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Yelena Andreevna. Not being as prone to monologues as Astrov and Voynitsky, the beautiful Yelena is a somewhat mysterious figure. Certainly a number of characters (not to mention critics) write her off as a shallow woman who does little more than idly eat, sleep, and charm with her beauty. This portrait of Yelena, however, perhaps gives her ...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Born on January 29, 1860, in the port village of Taganrog in the Ukraine, Anton Chekhov was the third son of Pavel Yegorovitch and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna (Morozov) Chekhov. Though the family was descended from Russian peasants, Chekhov’s grandfather purchased the family’s freedom, allowing Chekhov’s father to run a small grocery store. The family’s f...
Act I
The play opens on a cloudy afternoon in a garden behind the family estate of Serebryakov. Marina, the old nurse, is knitting a stocking, while Astrov, the doctor who has been called to tend to one of Professor Serebryakov’s ailments, is pacing nearby. Astrov laments that he’s aged tending the sick and that life “itself is boring, stupid, dirty.” Having no one to love, he complains that his emotions have grown numb. When he worries that people won’t remember him, Marina answers: “People won’t...
Act II
It is evening and this act is set in Serebryakov’s dining room. Before going to bed, Serebryakov complains of being in pain and of old age. After he is asleep, Yelena and Vanya talk. She speaks of the discord in the house, and Vanya speaks of dashed hopes. He feels he’s misspent his youth, and he associates his unrequited love for Yelena with the devastation of his life. Not only is Vanya distraught about his own life, but he tells Yelena her life is dying, too. “What are you waiting for?” he...
Act III
Vanya, Sonya, and Yelena are in the living room of Serebryakov’s house, having gathered to hear Serebryakov’s announcement. Vanya calls Yelena a water nymph and urges her, once again, to break free, saying playfully: “Let yourself go if only for once in your life, hurry and fall in love with some River God.” Sonya complains that she has loved Astrov for six years and that because she is not beautiful, he doesn’t notice her. Yelena volunteers to question Astrov and find out if he’s in love wit...
Sofia Alexandrovna
Sonya is Serebryakov’s daughter by his first marriage and Vanya’s niece. Hard-working and plain in appearance, Sonya is twenty-four and has been in love with Astrov for six years. When Yelena offers to ask Astrov about his feelings for Sonya, she wavers, saying, “Uncertainty is better. . . . After all, there is hope—” Like the others, Sonya confesses to deep unhappiness but is more pragmatic. It is Sonya who holds the family together. When Vanya complains of how heavy his burdens are, she say...
Yelena Andreevna
A twenty-seven-year-old beauty and charmer, Yelena is married to the already elderly professor Serebryakov. Like her namesake Helen of Troy, Yelena is a woman whose beauty stirs men to action though she herself suffers from inertia. She freely admits that she’s idle and bored, and she believes that any type of useful activity, such as nursing or teaching, is beyond her. Astrov jokes, “Both of you, he [Serebryakov] and you—infected us with your idleness.” Yelena admits that she married out of...
Dr. Mikhail Lvovich Astrov
As Act I opens, Astrov, the village doctor, is lamenting that he’s grown old and has not had a single day off in more than ten years. At times, Astrov appears to be close to desperation: “I work harder than anyone in the district, fate strikes me one blow after another and there are times when I suffer unbearably—but for me there is no light shining in the distance.” In addition to his other frustrations, Astrov is haunted by the death of one of his patients, a railroad switchman, who died of...
Anger and Hatred
Recognizing that he has wasted his life furthering the professor’s scholarship, Vanya responds in anger, a new and unaccustomed emotion for him. Although Vanya’s displeasure simmers throughout the play, it erupts into violence after Serebryakov announces his plan to sell the estate so that he and Yelena can buy a villa in Finland. Vanya then attempts to shoot the professor, only to miss, emphasizing the futility of his rebellion. Vanya’s full name, Voynitsky, hints at his potential for bellig...
Appearances and Reality
Vanya rails against Serebryakov’s intellectual posturing, knowing that the professors’s claims of intelligence are a fraud. “You were to us a creature of the highest order and your articles we knew by heart,” says Vanya. “But now my eyes are open! I see everything! You write about art, but you understand nothing of art! All your works, that I used to love, are not worth a brass penny! You fooled us!” Although some of Vanya’s charges have merit, Chekhov’s message is more complex. Serebryakov i...
Choices and Consequences
Vanya’s mother, Maria Vasilyevna, chides her son for railing against his fate, when he’s taken so few steps to change the course of his life. “It looks as if you are challenging your former convictions,” she says to Vanya. “But they are not guilty, it’s you are guilty. You keep forgetting that a conviction in itself is nothing, it’s a dead letter. . . . You should have been doing something.” Serebryakov echoes the same sentiments when he departs, saying, “One must, ladies and gentlemen, do so...
