Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

“The passions simmer so faintly, you can hardly tell when its pilot light is on.” – NY Times Review of a production of Uncle Vanya in 1999.

Trivia: In an episode of Family Guy, Lois and Peter are attending a production of Uncle Vanya when Peter yells "For crying out loud, somebody throw a pie!"

There are several ways you may know of Anton Chekhov. You may have heard of “Chekhov’s Gun,” the idea that if a gun is introduced in a piece of literature, it must go off—an example Chekhov used in his writings as a more general rule to only introduce elemetns into a story that will be used later on.

As Wikipedia expands, “For example, a character may find a mysterious object that eventually becomes crucial to the plot, but at the time of finding the object, does not seem to be important.”

As Chekhov wrote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)

Supposedly, one example of this is supposed to be Chekhov’s own “Uncle Vanya.” After all, a gun goes off. Admittedly, the gun is so irrevelant earlier on, that I actually can’t even find its existence in my notes. It’s a “pistol” one time and a “revolver” another, but neither of those words nor “gun” appear in any text search I do in project gutenberg’s english translation of the play before the gun actually appears in the play. But maybe I’m just blind.

You might get the impression that since Chekhov would have a rule like this, he might adhere to it. He does not. Most jarringly, there is a map of Africa in one scene that is totally out of place (even the text of the play says so), and furthermore is completely irrelevant to the play.

And there’s the further issue that Chekhov says that the gun must go off, not that someone must be shot by it. Hence the problem of Uncle Vanya, where at the end of the play nothing is reconciled because the villain of the plot triumphs, and the hero returns to his own life of drugery.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Uncle Vanya was not a wholly unsatisfying read. My translation (by Ann Dunnigan) is full of delicious words like “unprepossessing”, “samovar”, “indolent”, “sepulcher”, and others that you just don’t see nearly enough. And it does have some classic lines. For example:

“Elena [sic]: It’s a fine day today… not too hot.

[A pause]

Voinitsky: A fine day to hang oneself…”

I mean, come on, that’s just great.

Further, it would be far too much to say that “Uncle Vanya” has no plot. There are romances all over the place, missed opportunities, longing, etc. And finally the famous climax, where Uncle Vanya manages to avoid shooting his daughter in the face.

However, it’s still difficult to classify, since Chekhov was deliberately flying in the face of traditional Aristotilean narrative structures. It’s a tragicomedy, as most will put it, and I think this can best be explained by the comedic elements largely being a result of Schadenfreude on the part of the audience for the characters in the play, and perhaps possibly even for whatever poor sobs would bother to stage it.

Of course, Virginia Woolf, in traditional style, wants to blame the lack of entertainment that Chekhov presents as the fault of the reader. As she puts it:

“These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.”

What Virginia Woolf might have been more aware of, had she been alive and writing after the invention of television and hollywood and MTV and Blizzard Entertainment, is that when a play makes a reader question his or her “fitness as reader,” he may be perfectly fine with that, because it’s almost certainly easier to tune out reading like Chekhov and tune in to The Dark Knight or Metal Gear Solid 4.

That’s not a fair critique and not a fair comparison, but what the unfortunate truth is, is that Uncle Vanya is to The Dark Knight what The Three Sisters is to The Golden Compass. Look at the box office numbers and you’ll get my analogy here.

Some notes for remembering Uncle Vanya (difficult, considering how many characters are forgettable):

[nothing but spoilers for this section:]

The cast of Uncle Vanya with my notes.

Serebryakov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich - a retired professor. – “The bad guy.” In “The Three Sisters” a vaguely similar character is named “Andrei” and is also the first listed; and in “The Cherry Orchard” a not completely dissimilar character is named Andreyevna. Coincidence? I think not. Each is “the landowner”—and as seems to be a motif in Chekhov plays, Aleksandr is thinking about selling his estate. Little does he know that the estate is the last thing keeping Uncle Vanya from going over the deep end, and that his choice to sell it could cost him his life. (It doesn’t. No one dies. This is a family friendly production, bring the kids!)

Elena Andreyevna (or sometimes Yelena) - his young and beautiful second wife, 27 years old. – Elena is sort of like a MacGuffin. Everyone wants her, but she has the libido of a rock. Uncle Vanya wants her, but she really doesn’t want Uncle Vanya. Astroff also wants her, and her inability to reject him fast enough brings Uncle Vanya into a jealous madness that might cost Aleksandr his life. (But won’t. See above.)

Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonia) - his plain daughter by his first marriage. Mostly exists for Astroff to rant at. Largely forgettable.

Voinitskaya, Maria Vasilievna - the widow of a privy councillor, mother of the first wife of the professor. Totally irrelevant and utterly forgettable.

Voinitsky, Ivan Petrovitch ("Uncle Vanya") - Sonia's uncle, and Maria Vasilievna's son. His snide cynicism makes him the only character enjoyable to read and at all memorable.
Astroff, Michail Lvovich - a doctor. – Mr. Rantsalot. Will not shut up about the forest and the trees. Another motif in Chekhov is a doctor who has recently lost a patient and blames himself for it. Astroff is the token doctor in this play. (After all, Chekhov was a doctor, so he had to have some sort of doctor in the play.) Despite his ridiculous number of lines, Astroff is more a secondary antagonist and less of a sympathetic support character.

Telegin, Ilya Ilyitch - an impoverished landowner, also known as Waffles. Marina - an old nurse. Workman. All essentially forgettable.

I suggest just sparknoting or wikipediaing “The Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” because both of them I found too dreadful to actually review.

Words:

Unprepossessing: Not overtly impressive; unremarkable; nondescript.

Samovar: a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea.

Indolent: having or showing a disposition to avoid exertion; slothful.

Sepulcher: a tomb, grave, or burial place.