90 From Chekhov’s notebook: “Treplyov has no well-defined aims, and this is what destroyed him. His talent destroyed him. He says to Nina at the end: ‘You have found your path, you are saved, but I am ruined.’ ”
NOTES to Variants
1 Latin: “Touchy is the tribe of poets,” from Horace’s Epistles, II, 2.
2 Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), French astronomer, prolific author of books on popular science, including The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds (1890). His astronomical fantasies inspired some of the features in Treplyov’s play.
3 Cesare Lombroso (1856–1909), Italian criminologist, who published widely on the subject of decadence, sexual abnormality, and insanity; he believed that criminals and psychopaths could be identified by physical traits.
4 For Buckle, see The Cherry Orchard, note 36. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher and sociologist, whose works were extensively translated into Russian.
5 A five-act melodrama adapted from the French by Nikolay Kireev; its climax involves a train speeding across the stage. Chekhov had seen it as a schoolboy in Taganrog and mentions it in several stories of the 1880s.
UNCLE VANYA
Many of Chekhov’s contemporaries considered Uncle Vanya to be simply The Wood Goblin revised. For that reason, the Society for Russian Dramatic Authors denied it a prestigious prize in 1901. 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 Moscow Art Theatre, which was fresh from its success with The Seagull, Chekhov had to explain that he had already promised it to the Maly Theatre. The literary-advisory committee there, whose members included a couple of professors, was offended by the slurs on Sere-bryakov’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 Art Theatre, which opened it on October 26, 1899. The opening night audience was less than enthusiastic, but the play gained in favor during its run. It became immensely popular in the provinces, where the audiences could identify with the plight of Vanya and Astrov. Gorky wrote to Chekhov, “I do not consider it a pearl, but I see in it a greater subject than others do; its subject is enormous, symbolic, and in its form it’s something entirely original, something incomparable.”1
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 Voinitsky, 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.2
What Mandelshtam calls “propinquity” is more important than causal connections usually demanded by dramatic necessity, and distinct from naturalistic “environment.” Chekhov brings his people together on special occasions to watch their collisions and evasions. Conjugal or blood ties prove to be a lesser determinant of the characters’ behavior than the counter-irritants of their proximity to one another. They are rarely seen at work in their natural habitats: Arkadina was not on stage or Trigorin at his desk; the officers in Three Sisters are not in camp; here the Professor has been exiled from his lecture hall.
The principle is especially conspicuous in Uncle Vanya, where Chekhov stripped his cast down to the smallest number in any of his full-length plays. He achieved this primarily by conflating the cast of The Wood Goblin, combining the traits of two characters into one. By limiting the dramatis personae to eight (if we exclude the workman), Chekhov could present doublets of each character, to illustrate contrasting reactions to circumstances. Take the Serebryakov/Waffles dyad: the Professor, fond of his academic honors and perquisites, is an old man married to a young woman too repressed to betray him, yet he jealously tyrannizes over her. Waffles, whose pompous language aspires to erudition, and whose wife abandoned him almost immediately after their wedding, responded with loving generosity. His life, devoid of honors, is devoted to others. He feels strongly the opprobrium of being a “freeloader,” while the Professor is oblivious to his own parasitism.
Of the old women, Marina is earthy, stolid in her obedience to the natural cycle, her life narrowly focused on the practical matters of barnyard and kitchen. Still, she is capable of shrewd comment on human behavior. Mariya Vasilyevna is equally static and narrow, but her eyes never rise from the pages of a pamphlet; she is totally blind to what goes on inside her fellow men. Her reading and Marina’s knitting are both palliatives. One, meant for the betterment of all mankind, is sterile, while the other, meant for the comfort of individuals, is not.
The contrasts are more complex but just as vivid in the younger characters. Sonya and Yelena are both unhappy young women on the threshold of wasted lives; both are tentative and withdrawn in matters of the heart. Sonya, however, indulges in daydreams while eagerly drugging herself with work. Yelena is too inhibited to yield to her desires, managing to be both indolent and clumsily manipulative in her dealings with others. She declares her affinity to Vanya because they are both “exasperating” people.
Astrov and Vanya are the only two “educated persons in the district”; they started, like Ivanov, with exceptional promise, but grew disillusioned. Astrov’s disillusionment was gradual, over years of drudgery as a country doctor; he has turned into a toper and a cynic but can still compartmentalize vestiges of his idealism in his reforestation projects. Vanya’s disillusionment came as a thunderclap with the Professor’s arrival; its suddenness negated any possibility of maintaining an ideal. Instead, he is diverted to fantasies of bedding Yelena and, even at a moment of crisis, considering himself a potential Dostoevsky or Schopenhauer. His impossible dreams are regularly deflated by Astrov’s sarcasm, but both men are, to use a word repeated throughout the play, “crackpots” (chudaki).
Thus, the propinquity of the characters brings out their salient features: the existence of each puts the other in relief. As in The Seagull, they have been located by Chekhov on an estate where they are displaced persons. It has been in the family for little more than a generation. Vanya relinquished his patrimony to provide his sister’s dowry, gave up his own career to cut expenses and work the estate on the Professor’s behalf, taking his mother with him. They are acclimatized without being naturalized. The Professor and Yelena are obvious intruders, who disrupt the estate’s settled rhythms and cannot accommodate themselves to it. Even Astrov seldom pays a call; he prefers his forests. Only Sonya, Marina, and Waffles are rooted in the estate’s soil.
Again, the physical progression of the stage setting serves as an emblem of the inner development of the action. The play begins outside the house, with a tea table elaborately set to greet the Professor, who, on his entrance, walks right past it to closet himself in his study. The eruption of these dining room accessories into a natural setting suggests the upheaval caused by the Petersburgers’ presence. Moreover, the samovar has gone cold during the long wait; it fails to serve its purpose. As is usual with Chekhov, the play begins with a couple of characters on stage, waiting for the others to precipitate an event. When it comes, the event—the tea party—is frustrated.