'Vacillation,' in which the poet, a 'solitary man' of fifty, sits in a crowded teashop:
While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes, more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.9
This momentary euphoric wholeness is what Dorn experiences by fusion with mankind, and what he and the rest of the characters ordinarily lack. Each one pursues his own appetites and desires; characteristically, Dorn, who chooses to remain aloof from Polina's entreaties, Masha's cries for help, and Sorin's testy dissatisfaction, is also the only one to appreciate Treplyov's play and to be struck by the concept of a Universal Soul. In his recollection of merging with the crowd, he provides a vision, however fleeting, of another kind of life. It was precisely this communal coming-together that the 'mystical anarchists' and other 'decadent' groups were to prescribe as a new form for the theatre of the future.
And yet Chekhov himself does not succumb to this attractive yet passive alternative. Dorn moves into the crowd 'aimlessly,' after having warned Treplyov of the perils of aimlessness. The antagonist in Trigorin's short story ruins a girl because 'he has nothing better to do'. Arkadina ridicules 'this darling country boredom! Hot, quiet, nobody does a thing, everybody philosophises'. Ultimately, Chekhov prefers the active responsibilities contingent on accepting one's lot, even if this means a fate like Nina's.
6
'Uncle Vanya'
The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation. Nietzsche, Die froehliche Wissenschaft (1882)
The premise of Uncle Vanya is straightforward. A celebrated Professor of Fine Arts in the capital, now retired on a reduced income, and married to a young and beautiful second wife, decides to live on an estate left by his deceased first wife. Over the years the estate has been managed by his brother-in-law Ivan Voynitsky and his daughter Sonya, who sacrificed themselves in the belief that the Professor's career was luminous and deserving of support. The couple from Petersburg totally disrupts the even tenor of country life. Confronted with the Professor's selfish vacuity, Voynitsky regards his own life as wasted and tries to seduce the languid Yelena. She finds him ridiculous but is in turn attracted to the cynical and overworked rural doctor Astrov. Claiming to promote Sonya's interest in him, she manages both to blight her stepdaughter's hopes and arouse the doctor's amorous inclinations. The mounting tension culminates in an explosion, when the Professor announces his intention to sell the 'state and move to Finland on the proceeds, thereby stranding his relatives. Desperate, Voynitsky tries to shoot him, fails, and then botches a half-hearted attempt at suicide. Finally, the Professor and Yelena depart, followed by Astrov, leaving the original inhabitants of the estate more isolated, despondent and bereft of illusions than they had been at the start.
Many of Chekhov's contemporaries considered Uncle Vanya to be simply The Wood Demon revised. For that reason, the Society for Russian Dramatic Authors denied it the Griboedov Prize in 1901. Prince Urusov wrote Chekhov that he had spoiled the earlier play by suppressing Fyodor Orlovsky, omitting Voynitsky's suicide and leaving out the picturesque scene at the mill in Act Four. 'When I related to the French the contents of The Wood Demon they were struck just by this: the hero is killed, and life goes on.'1 But Chekhov had achieved that novelty by the final curtain of The Seagull; Uncle Vanya moves forward by eschewing even the excitement of a bullet that finds its mark.
Scholars assume that Chekhov finished the play sometime in late 1896, after he had written The Seagull but before that comedy had suffered the hapless opening that turned him off playwriting for years. When, in 1897, Nemirovich-Danchenko requested Uncle Vanya for the Art Theatre, fresh from its success with The Seagull, Chekhov had to explain that he had already promised it to the Maly Theatre. But the dramaturgical committee there, whose members included several professors, was offended by the slurs on Serebryakov's academic career and what it saw as a lack of motivation, and demanded revisions.
Chekhov coolly withdrew Uncle Vanya and turned it over to the Moscow Art Theatre, which opened it on 26 October 1899.
Olga Knipper played Yelena and Vishnevsky played Vanya; Stanislavsky, who would have preferred the title role, took to Astrov only gradually. He tended to play his scenes with Yelena as perfervid love interludes, until Chekhov indicated that Astrov's infatuation is easily whistled away. The opening night audience was less than enthusiastic, but the play gained in favour during its run, and soon became a favourite. Gorky wrote to Chekhov: T do not consider it a pearl, but I see in it a greater subject than others do; its subject is enormous, symbolistic, and in its form it's something entirely original, something incomparable'.2
A useful way of approaching Uncle Vanya, and indeed all of Chekhov's late plays, is that suggested by the poet Osip Mandelshtam in an unfinished article of 1936: starting with the cast list.
What an inexpressive and colorless rebus. Why are they all together? How is the privy counselor related to anybody? Try and define the kinship or connection between Voynitsky, the son of a privy counselor's widow, the mother of the professor's first wife and Sofiya, the professor's young daughter by his first marriage. In order to establish that somebody happens to be somebody else's uncle, one must study the whole roster . . .
A biologist would call this Chekhovian principle ecological. Combination is the decisive factor in Chekhov. There is no action in his drama, there is only propinquity with its resultant unpleasantness.3
What Mandelshtam calls 'propinquity' is more important than the causal connections usually demanded by dramatic necessity, and distinct from naturalistic 'environment'. Chekhov brings his people together on special occasions to watch the collisions and evasions. Conjugal or blood ties prove to be less a determinant on the characters' behaviour than the counter-irritants of their proximity to one another. They are never seen at work in their natural habitats: Arkadina was not on stage or Trigorin in his study, the officers in Three Sisters are not in camp, here the Professor has been exiled from his lecture-hall.
The principle is particularly obvious in Uncle Vanya, where Chekhov stripped his cast down to the smallest number of any of his full-length plays. He achieved this primarily by conflating the characters of The Wood Demon. Khrushchyov's priggishness was diluted by Fyodor's dissipation to form the idealistic but hard- drinking Astrov; Voynitsky's glumness was crossed with Zheltukhin's fussy wooing to compose Vanya. Sofiya the bluestocking and Yuliya the compulsive housekeeper were merged in Sony a. Yelena became less altruistic; and, most significantly, the role of Marina the nanny was added, to provide another, more objective viewpoint.
By reducing the cast to eight (if we exclude the workman), Chekhov could present doublets of each character, to illustrate contrasting reactions to circumstance. Take the Serebryakov/Waffles dyad: the Professor, fond of his academic honours and perquisites, is an old man married to a young woman too repressed to betray him, yet he jealously tyrannises over her. Waffles, whose wife abandoned him almost immediately after their wedding, responded with loving generosity; his life, devoid of honours, is devoted to others. He feels strongly the opprobrium of being 'a sponger', while the Professor is oblivious to his own parasitic position.