Anton Chekhov

Beyond these apparent devices, Chekhov is presenting a temporal sequence that is only a segment of the entire conspectus of duration. Another bond with the symbolists is that time in Chekhov's plays resembles Henri Bergson's temps-fleuve: human beings can measure duration, but they cannot stand outside the flow. The action of Uncle Vanya really began when Vanya gave up his inheritance for his sister's dowry years before; the consequences of that action fill Acts One through Four; but the further consequences remain unknown. How will the Professor and Yelena rub along in the provincial university town of Kharkov (in Chekhov, a symbol of nowhere: in The Seagull it adored Arkadina's acting, and in The Cherry Orchard, it will be one of Lopakhin's destinations)? How will Astrov manage to avoid alcoholism without the balm of Vanya's conversa­tion and Sonya's solicitude? How will Vanya and Sonya salve their emotional wounds over the course of a lifetime? These questions are left to our imagination.

Samuel Beckett, discussing the blissful pain-killer, habit, referred to 'the perilous zones in the life of an individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being'.⁴ Throughout Uncle Vanya the charac­ters, divorced from habit, suffer painful confrontations with being, and by the final curtain, must try hard to return to the dreary but safe addiction to living.

The play's close-knit structure, with its deliberate lack of breadth and breath, is abetted by the thirty-six-hour time scheme, the space limited to the precincts of the house, and the small cast: a tautness not unlike that of neoclassic tragedy. When frustrated passion is compressed so densely, the result approximates Racine. There are confidants (with Yelena as disastrous an adviser to Sonya as Oenone was to Phedre); interlocking triangles (Vanya loves Yelena who is taken with Astrov who prefers her but is loved by Sonya); tirades (Vanya's night thoughts, Yelena's self-analysis, Astrov's chalk-talk); and a tension between love and duty among the four central characters. This can be heard in Vanya's complaint, 'To betray an old husband you can't stand, that's immoral; to try and muffle the poor youth and living feeling in oneself - that's not immoral.' His contempt for Yelena's code is deprecated by Waffles, himself a cuckold: 'Anyone who betrays a wife or husband is a, I mean, a disloyal person, someone who could even betray his country!'

However, since no passion is ever pushed to its irremedi­able fulfilment, Uncle Vanya, noncommitally subtitled 'Scenes from Country Life',⁵ comes closer to comedy. Yelena's name may refer to Helen of Troy, but if so, Chekhov had Offenbach, not Homer, in mind. The play's central irony is that Yelena, who causes so much disrup­tion, is essentially passive. Others regard her as a dynamic force in their lives, but she describes herself (as Calchas had himself) as a 'secondary character', and cannot conceive of making any impact. Feeling trapped, she has no sympathy to waste on other persons' predicaments; even her interest in Sony a is motivated by an attraction to Astrov. Her acceptance of a fleeting kiss and a souvenir pencil as trophies of the romantic upsurge is comically reductive.

The closest approximation to a conventional love scene is that in which Astrov explains his conservation charts to her. In The Seagull, Trigorin, in a similar scene, had sought to dispel Nina's rose-tinted fantasies about a writer's life, but the two of them never truly communicated. Trigorin simply expatiated on his own craftsman's obsession, and Nina felt her ideals fortified. In Uncle Vanya, the country doctor, galloping apace on his hobbyhorse, gets caught up in his noble dreams for the future, unaware that his audience is preoccupied with personal matters. The profes­sional man is now the idealist, the woman the pragmatist. To Chekhov, Trigorin's self-deprecation had more authen­ticity than Nina's fantasies; here Astrov's ambitions have more validity than Yelena's intriguing. Eventually, Astrov denigrates his own temptation to philandering by a fac­etious reference to 'Turgenevian woodland glades'. He sig­nals that tragedy has been averted when he bids Yelena farewell: 'And so, wherever you and your husband set foot, destruction follows in your wake . . . I'm joking, of course, but all the same, it's peculiar, and I'm convinced that if you were to stay, the havoc wreaked would be stupendous'. Instead, finita la commedia.