Anton Chekhov

Many of Chekhov's contemporaries considered Uncle Vanya to be simply The Wood Demon revised. For that reason, the Society for Russian Dramatic Authors denied it the Griboedov Prize in 1901. Prince Urusov wrote Chekhov that he had spoiled the earlier play by suppressing Fyodor Orlovsky, omitting Voynitsky's suicide and leaving out the picturesque scene at the mill in Act Four. 'When I related to the French the contents of The Wood Demon they were struck just by this: the hero is killed, and life goes on.'¹ But Chekhov had achieved that novelty by the final curtain of The Seagull; Uncle Vanya moves forward by eschewing even the excitement of a bullet that finds its mark.

Scholars assume that Chekhov finished the play some­time in late 1896, after he had written The Seagull but before that comedy had suffered the hapless opening that turned him off playwriting for years. When, in 1897, Nemirovich-Danchenko requested Uncle Vanya for the Art Theatre, fresh from its success with The Seagull, Chekhov had to explain that he had already promised it to the Maly Theatre. But the dramaturgical committee there, whose members included several professors, was offended by the slurs on Serebryakov's academic career and what it saw as a lack of motivation, and demanded revisions.

Chekhov coolly withdrew Uncle Vanya and turned it over to the Moscow Art Theatre, which opened it on 26 October 1899.

Olga Knipper played Yelena and Vishnevsky played Vanya; Stanislavsky, who would have preferred the title role, took to Astrov only gradually. He tended to play his scenes with Yelena as perfervid love interludes, until Chekhov indicated that Astrov's infatuation is easily whistled away. The opening night audience was less than enthusiastic, but the play gained in favour during its run, and soon became a favourite. Gorky wrote to Chekhov: T do not consider it a pearl, but I see in it a greater subject than others do; its subject is enormous, symbolistic, and in its form it's something entirely original, something incom­parable'.²

A useful way of approaching Uncle Vanya, and indeed all of Chekhov's late plays, is that suggested by the poet Osip Mandelshtam in an unfinished article of 1936: starting with the cast list.

What an inexpressive and colorless rebus. Why are they all together? How is the privy counselor related to anybody? Try and define the kinship or connection between Voynitsky, the son of a privy counselor's widow, the mother of the professor's first wife and Sofiya, the professor's young daughter by his first marriage. In order to establish that somebody happens to be somebody else's uncle, one must study the whole roster . . .

A biologist would call this Chekhovian principle ecological. Combination is the decisive factor in Chekhov. There is no action in his drama, there is only propinquity with its resultant unpleasantness.³

What Mandelshtam calls 'propinquity' is more important than the causal connections usually demanded by dramatic necessity, and distinct from naturalistic 'environment'. Chekhov brings his people together on special occasions to watch the collisions and evasions. Conjugal or blood ties prove to be less a determinant on the characters' behaviour than the counter-irritants of their proximity to one another. They are never seen at work in their natural habitats: Arkadina was not on stage or Trigorin in his study, the officers in Three Sisters are not in camp, here the Professor has been exiled from his lecture-hall.

The principle is particularly obvious in Uncle Vanya, where Chekhov stripped his cast down to the smallest number of any of his full-length plays. He achieved this primarily by conflating the characters of The Wood Demon. Khrushchyov's priggishness was diluted by Fyodor's dissipation to form the idealistic but hard- drinking Astrov; Voynitsky's glumness was crossed with Zheltukhin's fussy wooing to compose Vanya. Sofiya the bluestocking and Yuliya the compulsive housekeeper were merged in Sony a. Yelena became less altruistic; and, most significantly, the role of Marina the nanny was added, to provide another, more objective viewpoint.

By reducing the cast to eight (if we exclude the work­man), Chekhov could present doublets of each character, to illustrate contrasting reactions to circumstance. Take the Serebryakov/Waffles dyad: the Professor, fond of his academic honours and perquisites, is an old man married to a young woman too repressed to betray him, yet he jealously tyrannises over her. Waffles, whose wife aban­doned him almost immediately after their wedding, responded with loving generosity; his life, devoid of honours, is devoted to others. He feels strongly the opprobrium of being 'a sponger', while the Professor is oblivious to his own parasitic position.