Revision
One way to understand the construction of Uncle Vanya is to contrast it with its earlier incarnation, The Wood Demon. Eric Bentley, in Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov, called The Wood Demon “a farce spiced with melodrama.” In that version, Chekhov emphasizes the romantic interests of the characters and the play concludes with the coupling of Astrov and Sonya. No one is successfully paired up in Uncle Vanya. In The Wood Demon Vanya commits suicide. In Uncle Vanya Vanya survives only to have h...
Setting
Uncle Vanyais set entirely within Serebryakov’s estate. Although the play opens in the garden behind the estate, most of the action takes place inside the rambling, twenty-six-room estate that Vanya and Sonya have managed and Sonya presumably owns. Many of the characters find the atmosphere stifling. Yelena describes the house as a crypt, a place of exile, and later, as hell, while Serebryakov says he feels like he’s “fallen from the earth on to some foreign planet” and he calls the estate “a...
Point of View
One of Chekhov’s innovations was to write plays without a single clear hero or heroine. In Uncle Vanyaand Chekhov’s other major plays, several characters are of nearly equal dramatic stature. Here, Vanya, Astrov, Sonya, and Yelena are the main characters and each experiences similar frustrations. The audience comes to understand each of the four characters’ unique point of view through his or her speeches when alone and the confidences he or she shares with the other characters.
In 1861, one year after Chekhov was born, Czar Alexander IIabolished serfdom in Russia. Serfs were essentially slaves and were forced to work for their owners unless they could purchase their own freedom. Once peasants were no longer owned by
Uncle Vanya was first published in 1897 but was not performed by the Moscow Art Theater, where it premiered, until October 26, 1899. Well received by audiences, Uncle Vanya was not entirely a success in Chekhov’s own estimation. The directors at the Moscow Art Theater—Konstantin Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko—did not understand Chekhov...
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 inUncle Vanya.
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. 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 Sistersis a play of thwarted desires and indirect action. 2. 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. 3. Chekhov was de...
Donald Ray field
Rayfield provides an overview of Uncle Vanya, discussing the manner in which Chekhov was able resurrect one of his biggest flops, The Wood Demon, as a new play that would come to be regarded as one of his masterworks. Uncle Vanya (Diadia Vania) can be seen as the last of Chekhov’s earlier plays, all based on a problematic, male antihero. It was published in 1897 and first performed in 1899, after The Seagull, and was written, or reconstituted, out of the wreck of The Wood Demon, between 1892...
Bentley, Eric. “Craftsmanship in Uncle Vanya” in Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov,G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 169-85. Eekman, Thomas A. Introduction to Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov,G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 1-7. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Chekhov’s Prose” in Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov,G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 26-33. Pitcher, Harvey. The Chekhov Play, Univers...
Bordinat, Philip. “Dramatic Structure in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya” in Chekhov’s Great Plays, New YorkUniversity Press, 1981, pp. 47-60. Gilman, Richard. Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity, Yale UniversityPress, 1997. Koteliansky, S. S., editor and translator. Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences,Benjamin Blom, 1965. Magarshack,...
People also ask
Why does Vanya call Yelena a water nymph?
How does Yelena feel in Uncle Vanya?
Why is Vanya in love with Yelena?
Why does Yelena rebuff Vanya's advances?
Astrov mentions that the storm woke him up and that he heard Yelena ’s voice. He asks Voynitsky why he seems so glum today and asks whether Voynitsky is in love with Yelena. Voynitsky says that Yelena is his good friend, and Astrov tells him that a woman can only be a man’s good friend after she’s been his mistress.
Astrov. Helena Serebryakova (referred to as Yelena) is Professor Serebryakov’s second wife. She and her husband have recently moved into Serebryakov’s estate in the country, where their presence disrupts the lives of the other characters who live there. Yelena is the main catalyst of the play’s conflict, as her presence in the house ...
Voynitsky desperately tells Yelena that he loves her, but Yelena doesn’t reciprocate, telling him to be quiet so that no one hears. At this point, the impossibility of Voynitsky’s desire for Yelena becomes clear.
When Vanya exhorts Yelena to have an affair, he is, in part, motivated by self interest. He says, ‘‘Faithfulness like this is false from beginning to end; it has a fine sound but no logic ...
Soon Vanya, who is disillusioned about Serebryakov's achievements, falls in love with Yelena, as does Mikhail Astrov, an idealistic doctor. Yelena rebuffs Vanya's advances, and Sonya tries to make Astrov understand that she loves him. She asks Yelena to sound out Astrov's feelings about her, and Astrov imagines that Yelena is attracted to him.
