Similarly, of the old women, Marina is of the earth earthy, stationary in her obedience to the natural cycle, her life narrowly focussed on barnyard and kitchen; still, she is capable of shrewd comment on human behaviour. Mariya Vasilievna is equally static and narrow, but her eyes never rise from the pages of a pamphlet; she is totally blind to what goes on inside her fellow men. Her reading and Marina's knitting are both palliatives. One, meant for the betterment of all mankind, is sterile; the other, meant for the comfort of specific individuals, is not.
The contrasts are more complex but just as vivid in the younger characters. Sonya and Yelena are both unhappy young women on the threshold of wasted lives; both are tentative and withdrawn in matters of the heart. Sonya, however, is straightforward, less willing to indulge her daydreams, more eager to drug herself with work. Yelena manages to be both indolent and clumsily manipulative in her dealings with others; she declares her affinity to Vanya because they are both 'exasperating' people.
Astrov and Vanya are the only two 'educated persons in the district', who started, like Platonov and Ivanov, with exceptional promise, but grew disillusioned. Astrov's disillusionment was gradual, over years of drudgery as a rural doctor; he has turned into a toper and a cynic, but can still compartmentalise the vestiges of his idealism in his reforestation projects. Vanya's disillusionment came as a thunderclap with the Professor's arrival; its suddenness negated any possibility of maintaining an ideal. Instead, he is diverted to absurd fantasies of bedding down Yelena and, even at a moment of crisis, of thinking himself a potential Dostoevsky or Schopenhauer. His impossible dreams are regularly deflated by Astrov's sarcasm, but both men are, to use a word repeated throughout the play, 'crackpots' ('chudakV).
Thus, the propinquity of the characters brings out their salient features; the existence of each puts the other in relief. As in The Seagull, they have been collected by Chekhov on an estate where they are displaced persons. We are told it has been in the family for little more than a generation. Vanya relinquished his patrimony to provide his sister's dowry, gave up his own career to cut expenses and work the estate on the Professor's behalf, taking his mother with him: they are acclimatised without being naturalised. The Professor and Yelena are obvious intruders, who disrupt the estate's settled rhythms and cannot accommodate themselves to it. Even Astrov seldom pays a call; he prefers his forests. Only Sonya, Marina and Waffles are rooted in the estate's soil.
Again, the physical progression of the stage setting emblematises the inner development of the action. The play begins outside the house, with a tea-table elaborately set to greet the Professor, who, on his entrance, walks right past it to closet himself in his study. The eruption of appurtenances of gentility into a natural setting vividly suggests the upheaval caused by the Petersburgers' presence. Moreover, the samovar has gone cold during the long wait; it fails to serve its purpose. As is usual with Chekhov the play begins with a couple of characters on stage, waiting for the others to precipitate an event. But when it comes, the event - the tea-party - is frustrated.
The second act moves indoors, its sense of claustrophobia enhanced by the impending storm and Yelena's need to throw open the window. The dining-room too has been usurped by the Professor, who has turned it into a study cum sickroom, his medicine littering the sideboard. No family gathers to share a meaclass="underline" midnight snacks, a clandestine glass of wine, tete-a-tetes rather than group encounters are standard. Nanny, who has already grumbled at the altered meal-times, complains that the samovar has still not been cleared. Later she will rejoice that plain noodles have returned in place of the Professor's spicy curries.
In Act Three, the Professor thrusts the family into unfamiliar surroundings when he convenes them in a rarely used reception room. (In the Art Theatre production, the furniture was swathed in dust-covers and the chandelier hung in its bag like a huge teardrop.) Cold, formal, empty, it suits the Professor's taste for his missing podium and further disorients the others. Nanny, cowed by the ambience, must be asked to sit down; for the sake of the occasion, she was prepared to stand at the door like a good servant. Anyone can wander through, like Vanya who intrudes upon Astrov and Yelena with his bunch of roses, another property rendered useless by circumstance.
Finally, in Act Four, we move, for the first time, to a room actually lived in, Vanya's combination bedchamber and estate office. The real life of the house has migrated to this small, cluttered area where day-to-day tasks are carried out, where Astrov has his drawing-table, Sonya her ledgers. There is even a mat for peasants to wipe their feet on. Vanya, like Treplyov, has no personal space that is not encroached on, and none of the objects bespeaks a private being. Once the Professor and Yelena, the disruptive factor, have gone, the family comes together in this atmosphere of warmth generated by routine. But for them to do so, Vanya must abandon his personal claims and ambitions; for good reason a caged linnet chirps by the worktable. The absence of conversation is noticeable in this symbiosis. Were it not for Vanya's impassioned outburst and Sonya's attempts to console him, the characters would write, knit, yawn, read and strum the guitar voicelessly, with no need to communicate aloud, bound together by propinquity.
The more deeply inward the play moves physically, the more the sense of oppression mounts. Chekhov uses weather and seasons along with certain verbal echoes to produce this feeling. In the first few lines of dialogue, Astrov declares, Tt's stifling' (dushno), and variations on that sentiment occur with regularity. Vanya repeats it and speaks of Yelena's attempt to muffle her youth; the Professor begins Act Two by announcing that he cannot breathe, and Vanya speaks of being choked by the idea that his life is wasted. Astrov admits he would be suffocated if he had to live in the house for a month. The two young women fling open windows to be able to breathe freely. During the first two acts, a storm is brewing and then rages; and Vanya spends the last act moaning, Tyazhelo menya, literally, Tt is heavy to me,' or 'I feel weighed down'. At the very end, Sonya's 'We shall rest' {My otdokhnyom) is etymologically related to dushno and connotes 'breathing easily'.
Cognate is Yelena's repeated assertion that she is 'shy', in Russianzastenchivaya, a word that suggests 'hemmed in, walled up', and might, in context, be better translated 'inhibited'. The references to the Professor's gout, to clouded vision, blood-poisoning and morphine contribute to the numbing atmosphere. This is intensified by the sense of isolation: constant reference is made to the great distances between places. Only Lopakhin the businessman in The Cherry Orchard is as insistent as Astrov on how many miles it takes to get somewhere. The cumulative effect is one of immobility and stagnation, oppression and frustration.
Time also acts as a pressure. 'What time is it?' or a statement of the hour is voiced at regular intervals, along with mention of years, seasons, mealtimes. The play begins with Astrov's asking Marina, 'How long is it since we've known each other?', simple exposition but also an initiation of the motif of lives eroded by the steady passage of time. (Chekhov was to reuse this device to launch Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.) Uncle Vanya opens at summer's end, proceeds through a wet and dismal autumn, and concludes with a bleak winter staring the characters in the face. The suggestion of summer's evanescence, the equation of middle age with the oncoming fall may seem hackneyed. Vanya certainly leaps for the obvious, with his bouquet of 'mournful autumn roses' and his personalisation of the storm as the pathetic fallacy of his own despair. Chekhov, however, used storms in his short stories as a favourite premonition of a character's mental turmoil, and in stage terms, the storm without and the storm within Vanya's brain effectively collaborate.