  • Is Astroff fair to Helena, or is he blaming her for his own feelings?
  • Why does the play end with Vanya and Sonia doing accounts?

• Patient endurance and hope

  Sonia has as much reason for despair as Vanya, since Astroff does not love her, yet she answers his misery with a promise of work now and rest hereafter. Her closing speech joins patient suffering with faith in God's pity. Audiences have heard it as consolation, as resignation, or both.

  • What does Sonia promise Vanya, and on what does she base her hope?
  • Is her speech a sign of strength or of exhaustion, or can it be both?

Context

The play is set on a provincial estate in late nineteenth-century Russia, a generation after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, when many gentry families were living on dwindling incomes and rural doctors worked among peasants under the zemstvo system of local self-government. Astroff's concern with deforestation echoes debates of the 1880s and 1890s about Russia's forests. Chekhov knew the world of the play at first hand as a doctor and as the owner, from 1892 to 1899, of the small estate of Melikhovo south of Moscow.

Composition

Uncle Vanya grew out of The Wood Demon, a four-act comedy staged in Moscow in 1889 without success. Chekhov cut its cast, removed the original suicide of the Vanya figure, and made the shooting misfire; the new play appeared in a volume of his plays in 1897. It was produced by provincial companies before the Moscow Art Theatre staged it in October 1899, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, with Stanislavski as Astroff. Marian Fell's English translation was published in 1912 in a volume of Chekhov's plays.

Reception

After the Moscow Art Theatre production the play became a staple of the Russian repertory and later of the English-speaking stage, often in new translations and adaptations. Its quiet action, broken conversations and long final speech helped define the modern drama of mood and undercurrent. Productions differ over whether the ending is consoling or bleak, and the play has been read in recent decades for Astroff's ecological speeches.

Comparisons

• a-dolls-house-and-other-plays

  Ibsen builds to a decisive confrontation and a door slammed; Chekhov's crisis, Vanya's missed shots, changes nothing, and everyone resumes the old life.

• fathers-and-sons

  Turgenev's Bazarov and Chekhov's Astroff are both country doctors among the gentry, one a confident nihilist, the other a weary idealist planting forests.

• the-death-of-ivan-ilyich

  Tolstoy's judge and Chekhov's Vanya both conclude in middle age that their lives went wrong; Tolstoy resolves the crisis in a vision at death, Chekhov leaves it in the account books.

• the-bible

  Sonia's closing speech draws on the Christian hope of rest after labour and of God's compassion for the suffering.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Astroff's account of the epidemic and the patient lost under chloroform in Act I, and Marina's answer.
• The night scene of Act II, with the professor's complaints, the drinking, and the reconciliation of Sonia and Helena.
• Astroff's three maps of the district in Act III, showing fifty years of change.
• The family council in Act III and how Vanya's anger builds to the two missed shots.
• The sounds and small actions at the very end: the guitar, the watchman's rattle, the knitting, the pamphlet.

Key terms and names

Scenes from Country Life

Chekhov's subtitle, signalling a play of ordinary days on a provincial estate rather than a plot of great events.

The Wood Demon

Chekhov's earlier comedy (1889), which he rewrote as Uncle Vanya; its title was a nickname for the forest-loving doctor.

The estate

The property Vanya manages, which belongs to Sonia through her mother and which the professor proposes to sell.

Astroff's maps

Watercolour maps showing the district fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago and now, recording the loss of forests and wildlife.

Subtext

Feeling carried beneath ordinary talk; in this play people speak of the weather, tea or accounts while concealing love and despair.

Morphine

The drug Vanya takes from Astroff's case in Act IV, intending to end his life, and is persuaded to return.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why has Vanya turned against the professor, and what does he say the professor has cost him?
2. Comprehension What does the professor propose at the family council in Act III, and why does it enrage Vanya?
3. Comprehension How do Astroff and Sonia persuade Vanya to give back the morphine?
4. Interpretation Helena sets out to learn whether Astroff loves Sonia. What does she discover about him, and about herself?
5. Interpretation Is the professor a villain, a fool, or simply an old man afraid of death? What evidence supports each view?
6. Interpretation Why does Chekhov let Vanya miss twice? What would be lost if the shot had found its mark?
7. Big Question Can a life spent quietly serving others be a wasted life? What would make it meaningful?
8. Big Question Is hope in a life to come a flight from present suffering or a reason to endure it?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 11:28-30 (Scripture)

  Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: Sonia's promise that they shall rest after their labour echoes this invitation.

