The second act moves indoors, its sense of claustrophobia enhanced by the impending storm and Yelena’s need to throw open the window. The dining room too has been usurped by the Professor, who has turned it into a study cum sickroom, his medicine littering the sideboard. No family gathers to share a meaclass="underline" midnight snacks, a clandestine glass of wine, tête-a-têtes rather than group encounters are standard. Nanny, who has already grumbled at the altered meal times, complains that the samovar has still not been cleared. Later, she will rejoice that plain noodles have replaced the Professor’s spicy curries.
In Act Three, the Professor thrusts the family into unfamiliar surroundings when he convenes them in a rarely used reception room. Cold, formal, empty, it suits the Professor’s taste for his missing podium and further disorients the others. Nanny, cowed by the ambience, must be asked to sit down; for the sake of the occasion, she was prepared to stand by the door like a good servant. Anyone can wander through, like Vanya, who intrudes upon Astrov and Yelena with his bunch of roses. Another prop is rendered useless by circumstance.
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 keeps 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 his objects bespeaks a private being. Once the Professor and Yelena, the disruptive factor, are gone, the family comes together in this atmosphere of warmth generated by routine. For them to do so, however, Vanya must abandon his personal desires and ambitions; for good reason a caged starling chirps by the worktable. The absence of conversation is noteworthy is this symbiosis. Except for Vanya’s impassioned outburst and Sonya’s attempts to console him, the characters write, yawn, read, and strum the guitar voicelessly, with no need to communicate aloud, bound together by propinquity.
The more inward the play moves in terms of locale, 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, “It’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 mene, literally “It is heavy on me,” “I feel weighed down.” At the very end, Sonya’s “We shall rest” (My otdokhnyom), or “We’ll be at peace,” is etymologically related to dushno and connotes “breathing freely.”
Yelena’s repeated assertion that she is “shy,” zastenchivaya, suggests etymologically that she is “hemmed in, walled up,” and might, in context, be better translated “inhibited.” The references to the Professor’s gout, 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 pressure. “What time is it?” or a statement of the hour is voiced at regular intervals, along with mention of years, months, seasons, mealtimes. The play begins with Astrov’s asking Marina, “How long have we known one another?” — 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 open 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 at the obvious, with his bouquet of “mournful autumn roses” and his personalization of the storm as the pathetic fallacy of his own despair. Chekhov, however, used storms in his short stories as a 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, railway journeys, or fires to break the monotony. The Professor and Yelena have destroyed routine, supplanting it with a more troubling sense of torpid leisure. Without the narcotic effect of their daily labor, Astrov, Vanya, and Sonya toy with erotic fantasies that make their present all the grimmer.
Beyond these apparent devices, Chekhov is presenting a temporal sequence that is only a segment of a whole conspectus of duration. 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 unrevealed. How will the Professor and Yelena get along in the provincial university town of Kharkov? (In Chekhov, Kharkov is a symbol of nowhere: in The Seagull it acclaims Arkadina’s acting and in The Cherry Orchard it is one of Lopakhin’s destinations.) How will Astrov manage to avoid dipsomania 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 imaginations.
Samuel Beckett, describing habit as a blissful painkiller, 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.3 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 humdrum but safe addiction to living.
Although the tautness of the play’s structure, its triangles and confidants, might suggest neoclassic tragedy, Uncle Vanya comes closer to comedy, because no passion is ever pushed to an irremediable fulfillment. Yelena’s name may refer to Helen of Troy, but, if so, Chekhov had Offenbach, not Homer, in mind. He may also have been thinking of the Russian fairy tale Yelena the Fair, a Cinderella story in which the sniveling booby Vanya woos and wins the beautiful princess with the aid of his dead father. Folklore has other echoes here: the Russian version of Snow White is quoted (“the fairest in the land”) and Vanya characterizes Yelena as a rusalka, a water nymph of voluptuous beauty and destructive tendencies. Others may regard her as a dynamic force in their life, but she describes herself as a “secondary character,” without any real impact. Her acceptance of a fleeting kiss and a souvenir pencil as trophies of a romantic upsurge is comically reductive.