Uncle Vanya (Criticism)

Criticism

Elizabeth Judd

Judd is a writer and book reviewer with an M.F.A. in English from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Yale. In this essay, she discusses various the methods of indirect action employed by Chekhov in Uncle Vanya.

About suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position; how it takes place/ While someone else is eating

or opening a window or just walking dully along... . — “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W. H. Auden

When it comes to portraying the anguish of the human condition, no other dramatist, past or present, equals Chekhov, especially in Uncle Vanya, his classic of thwarted desire. In practically every scene of the play, the characters give voice to their boredom, pain, and despair, yet Uncle Vanya is also filled with moments of lightness and comedy. Chekhov examines frustration and loss of hope indirectly, placing nearly all the climactic moments off stage, many of them in the distant past.

Chekhov is known for pioneering a dramatic technique — indirect action — which concentrates on subtleties of characterization and the interactions between individuals, instead of on flashy revelations or unexpected plot twists. In this play, “Everything,” as Vanya says, “is an old story.” Vanya has been editing Serebryakov’s work for twenty-five years; Sony a has spent six years loving Astrov without her affections being returned; and Astrov has slaved away as a country doctor for the past eleven years. Emotional scenes have been played out and the characters are exhausted and cranky. When Maria Voinitskaya begins to describe a letter she’s received, Vanya interrupts her: “But for fifty years now we talk and talk, and read pamphlets. It’s high time to stop.”

If Uncle Vanya were a more conventional drama, Chekhov would have begun the play with the arrival of the professor and Yelena. Instead, the characters are already bored with one another by the time the curtain rises, and the first glimpse the audience catches of Vanya highlights the sense of malaise: he is yawning after an afternoon nap. In a less innovative play, Chekhov would have shown Vanya’s growing disillusionment with the professor as it unfolded, rather than presenting it as an accomplished fact. In fact, the central drama of the play — Vanya’s realization that he’s squandered his own talents in serving the professor — occurs a year before the play begins.

When Vanya’s mother observes that he’s changed beyond recognition, he says: “Up to last year, I deliberately tried just as you do to blind my eyes with this pedantry of yours and not to see real life — and I thought I was doing well. And now, if you only knew! I don’t sleep nights because of disappointment, and anger that I so stupidly let time slip by, when now I could have had everything that my old age denies me!” Strikingly, Chekhov is not content to let the drama of such an impassioned speech pass without a moment of deflation. Sonya chides: “Uncle Vanya, that’s boring,” withholding even the most meager comfort.

Love is also denied, again and again, in Uncle Vanya. Except for two hurried embraces between Astrov and Yelena, the only romantic consummation occurs in Vanya’s daydream of proposing to Yelena ten years prior, before she’d married Serebryakov. “It was so possible,” says Vanya. “Now we both would have been awakened by the storm; she would have been frightened by the thunder and I would have held her in my arms and whispered: ‘Don’t be afraid, I am here.’ Oh, beautiful thoughts, how wonderful, I am even smiling.” Vanya is so demoralized that he can’t even bring himself to fantasize in the present tense.

More telling is the fact Vanya doesn’t sustain the thought of a romance with Yelena but launches immediately into another mental harangue about the piteous state of his life. “Why am I old?” cries Vanya, who then give voice to his real passion: how he has been deceived by the professor: “I adored that Professor, that pitiful, gouty creature, I worked for him like an ox!” For Vanya, the self-deception of his love for Serebryakov is far more painful than his unrequited love for the professor’s wife.

Many critics have observed that Chekhov’s three great plays — Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard — are difficult to describe because so little happens. Yet a lack of dramatic action is central to Chekhov’s design. Articulating his artistic approach in a critique of a performance of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov faulted the actress who played Sonya for having thrown herself at Serebryakov’s feet in Act III. “That’s quite wrong,” said Chekhov, “after all, it isn’t a drama. The whole meaning, the whole drama of a person’s life are contained within, not in outward manifestations. . . . A shot, after all, is not a drama, but an incident.” In other words, what matters to Chekhov is the individual’s emotions and motivations, not the activities that occupy his or her days. True to his convictions, Chekhov portrays the gun shot in Uncle Vanya as a ludicrous non-event, with Vanya firing at point-blank range only to miss the mark. Underscoring the absurdity of this act of untutored violence, Chekhov has the beautiful and bored Yelena struggle with Vanya, preventing him from firing again.

Although a conspicuous absence of drama is certainly a form of indirection, Chekhov’s penchant for inserting humor into the most gloomy pronouncements or situations is an even more radical, anti-dramatic strategy. In Uncle Vanya heartbreakingly sad moments are undercut by incongruous details or moments of outright silliness. In some ways, Chekhov works like a magician, using the misdirection of humor to divert the audience from the sadness that engulfs Vanya, Astrov, Yelena, and Sonya. No matter how great the misery of the characters, Marina offers the same, simplistic cure — linden tea, vodka, or some noodle soup. The old nurse is unruffled by the accusations family members hurl at one another, reducing passion to the nonsense sounds made by animals. “It’s all right, my child,” Marina tells Sonya. “The geese will cackle — and then stop . . . cackle — and stop.” And when Marina believes that Vanya has shot Serebryakov, she says, “Ough! Botheration take them!” and goes right on knitting.

