The play ends with Sonya's vision of 'a long, long series of days, no end of evenings' to be lived through before the happy release of death. The sense of moments ticking away inexorably is much stronger here than in Chekhov's other plays, because there are no parties, balls, theatricals or fires to break the monotony. The Professor and Yelena have destroyed routine, replacing it with a more troubling sense of torpid leisure. Without the narcotic effect of their daily labour, Astrov, Vanya and Sonya toy with erotic fantasies that make their present all the grimmer.
Beyond these apparent devices, Chekhov is presenting a temporal sequence that is only a segment of the entire conspectus of duration. Another bond with the symbolists is that time in Chekhov's plays resembles Henri Bergson's temps-fleuve: human beings can measure duration, but they cannot stand outside the flow. The action of Uncle Vanya really began when Vanya gave up his inheritance for his sister's dowry years before; the consequences of that action fill Acts One through Four; but the further consequences remain unknown. How will the Professor and Yelena rub along in the provincial university town of Kharkov (in Chekhov, a symbol of nowhere: in The Seagull it adored Arkadina's acting, and in The Cherry Orchard, it will be one of Lopakhin's destinations)? How will Astrov manage to avoid alcoholism without the balm of Vanya's conversation and Sonya's solicitude? How will Vanya and Sonya salve their emotional wounds over the course of a lifetime? These questions are left to our imagination.
Samuel Beckett, discussing the blissful pain-killer, habit, referred to 'the perilous zones in the life of an individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being'.4 Throughout Uncle Vanya the characters, divorced from habit, suffer painful confrontations with being, and by the final curtain, must try hard to return to the dreary but safe addiction to living.
The play's close-knit structure, with its deliberate lack of breadth and breath, is abetted by the thirty-six-hour time scheme, the space limited to the precincts of the house, and the small cast: a tautness not unlike that of neoclassic tragedy. When frustrated passion is compressed so densely, the result approximates Racine. There are confidants (with Yelena as disastrous an adviser to Sonya as Oenone was to Phedre); interlocking triangles (Vanya loves Yelena who is taken with Astrov who prefers her but is loved by Sonya); tirades (Vanya's night thoughts, Yelena's self-analysis, Astrov's chalk-talk); and a tension between love and duty among the four central characters. This can be heard in Vanya's complaint, 'To betray an old husband you can't stand, that's immoral; to try and muffle the poor youth and living feeling in oneself - that's not immoral.' His contempt for Yelena's code is deprecated by Waffles, himself a cuckold: 'Anyone who betrays a wife or husband is a, I mean, a disloyal person, someone who could even betray his country!'
However, since no passion is ever pushed to its irremediable fulfilment, Uncle Vanya, noncommitally subtitled 'Scenes from Country Life',5 comes closer to comedy. Yelena's name may refer to Helen of Troy, but if so, Chekhov had Offenbach, not Homer, in mind. The play's central irony is that Yelena, who causes so much disruption, is essentially passive. Others regard her as a dynamic force in their lives, but she describes herself (as Calchas had himself) as a 'secondary character', and cannot conceive of making any impact. Feeling trapped, she has no sympathy to waste on other persons' predicaments; even her interest in Sony a is motivated by an attraction to Astrov. Her acceptance of a fleeting kiss and a souvenir pencil as trophies of the romantic upsurge is comically reductive.
The closest approximation to a conventional love scene is that in which Astrov explains his conservation charts to her. In The Seagull, Trigorin, in a similar scene, had sought to dispel Nina's rose-tinted fantasies about a writer's life, but the two of them never truly communicated. Trigorin simply expatiated on his own craftsman's obsession, and Nina felt her ideals fortified. In Uncle Vanya, the country doctor, galloping apace on his hobbyhorse, gets caught up in his noble dreams for the future, unaware that his audience is preoccupied with personal matters. The professional man is now the idealist, the woman the pragmatist. To Chekhov, Trigorin's self-deprecation had more authenticity than Nina's fantasies; here Astrov's ambitions have more validity than Yelena's intriguing. Eventually, Astrov denigrates his own temptation to philandering by a facetious reference to 'Turgenevian woodland glades'. He signals that tragedy has been averted when he bids Yelena farewelclass="underline" 'And so, wherever you and your husband set foot, destruction follows in your wake . . . I'm joking, of course, but all the same, it's peculiar, and I'm convinced that if you were to stay, the havoc wreaked would be stupendous'. Instead, finita la commedia.
The anti-tragic tendency of the play is apparent in the title. Most serious Russian drama of the 1890s bore titles of symbolic import: Gold and The Price of Life (Nemirovich-Danchenko), Chains (Sumbatov), At the Bottom (The Lower Depths) (Gorky), Walls (Naydyonov). Or a play might be named after its protagonist (Suvorin's Tatyana Repina) or a central relationship (Naydyonov's Vanyushin's Children). As a rule, Chekhov complies with this convention.
In Uncle Vanya, though, the title reveals that the centre of attention is not Astrov, whose attractive qualities can upstage the title role in production, but the self-pitying Voynitsky. Our Uncle Jack, as he might be in English, sounds peripheral, the archetype of mediocrity. Such a man is not serious enough to be given a grownup name; he counts chiefly in relationship to others. But who calls him Uncle Vanya? To the Professor, Yelena and Astrov he is Ivan Petrovich, except when they mean to be slighting. 'That Uncle Vanya' is how Yelena dismisses him in Act Three, and in Act Four Astrov flippantly calls for an embrace before 'Uncle Vanya' comes in. To his mother, he is Jean, the 'radiant personality' of his youth. He is Vanya primarily to Sonya and Waffles, who love him. Therefore, if Voynitsky matters most when he is Uncle Vanya, his self-realisation lies not in competing with the Professor or winning Yelena,6 but in his dealings with his dependents. He gave up trying to be Jean long ago; when he stops trying to be Ivan Petrovich and fulfills himself as Uncle Vanya, a new life might commence.
Just as Ivan Petrovich is effaced by Uncle Vanya, so the theme of blighted or unrequited love must play second fiddle to that of meaningful work. Chekhov's own activities as a country doctor, farmer, planter of trees, set an example for his characters, who, in his play, can be divided between those who perform useful tasks, and those whose occupations are meaningless. Two crucial transmitters of this theme are the catchphrase Nado delo delat and Sonya's final 'aria.'
Nado delo delat has been translated as 'We must work,' which sounds ironic, since it drops from the lips of two such dilettanti as Vanya's mother and the Professor. But the phrase is more topical in its connotations: it means 'One must do something, one must take an active part,' and alludes to Chernyshevsky's radical novel of 1864, Chto delat? (What is to be done?). 'Something must be done' is therefore an out-of-date propaganda slogan, still current with Mariya Vasilyevna who chews over the liberalism of a bygone generation (like Roebuck Ramsden in Shaw's Man and Superman) and the Professor who (like Gayev in The Cherry Orchard) is a 'man of the 'eighties', a right-minded but essentially quiescent intellectual during the repressive regime of Aleksandr III whose name the Professor bears. This was picked up by the original audiences, who thought Chekhov was mocking the liberal movement, for he is not assailing the characters' laziness so much as their armchair progressivism and hollow phrasemaking. Talk is cheap.