Summary
The scene is a garden with a country house in the distance. It is mid-afternoon. Marina, an elderly woman, is knitting. Michael Astrov, a doctor, approaches her.
Marina asks if he would like a drink, and Astrov declines. She reminisces about when he first came to these parts, and comments that he looks much older now. Astrov sighs that he is overworked and surrounded by the oddest people, which makes one turn odd themselves. He feels that he still has his wits, but he rues that he cares for nothing and no one. He does kiss her head, though, and smiles that he is fond of her.
Astrov continues to talk about what he’s seen, particularly a typhus epidemic and how, when he got home, a railwayman was brought in and died right on his table. The weight of guilt at not being able to save the man crushes him; he laments that, when he and everyone else is gone hundreds of years from now, people will not remember them. Marina comforts him by saying that God will remember.
Voynitsky (known as Vanya), looking disheveled and sleepy after a nap, joins them. He complains that since the professor and his wife arrived, the house has been turned upside down. Sonya works and he does nothing, but the schedule is completely different. Marina adds her complaints about the professor’s whims and how she has to put the samovar on at random hours. Astrov asks how long they are staying; Vanya jokes wryly that they will be there for a hundred years.
The professor, Serebryakov, his young and lovely second wife Helen, his daughter Sonya from his first marriage (to Vanya’s sister, now deceased), and Telegin, an elderly landowner and Sonya's godfather, come down into the garden and join them. Serebryakov compliments the scenery and then asks for tea to be sent to the study. He, his wife, and his daughter retire into the house.
Vanya mocks the professor’s excessive clothing on this warm day, but he gushes over Helen’s beauty. Astrov tries to get Vanya to talk about what is going on in the house now, and Vanya only grumbles that he is lazy and that his mother complains all day and gets her head in a tizzy about women’s rights. As for the professor, he suffers from a myriad of ailments but spends his time writing and living off his first wife’s estate. He knows nothing about the art he writes about, and he seems to get too many lucky breaks. Vanya adds that his brother-in-law simply writes about things that all smart people already know—“in other words he’s spent twenty-five years chasing his own shadow” (123).
Astrov comments that perhaps Vanya is jealous, and Vanya laughs blackly that of course he is. He doesn't understand Serebryakov’s success with women: he married Vanya's sister; his mother still likes him; and now he is married to the beautiful Helen. Astrov asks if Helen is faithful to Serebryakov, and remarks that it seems incredibly ridiculous.
Telegin whines that Vanya shouldn’t criticize someone who is faithful to a spouse because being unfaithful could lead to being unfaithful to one’s country. Vanya, irritated, tells him to be quiet. Telegin tearfully tells them of his own wife’s unfaithfulness. Now, however, she has lost her looks and her lover is dead: she has nothing, while he still has his pride.
Sonya and Helen return along with Mrs. Voynitsky, and Sonya hurriedly asks Marina if she can see what new visitors to the house want. Astrov tells Helen that he’s come to see her husband but she says that he is fine now. Astrov decides to stay the night; Sonya tells him she is glad, and that he can eat with them.
Telegin volunteers that the samovar is cold now, and Helen, referring to him as “Mr. Galetin,” tells him not to worry. He corrects her, and Sonya tells Helen that Telegin is a great help to them here.
Mrs. Voynitsky speaks up to tell her son about a pamphlet from Kharkov, and how it is odd because the man reversed his opinions. Vanya rolls his eyes and says they ought to stop talking about pamphlets. Mrs. Voynitsky is offended by her son’s behavior, but Vanya does not care. He is forty-seven and no longer feels like he knows what to do with himself, and he cannot sleep at night because he is angry and frustrated with his wasted life. His mother chides him that he is the only one to blame and that if he wanted to do something, he should have done it. Vanya scoffs that they aren’t all “non-stop writing machines like the learned professor” (125).
Sonya begs them to stop bickering, and they fall silent. Helen comments that it is a perfect day. Vanya retorts that it is a perfect day to hang oneself.
When Marina returns, she tells Sonya that the village people wanted to talk about the wasted land. A laborer comes up to them asking for the doctor because there is an issue at the factory. Grumbling, Astrov gets up to leave. He addresses Sonya and Helen, telling them that there is a government forest reserve next to his estate and that it is somewhat of a showpiece. If they want to come, he says, he will show them around.
Helen smiles that she has heard of his fondness for forestry work, and asks if it interferes with his “real business” (127). Astrov wryly asks what life’s real business really is, but comments that forestry is interesting work. Helen is surprised someone as young as he is so interested in something as dull as trees. Sonya interjects and says that it is very interesting, and that Astrov is trying to save the forest from destruction. She explains that Astrov always says, “forest are the glory of our earth, that they teach man to appreciate beauty and give him a sense of grandeur” (127).
