Anton Chekhov

Finally, in Act Four, we move, for the first time, to a room actually lived in, Vanya's combination bedchamber and estate office. The real life of the house has migrated to this small, cluttered area where day-to-day tasks are carried out, where Astrov has his drawing-table, Sonya her ledgers. There is even a mat for peasants to wipe their feet on. Vanya, like Treplyov, has no personal space that is not encroached on, and none of the objects bespeaks a private being. Once the Professor and Yelena, the disruptive factor, have gone, the family comes together in this atmosphere of warmth generated by routine. But for them to do so, Vanya must abandon his personal claims and ambitions; for good reason a caged linnet chirps by the worktable. The absence of conversation is noticeable in this symbiosis. Were it not for Vanya's impassioned outburst and Sonya's attempts to console him, the characters would write, knit, yawn, read and strum the guitar voicelessly, with no need to communicate aloud, bound together by propinquity.

The more deeply inward the play moves physically, the more the sense of oppression mounts. Chekhov uses weather and seasons along with certain verbal echoes to produce this feeling. In the first few lines of dialogue, Astrov declares, Tt's stifling' (dushno), and variations on that sentiment occur with regularity. Vanya repeats it and speaks of Yelena's attempt to muffle her youth; the Professor begins Act Two by announcing that he cannot breathe, and Vanya speaks of being choked by the idea that his life is wasted. Astrov admits he would be suffocated if he had to live in the house for a month. The two young women fling open windows to be able to breathe freely. During the first two acts, a storm is brewing and then rages; and Vanya spends the last act moaning, Tyazhelo menya, literally, Tt is heavy to me,' or 'I feel weighed down'. At the very end, Sonya's 'We shall rest' {My otdokhnyom) is etymologically related to dushno and connotes 'breathing easily'.

Cognate is Yelena's repeated assertion that she is 'shy', in Russianzastenchivaya, a word that suggests 'hemmed in, walled up', and might, in context, be better translated 'inhibited'. The references to the Professor's gout, to clouded vision, blood-poisoning and morphine contribute to the numbing atmosphere. This is intensified by the sense of isolation: constant reference is made to the great distances between places. Only Lopakhin the businessman in The Cherry Orchard is as insistent as Astrov on how many miles it takes to get somewhere. The cumulative effect is one of immobility and stagnation, oppression and frustration.

Time also acts as a pressure. 'What time is it?' or a statement of the hour is voiced at regular intervals, along with mention of years, seasons, mealtimes. The play begins with Astrov's asking Marina, 'How long is it since we've known each other?', simple exposition but also an initiation of the motif of lives eroded by the steady passage of time. (Chekhov was to reuse this device to launch Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.) Uncle Vanya opens at summer's end, proceeds through a wet and dismal autumn, and concludes with a bleak winter staring the characters in the face. The suggestion of summer's evanescence, the equa­tion of middle age with the oncoming fall may seem hackneyed. Vanya certainly leaps for the obvious, with his bouquet of 'mournful autumn roses' and his personalisa­tion of the storm as the pathetic fallacy of his own despair. Chekhov, however, used storms in his short stories as a favourite premonition of a character's mental turmoil, and in stage terms, the storm without and the storm within Vanya's brain effectively collaborate.

The play ends with Sonya's vision of 'a long, long series of days, no end of evenings' to be lived through before the happy release of death. The sense of moments ticking away inexorably is much stronger here than in Chekhov's other plays, because there are no parties, balls, theatricals or fires to break the monotony. The Professor and Yelena have destroyed routine, replacing it with a more troubling sense of torpid leisure. Without the narcotic effect of their daily labour, Astrov, Vanya and Sonya toy with erotic fantasies that make their present all the grimmer.