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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Act III

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

• 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.