Vanya laughs and says he’ll keep burning his logs and building wooden barns. Astrov responds that, yes, he can cut timber, but why ruin all the forests? Russia is losing millions of trees and the scenery has changed. Man is not a creator but merely a destroyer: he ruins forests and rivers, wildlife is destroyed, the climate is changing, and everything grows uglier. Astrov is proud of what he has saved.
Sonya walks him out, asking when he will return. Helen and Vanya start walking and she chastises him for his rudeness and for the way he treats her husband. He comments that he hates him, and then he muses that she seems to move as if she were bored and life were too much. She admits that she is bored but that men always feel sorry for women because they have a demon of destruction in them and feel upset when they see a woman who doesn’t belong to them.
She pauses and comments that Sonya is obviously in love with the doctor and that, although he is high-strung, he is attractive. He does not seem to like her, she muses, but she and Vanya get along so well because they are both “abysmal bores” (129).
Vanya feverishly proclaims his love for her, but she shushes him and tells him that he is simply too much. Telegin plays the guitar in the background.
Analysis
Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is comprised of four acts. Although the subtitle of the play suggests it will concern “scenes of country life,” that’s only partially accurate. The play is indeed set on a country estate at the end of the 19th century, but there are few scenes that provide any insight into what the lived experience of people in the Russian countryside might be. Instead, the play is mostly concerned with the squabbles, complaints, and thwarted dreams of the middle-class characters. By the end of the play, little to nothing has happened; everything returns to the status quo. Even a dramatic attempted murder ends with the proverbial whimper rather than a bang. For theatergoers at the time of its staging, this was remarkably aberrant. As scholar Ronald Hingley notes in his introduction to an edition of Chekhov’s plays, “we shall do better to look neither for tragedy nor comedy, but to realize that we have entered a strange anti-climactic, anti-romantic, anti-dramatic world such has never existed on the stage before Chekhov, a world with its own laws, its own dimensions, its own brand of humor.” Rosamund Bartlett described it as a “play about a group of unremarkable individuals who seemingly randomly enter and leave, after holding desultory conversations which invariably degenerate into arguments” and “is neither tragedy nor farce.”
What, then, is Uncle Vanya about? Despite its lack of a traditional plot structure, the play does establish a few points of contention. In Act I, we meet Astrov, a country doctor who is bitterly aware of the intellectual limitations of his job. He expresses derision of the people whom he treats and wonders if anyone will ever remember the work he did. However, unlike Vanya, he manages to exhibit some feeling, telling Marina about a man he could not save and how “I felt guilty as if I’d murdered the man” (120). Astrov also extols the merits of his forestry reserve, offering an impassioned account of how Russians do not create but only destroy, and how this destruction results in both devastation of the environment and the Russian character. Astrov’s labors are noble, but he does not succeed in convincing anyone else (besides Sonya, who is in love with him) that his work invites emulation.
If the title didn’t already suggest it, it becomes clear that the play really belongs to Voynitsky, or Vanya. Vanya struggles with both his life as a whole and with the particular dynamic that results from Serebryakov and Helen being at the estate in person; their presence provokes and exacerbates his general feelings of unhappiness, lack of fulfillment, and exhaustion. Although Vanya normally works hard on the estate, being face-to-face with his brother-in-law and Helen renders him only able to “sleep, eat, and drink” (120). He is bitterly jealous of Serebryakov—not only for the women he attracts, but also for the fact that Serebryakov has been successful as a writer and scholar while he, Vanya, has not done anything of note. Vanya excoriates the lack of originality in Serebryakov’s ideas and claims that he is “totally obscure” and “[has] spent twenty-five years chasing his own shadow” (123).
Ironically, one of the things that Vanya has in common with Serebryakov is his fixation on his age. Vanya bemoans the fact that he is almost fifty, whining “I can’t sleep at night for frustration and anger at the stupid way I’ve wasted time when I might have had everything I can’t have now because I’m too old” (125). Towards the end of the play, he even claims that he could have been a Dostoevsky or Schopenhauer if not for Serebryakov’s diversion of his talents. In response to the first statement, Vanya’s mother rightfully chastises him" “You’re forgetting that principles on their own don’t mean anything. You should have done something” (125).
Mrs. Voynitsky’s advice could be applied to nearly all the characters, as they are prone to blaming others for their problems without taking into account their own behavior. Chekhov isn't entirely dismissive of them, though, and renders them both critically and sympathetically. They are prisoners of societal expectations, their own characteristics and viewpoints, and the vapidity of parochial existence.
