Gurov goes to the theater. There she is, “this little woman, in no way remarkable,” clutching the “vulgar lorgnette in her hand,” and there also is her tall, obsequious husband, wearing an order on his uniform, and it does indeed look like a waiter’s number. Gurov sits there dirough the first act; then at the interval the husband goes out to smoke. Thinking that all eyes in the audience are on him, Gurov goes over to speak to Anna. He can hardly speak, nor can she, and she stares in terror at him. She rushes out of the auditorium and he follows her into the drafty corridor. Their love becomes theater within theater. A cold stale wind seems to blow as she races past vulgar crowds of officials in uniforms “legal, scholastic and civil,” past ladies, past fur coats swaying on their pegs as they rush by, down stairs and passages, until at last he catches up with her, breathless, under a balcony. A Chekhovian detaiclass="underline" two bored schoolboys who are smoking cigarettes look down to watch as Gurov takes Anna into his arms and kisses her and she clings to him. There the lovers stand, dazed, almost speechless, in the buzz of chatter and the sound of the meaningless tuning up of the orchestra. She gasps out a promise to find an excuse for coming to Moscow to see him. And so they part and he leaves the theater.
Remember that we have seen the story through Gurov’s eyes and that Chekhov’s intention is to show him as a maturing and feeling man arguing with himself about the unexpected situation. The scene requires a momentary point of ironic distraction. It happens that Gurov has to drop his little daughter at her school on the way to his secret rendezvous, and as they walk the child asks her father why the pavements are still slushy after the sleet storm in the night. Gurov tells her kindly: “It is three degrees above zero, and yet it is sleeting…. The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature in the upper strata of the atmosphere.”
The child chatters on: “And is there no thunder in the winter, Daddy?”
He explains that too. When he has dropped the child at her school he is free to reflect on his two lives, full of stereotyped truths and untruths.
Everything … in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
The real subject of the story is this serious conflict in the minds of the lovers. At the hotel they are in each other’s arms and their theories vanish. Every two or three months after this they will meet and wrestle with their dilemma.
[They] could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband…. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both…. And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin.
And there Chekhov leaves them. As he once said, it is not the function of art to solve problems but to present them correctly.
In the year before writing The Lady with the Little Dog Chekhov had been entirely occupied with stories: lonych, The Darling, The New Dacha, which echoes Misail’s struggle with the peasants in My Life, and On Official Duty. The last is remarkable for its portrait of a country policeman who has to spend a wretched night during a blizzard with the body of a ruined landowner who has committed suicide, while the young magistrate wines and dines well in a country house. Tolstoy admired this story. Chekhov was eager to write a long story, the famous In the Ravine, but this had to be put aside. The Moscow Art Theater was pressing him for a new play. At Yalta he was ill, “torn up by the roots,” he said, longing for Olga.
I am torn up by the roots. … I don’t drink though I am fond of drinking. I love noise and don’t hear it. … I am in the condition of a transplanted tree which is hesitating whether to take root or to begin to wither.
All he can offer the Moscow Art Theater for the new season is an old play, Uncle Vanya, which has never been put on in Moscow.
Uncle Vanya has a curious history. It was extracted from an earlier play, The Wood Demon, which was much longer. Chekhov had written it when he was staying with the Lint-varyov family in the Ukraine.
The people and scene of the earlier play recall something Chekhov had said about life in the Ukraine:
There are old neglected gardens and poetical estates, shut up and deserted, where dwell the souls of beautiful women.
In Uncle Vanya the scene is less seductive. The forests are being cut down in a haphazard way, the railway has crept in, factories have followed. We shall see a large half-neglected house with twenty-six rooms which is occupied by Uncle Vanya, who manages the estate, and his niece Sonya, who helps him with it. She actually owns the place, having inherited it from her mother. The profits, such as they are, go to support Sonya’s father, an elderly, gouty, cantankerous professor of art who does not reside on the estate but who happens to be staying there with his young second wife, the beautiful Yelena. Other characters include Astrov, a local doctor, Telegin, an impoverished garrulous landowner, and the widowed Mariya Vasilyevna, mother of Vanya and of the professor’s first wife.
Peace? We are about to see an absurd and acrimonious “month in the country” which will be very far from Tur-genevan. The interrelationships are complicated, as they often are in country life. The play may strike us as being something of an intricate novel, but its popularity in the provinces even before it was revived by the Moscow Art Theater suggests that it had the spell of normal country gossip about “goings on.” The professor has some of the disturbing egotism of the professor in A Dreary Story. His arrival puts everyone’s back up, especially Uncle Vanya’s, and, as in The Seagull, if very tentatively, there are “tons of love,” but here open tippling is added. Uncle Vanya tipples and so does Dr. Astrov, and both make passes at Yelena, who is beginning to hate her exasperating elderly husband. The plain Sonya longs for Dr. Astrov, who is treating the professor. Astrov is one of Chekhov’s strong if frustrated doctors and is close to him in that he is not only a doctor but also an active propagandist for the conservation of the forests. He hates having to treat the workers who have been injured by industrial accidents—a feeling, we suppose, Chekhov would not have shared. At the center of the play is Uncle Vanya’s mad jealousy of the learned professor. If only, Uncle Vanya cries out, he had “had a normal life,” he could have been “a Dostoyevsky or a Schopenhauer!”
The general situation comes to a head when the professor has the nerve to call together everyone in the house to appall them with the suggestion that the estate should be sold and the proceeds invested in securities. This is too much for Uncle Vanya. He announces that the professor cannot do this because the estate is not his to sell. It belongs to his daughter, Sonya. In any case, Uncle Vanya and Sonya have nowhere else to live. They have run the farm for twenty-five years. And so in a mad fit, Uncle Vanya gets a gun and fires two shots at the professor. They miss. This is too much for Yelena, who is tired of Uncle Vanya’s drunken attempts to seduce her, and of the doctors also. She forces the professor to give up his plans and leave. She has been disturbed by Dr. Astrov’s insinuation that as a faithful wife she will soon tire of living with a cantankerous old scholar. She is frightened by the insinuation for she has been more impressed by Dr. Astrov than she cares to admit. Life in the country is out of date, dull and corrupting in its spell.
For all its mingling of angers and farce, Uncle Vanya is a very subde, thoughtful and imaginative play. Chekhov has the art of showing us farce as inverted poetry. Uncle Vanya is absurd but we are drawn irresistibly to his side. The professor is ruthless because he is locked up in his conceit as a scholar. Dr. Astrov is angered by the passing of youth and its illusions but is passionately indignant at the fallen condition of the Russian peasant. He is also manly and shrewd. There is a good moment when, privately talking to Uncle Vanya after the absurd shooting scene, he comforts him, saying: