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GCC Performing Arts Center

$5 students & faculty
$7 general

By Anton Chekov
Adapted by David Mamet
English Tranlation by Vlada Chernomirdik
Produced in arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.

Characters:

• Ivan Petrovich Voynitzky (Vanya), a witty and cynical man who sees only frustrated ambition and wasted opportunity in his life.

• Alexandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov, a retired well-known professor long admired by his family who turns out to be little more than a pompous, vain and cantankerous stuffed shirt. His visit to the family's country estate awakens in Vanya feelings of betrayal, envy and resentment.

• Yelena Andreyevna, the professor's beautiful, young and unhappy second wife. Yelena is about the age of Serebryakov's daughter (Sonya) from his first wife.

• Sofya Alexandrovna (Sonya), the professor's daughter, and Vanya's neice.  Sonya's hopes in life are plain, simple and practical in contrast with the others, but also end in frustration.

• Mariya Vasilyevna Voynitzkaya, Vanya's domineering mother and Sonya's grandmother. Her late daughter was the professor's first wife. It was Mariya who urged the family to put their faith and respect in the egotistical professor.

• Mikhail Lvovich Astrov, a conscientious but weary doctor who has lost his idealism to cynicism. Dr. Astrov fears aging and spends much of his time drinking. Both Dr. Astrov and Vanya fall in love with Yelena. Astrov never even notices the quietly dignified Sonya who loves him shyly from afar.

• Ilya IlyichTelegin (Waffles), an impoverished neighbor, landowner and permanent houseguest who represents loyalty and stability. He is a coward, who doesn't like confrontation. He reveres Uncle Vanya and the professor and to see them argue crushes him.

• Marina, the family's old nurse.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904)

• Read the Entire Play
• In English
• In Russian
• More stories in English
• Story Summaries
• Chekhov website- Gourd
• Chekhov website- Russell
• Chekhov profile
• Checkov Quotes
• Another biography
• Pictures of his grave
• Pictures of the Play
• Chekhov House Museum in Moscow

Back to GCC Russian Club

The retired professor has returned to his estate to live with his beautiful young wife, Yelena. The estate originally belonged to his first wife, now deceased; her mother and brother, still live there and manage the farm. For many years the brother (Uncle Vanya) has sent the farm's proceeds to the professor, while receiving only a small salary himself. Sonya, the professor's daughter, who is about the same age as his new wife, also lives on the estate. The professor is pompous, vain, and irritable. He calls the doctor (Astrov) to treat his gout, only to send him away without seeing him. Astrov is an experienced physician who performs his job conscientiously, but has lost all idealism and spends much of his time drinking.

The presence of Yelena introduces a bit of sexual tension into the household. Astrov and Uncle Vanya both fall in love with Yelena; she spurns them both. Meanwhile, Sonya is in love with Astrov, who fails even to notice her. Finally, when the professor announces he wants to sell the estate, Vanya, whose admiration for the man died with his sister, tries to kill him. But the professor survives and he and Yelena leave the estate

Although first presented in Moscow in 1899, the play remains relevant – there is a save-the-forests environmental speech and the characters demonstrate the folly of spending all one's time lamenting the things one cannot change while doing nothing about the things one can. The play is a drama but it laces comedy throughout its beginnings and doesn't weigh you down with its message too early. It gives a nice twist at the end which should leave the audience feeling pretty uncomfortable, hopefully.

Chekhov saw life as a blend of comedy and tragedy, with the sadder, darker side prevailing. While Vanya seems to be losing the battle with life, all the characters in the play are going through ordeals of their own.

The realization of what their lives have become, and what might have been, bring painful feelings of frustration and futility to the characters of "Uncle Vanya," during a miserable summer at a Russian country estate.

After a well-known retired professor and his beautiful young wife come to live at the family estate, the other characters begin to feel a rising aggravation at their wasted years, their age, the others around them and most of all, themselves.

The estate actually was a dowry for Professor Alexandr Serebryakov's first wife, Vanya's sister, who since died. Vanya and the professor's daughter, Sonya, have tirelessly managed it for him for years. Vanya has received a small salary while sending the farm's profits to the professor.

It was Vanya's mother who urged the family to believe in and respect the professor. But when he returns with his wife, who is about the age of his daughter, Vanya realizes his lifelong faith in the professor has been a mockery and life loses all meaning for him.  

"If you knew," he says to his mother, "how I lie awake at night, heartsick and angry, to think how stupidly I have wasted my time."

The ailing professor, it turns out, is something of a fraudulent academic, a pompous and irritable man. When he announces his plan to sell the estate, Vanya's feelings of betrayal, envy, disillusionment and resentment erupt into violence, but even that doesn't work out correctly.

Dr. Astrov, a frequent visitor to the estate, has become cynical and lost most of his capacity for close human relationships. Ilya Telegin, or "Waffles," an impoverished landowner, has become a permanent houseguest.

Vanya and Astrov fall in love with Yelena, the professor's wife, but are spurned by her. Sonya, who only wants a good marriage and a useful life, seems to have nothing left when she realizes her love for the doctor is hopeless.

Chekhov began writing short pieces for newspapers and magazines when he was 20 and had a sporadic second career as a doctor. His other major plays, "The Seagull," "The Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard," also are still performed.

Russian-born American writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the Russian reader was attracted to Chekhov because he recognized in his writings the Russian idealist, "a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time, sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything – a good man who cannot make good.

"This is the character that passes – in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people–all through Chekhov's stories," Nabokov wrote.

Short Biography:

Chekhov's major plays--Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard --have links with his antecedent stories, as well as with events in his life

His grandfather, Egor, was a slave ("serf"). In 1841, Egor managed to buy freedom for himself and his family. Egor's son Pavel became a shopkeeper in Taganrog (near Rostov-na-Donu), struggling but free; and there Pavel's son Anton was born in 1860. Anton certainly never forgot his origins. He once described himself as a "young man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one morning feeling that real
human blood, not a slave's, is flowing through his veins."

Writing, the art of writing, entered Chekhov's life tangentially. In 1879, aided by a grant from the Taganrog city council, Chekhov went to Moscow, where most of his family had already moved, to study medicine. To help pay his way through medical school, he began to write--sketches and stories for newspapers and magazines. Within a very few years, he was established as a writer. In 1884 he qualified as a physician, and he never completely gave up medicine as his short life raced to a close. (He died in 1904 at forty-four.) But, paradoxically, what had started as an adjunct to his medical education became his chief support--fairly handsome support, too.

The overarching paradox of his life is the state of Chekhov's health and his attitude toward it. By his middle twenties, he knew that he suffered from tuberculosis, and he coughed blood increasingly as the years went on. When he married in 1901 (dying 3 years later), he and his wife (Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theatre) went directly from the ceremony to a honeymoon in a sanitarium. Why did this man, himself a physician, pay so relatively little attention to his disease? The only comprehensible explanation is that the vocation that had burrowed in next to medicine had taken control, had insisted. In 1894 he said in a letter to a friend: "Not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to write. Write, write, and write."