Despair itself takes on its own black humor in Uncle Vanya. When Yelena makes the casual observation, “And fine weather today. . . . Not hot. . . .” Vanya responds: “It’s fine weather to hang yourself.” The intense self-pity of Vanya’s pronouncement is so inappropriate that it catches the audience off guard in much the way the physical comedy of a pratfall does. In Chekhov’s plays, even pleasantries are subverted. The humor of Vanya’s relentless gloominess is heightened by the nonchalance of those around him. For the characters in Uncle Vanya, talk of suicide is so unexceptional that no one bothers to ask Vanya what’s wrong or even to respond to his noisy despair. At times, the play possesses the deadpan humor of an Addams Family cartoon, where dark statements are viewed as too banal, too commonplace, to warrant acknowledgment or comment.

Writing in Anton Chekhov’s Plays, Charles B. Timmer maintained that elements of incongruity, which he termed “the bizarre,” have been overlooked in Chekhov’s work, and he described the dramatist’s approach this way: “The bizarre is not necessarily absurd: it is, as it were, a statement, or a situation, which has no logical place in the context or in the sequence of events, the resulting effect being one of sudden bewilderment; the bizarre brings about a kind of mental ‘airpocket’: one gasps for breath, until the tension is relieved by laughter.”

To illustrate, Timmer pointed to the moment in Act IV when Astrov is about to take leave of Vanya and Sonya. In a scene that should be highly emotional, Chekhov flouts expectations by having Astrov observe a meaningless detail — a map of Africa hanging on the wall. “I suppose down there the heat in Africa must be terrific now!” exclaims the doctor as Sonya and Vanya pay bills. According to Timmer, “this element of restraint, applied in a scene that is charged with emotions, greatly intensifies the impression on the spectator. The element of the bizarre as a technique to retard the action and restrain the emotions is used frequently by Chekhov in his plays.”

Why would Chekhov write about the frustration and sadness of the human condition, only to undercut these emotions time and again with a noticeable lack of drama and eruptions of humor? In many ways, the lack of drama is Chekhov’s point. Many critics have observed that Uncle Vanya is, in some sense, an anti-play, one where the characters try to strike out and change their lives, only to fail miserably. At the end of the final act, when Marina invites Astrov to drink some vodka, the audience is reminded of the very first scene of the play when she makes the exact same offer to him. Chekhov further underscores that old patterns have been re-established by having Vanya tell Serebryakov at their parting, “You will receive what you used to receive accurately. Everything will be as always.”

Imprisoned in static lives, Vanya, Sonya, and Astrov make a bid for something larger and grander — for love or for an acknowledgment of how they’ve suffered — but nothing comes of their tired rebellion. The action of the play is indirect because it’s internal, the plotting of a break that fails to materialize. As Eric Bentley wrote in Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov:“In Uncle Vanya, recognition means that what all these years seemed to be so, though one hesitated to believe it, really is so and will remain so.”

In Uncle Vanya there is no way out of misery, no light at the end of the tunnel. “You know,” says Astrov, “when you walk through a forest on a dark night, if you see a small light gleaming in the distance, you don’t notice your fatigue, the darkness, the thorny branches lashing your face . . . but for me there is no small light in the distance.” Vanya is also without hope: “Here they are: my life and my love: where shall I put them, what shall I do with them? This feeling of mine is dying in vain, like a ray of sunlight that has strayed into a pit, and I myself am dying.” Such a bleak message can hardly be contemplated directly. Nor can Chekhov provide an answer beyond the half-hearted suggestion that the only way to live with such pain is to practice indirection.

When Astrov asks why Vanya isn’t seeing Yelena and Serebryakov off, he answers: “Let them go, and I . . . I can’t. I feel very low, I must busy myself quickly with something. . . . Work, work!” Ultimately, in a world where there’s no hope that the frustration will end, when there is no light and the characters’ own sparks have been extinguished in a pit of engulfing darkness, all there can be is indirection and distraction — moments of humor, oases and panaceas like hard work and Marina’s cup of linden tea.

Source: Elizabeth Judd, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Three Sisters, a Chekhov play first produced at the Moscow Art Theater in 1901, is the story of a wealthy Russian family who longs to move to Moscow, but the three sisters find themselves mired in provincial life. Like Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters is a play of thwarted desires and indirect action.
• In The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s characters long to preserve an orchard that holds fond memories rather than allowing it to be chopped down and turned into a subdivision.
• Chekhov was deeply influenced by Leo Tolstoy. There are parallels between Tolstoy’s treatment of the peasants and of religious faith in Anna Karenina and Chekhov’s treatment of the same subjects in Uncle Vanya. However, Anna Karenina is also considered one of the world’s great, tragic love stories.
• Like Chekhov, George Eliot was a proponent of realism in literature. Her masterpiece — Middlemarch — is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a woman who wants to make a worthwhile contribution to society but is thwarted by a tragically misbegotten marriage.
• Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady is one of the world’s finest novels about deception and frustrated desires.