Anton Chekhov

The anti-tragic tendency of the play is apparent in the title. Most serious Russian drama of the 1890s bore titles of symbolic import: Gold and The Price of Life (Nemirovich-Danchenko), Chains (Sumbatov), At the Bottom (The Lower Depths) (Gorky), Walls (Naydyonov). Or a play might be named after its protagonist (Suvorin's Tatyana Repina) or a central relationship (Naydyonov's Vanyushin's Children). As a rule, Chekhov complies with this convention.

In Uncle Vanya, though, the title reveals that the centre of attention is not Astrov, whose attractive qualities can upstage the title role in production, but the self-pitying Voynitsky. Our Uncle Jack, as he might be in English, sounds peripheral, the archetype of mediocrity. Such a man is not serious enough to be given a grownup name; he counts chiefly in relationship to others. But who calls him Uncle Vanya? To the Professor, Yelena and Astrov he is Ivan Petrovich, except when they mean to be slighting. 'That Uncle Vanya' is how Yelena dismisses him in Act Three, and in Act Four Astrov flippantly calls for an embrace before 'Uncle Vanya' comes in. To his mother, he is Jean, the 'radiant personality' of his youth. He is Vanya primarily to Sonya and Waffles, who love him. Therefore, if Voynitsky matters most when he is Uncle Vanya, his self-realisation lies not in competing with the Professor or winning Yelena,⁶ but in his dealings with his dependents. He gave up trying to be Jean long ago; when he stops trying to be Ivan Petrovich and fulfills himself as Uncle Vanya, a new life might commence.

Just as Ivan Petrovich is effaced by Uncle Vanya, so the theme of blighted or unrequited love must play second fiddle to that of meaningful work. Chekhov's own activities as a country doctor, farmer, planter of trees, set an example for his characters, who, in his play, can be divided between those who perform useful tasks, and those whose occupa­tions are meaningless. Two crucial transmitters of this theme are the catchphrase Nado delo delat and Sonya's final 'aria.'

Nado delo delat has been translated as 'We must work,' which sounds ironic, since it drops from the lips of two such dilettanti as Vanya's mother and the Professor. But the phrase is more topical in its connotations: it means 'One must do something, one must take an active part,' and alludes to Chernyshevsky's radical novel of 1864, Chto delat? (What is to be done?). 'Something must be done' is therefore an out-of-date propaganda slogan, still current with Mariya Vasilyevna who chews over the liberalism of a bygone generation (like Roebuck Ramsden in Shaw's Man and Superman) and the Professor who (like Gayev in The Cherry Orchard) is a 'man of the 'eighties', a right-minded but essentially quiescent intellectual during the repressive regime of Aleksandr III whose name the Professor bears. This was picked up by the original audiences, who thought Chekhov was mocking the liberal movement, for he is not assailing the characters' laziness so much as their armchair progressivism and hollow phrasemaking. Talk is cheap.

Sonya and Vanya, at the play's end, seem bereft, marooned by those on whom they had pinned their hopes. Vanya cannot bear up under the disappointment and dissolves into tears, at which point Sonya tries to console him with her vision of Nirvana and the possible blessing of posterity. Vanya's plaints have been mingled with the humdrum recitation of accounts, a device which Chekhov may have borrowed from Sumbatov's play Chains (1887), a work he admired. In Sumbatov, the consoler is a plain-spoken middle-aged woman, an authority figure; her patient is a nervous young spinster. Chekhov reverses the relationship; the young spinster recommends work for the older authority figure. Sonya acts in loco parentis and her counsel of patience has the same soothing but empty effect as Marina's cooling offer of lime-flower tea had on the Professor. Nothingness as a consolation prize is not neces­sarily endorsed by Chekhov, as it is by Strindberg in his dream plays. Nevertheless, in the words of an American critic, 'The inertia of the spirit in Chekhov is there as a blessing as well as a curse'.⁷