• Revelation 21:4 (Scripture)

  God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: Sonia's vision of all pain sinking away in a great compassion draws on this hope.

• Ecclesiastes 2:18-23 (Scripture)

  The Preacher's lament that he must leave his labour to another who may not deserve it is close to Vanya's grievance against the professor.

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Great Conversation)

  Vanya names Dostoevsky as the writer he might have become; Dostoevsky's elder Zosima teaches active love and labour as the answer to despair, close to the path Sonia chooses.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Vanya reasons that he gave his life to a man he thought great; the man is not great; therefore his life was wasted. Astroff reasons that his work will be forgotten and the forests will fall anyway. Sonia answers neither argument directly but proposes another premise: that God sees and will have pity on patient labour and suffering. The play leaves the audience to judge whether her hope answers their despair.

Rhetorical device: anaphora. Sonia's final speech in Act IV repeats we shall, ending in the refrain We shall rest, so that the words become a kind of litany over Vanya's grief.

Debate: Resolved: that Sonia's closing speech is an expression of hope rather than resignation.

Memory Work

We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel.

Man is forgetful, but God remembers.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Astroff plants forests for a future he will not see, and Sonia works for a rest she expects after death. Argue whether the play presents these two hopes as alike or opposed.

Comparison with The Death of Ivan Ilyich: Ivan Ilyich and Uncle Vanya both decide that their lives have been wrongly lived. Compare how each reaches this conclusion and what, if anything, each finds beyond it.

Medical Lens

Chekhov was a practising physician, and Astroff is among the most closely observed doctors in drama: a district practitioner riding to epidemics, overworked, underpaid, drinking to dull fatigue and losing the feeling that makes him a good doctor. In Act I he describes an outbreak of what Fell renders as eruptive typhoid (typhus is a possible reading of the Russian term) among peasants living with their animals in smoky huts, and a railway switchman who died on his table under chloroform, leaving him tormented as if he had killed the man; chloroform anaesthesia carried a known risk of sudden death in this period. The professor's gout, rheumatism and fear of angina, with his sleeplessness and querulous dependence, give a portrait of old age and chronic illness from the household's side. In Act IV Vanya takes a bottle of morphine from Astroff's medical case, and the doctor's matter-of-fact plea that he return it, with Sonia's intercession, is a scene of suicide risk handled within a family. Vanya's despair has been read in modern terms as depression; the play presents it as grief over a wasted life, and any such reading is interpretive.

• Act I

  Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.

  Fever Infection Plague Epidemic Surgery Physicians Doctors Public Health Sanitation
• Act II

  Serebrakoff, sleepless with gout, fears angina and complains of old age; he refuses to see Astroff, whom he had sent for, and is soothed by Marina with linden tea; Astroff drinks with Vanya.

  Aging Senescence Pain Alcohol
• Act III

  Vanya's despair at the family council ends in two shots fired at the professor.

  Melancholia Depression
• Act IV

  Astroff demands the return of the morphine Vanya has taken from his medicine case, and Sonia persuades her uncle to give it back.

  Suicide Opium Laudanum Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Stage Sonia's final speech twice, once as consolation and once as exhaustion, and discuss which reading the stage directions support.

• Essay

  Compare Vanya and Astroff as two men who think their lives have been wasted. Which of them has better grounds, and which responds better?

• Fiction

  Write Astroff's diary for the night after his last departure in Act IV.

Further Reading

• The Seagull, Anton Chekhov

• The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov

• The Island of Sakhalin, Anton Chekhov

  Chekhov's survey of the penal colony, written as a physician and census-taker.

• Anton Chekhov: A Life, Donald Rayfield