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    Uncle Vanya
    Uncle Vanya
    Uncle Vanya
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Uncle Vanya

    By Anton Chekhov

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    About this ebook

    “Spectacular…This new Vanya has a conversational smoothness that removes the cobwebs sticking to those other translations that never let you forget that the play was written in 1897… One of the most exquisite renderings of Uncle Vanya I’ve encountered.” —Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

    “Quietly arresting… A canny and colloquial world-premiere translation… A beautifully rewarding exploration of stunted lives still bending toward the meager sunlight, like wildflowers sprouting from a cracked sidewalk.” —James Hebert, San Diego Union-Tribune

    As the sixth play in the TCG Classic Russian Drama Series, Richard Nelson and preeminent translators of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, continue their collaboration with Chekhov’s most intimate play.

     

    Other titles in this series include:

    The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

    The Inspector by Nikolai Gogol

    Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites and Don Quixote by Mikhail Bulgakov

    A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev

    The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateOct 23, 2018
    ISBN9781559369053
    Author

    Anton Chekhov

    Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Southern Russia and moved to Moscow to study medicine. Whilst at university he sold short stories and sketches to magazines to raise money to support his family. His success and acclaim grew as both a writer of fiction and of plays whilst he continued to practice medicine. Ill health forced him to move from his country estate near Moscow to Yalta where he wrote some of his most famous work, and it was there that he married actress Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in 1904.

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      Book preview

      Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov

      INTRODUCTION

      An unfathomable phenomenon: what surrounds us in everyday life, what is inseparable from us, what is ordinary, can be noticed only by profound, great, extraordinary talent. But what happens rarely, what is exceptional, what strikes us by its ugliness, its unharmoniousness in the midst of harmony, is what mediocrity seizes upon with both hands.

      —Nikolai Gogol, Petersburg Notes for 1836, part 2

      Sixty years before the fact, Gogol defined with remarkable precision the essence of Chekhov’s gift as a playwright. That extraordinary talent for dramatizing what is ordinary is everywhere evident in Chekhov’s last four plays, nowhere more so than in Uncle Vanya, the shortest, the most concentrated, the most classical of the four.

      After the failed premiere of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1896, Chekhov vowed to give up playwriting altogether. Yet he was already at work on Uncle Vanya. The play was included in a collection of his theater works published in 1897, and was produced with success in several provincial theaters during 1898 (Maxim Gorky saw a performance in Nizhny Novgorod and wrote an admiring letter to the author). Meanwhile, in 1897, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko had met together to form the Moscow Art Theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko had seen the Alexandrinsky production of The Seagull and strongly disagreed with its critics. For the first season of the new theater, he asked Chekhov’s permission to stage the play. The opening on December 17, 1898, was a triumph, so much so that the seagull became the theater’s emblem.

      The imperial theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow had expressed interest in Uncle Vanya, but the selection committee objected to its negative portrayal of a state university professor. Chekhov refused to revise it, and the delighted Nemirovich immediately snatched it up. The play had its Moscow premiere at the Art Theatre on October 26, 1899, directed by Stanislavsky, who played Dr. Astrov. The reviews were generally favorable and improved as the performances went on, and the play entered permanently into the Art Theatre’s repertoire.

      If Uncle Vanya is the most classical of Chekhov’s plays, the history of its composition is certainly the most complicated. Chekhov began to write one-act sketches and vaudevilles while he was still in high school in his native Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. He is also said to have drafted a full-length play as early as 1877, at the age of seventeen. All these works have been lost. In 1879 he graduated, moved to Moscow, entered medical school, and to support himself and his family (parents, three brothers and a sister) turned out a great number of sketches and stories for various humorous journals. He also went on writing plays. Along with some successful one-act comedies like The Bear, The Proposal, The Harmfulness of Tobacco, he wrote three four-act dramas. He tore up the first, but a rough draft of it in his brother’s hand, found among other papers in a strongbox, was published in 1923, and under various titles, though now generally known as Platonov, it has been produced in a number of adaptations and translations. It is by far the longest and most sprawling of his plays, but full of premonitions. The second, Ivanov, was commissioned by the theater-owner Fyodor Korsh in 1887. Chekhov wrote it in two weeks, and it was produced that November in Moscow and then in a revised version in Petersburg, to mainly good reviews. Chekhov did not like the production, but the public did. In 1888 he began work on the third play, The Wood Demon, in collaboration with his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin. Suvorin dropped out fairly soon, and Chekhov went on by himself, finishing the script in October 1889. The imperial theaters both asked to consider it but quickly rejected it, finding it more of a novel than a play. Then the newly founded Abramov Theatre in Moscow took it on. The premiere was on December 27, 1889, the reviews were very bad, and the show closed after only three performances. When a Moscow publisher offered to publish The Wood Demon, Chekhov begged him not to, saying it would prevent him from working further on it. That was in 1890. And he did work further on it, though it is not clear when he started—maybe as early as 1890 or 1891, maybe only after finishing The Seagull in 1895. The result was Uncle Vanya.

      What we see in the transformation of The Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya is the emergence of what has come to be called the Chekhov play, which, as Sharon Marie Carnicke has observed, is not comic, tragic, melodramatic, realistic, impressionistic, or symbolist; it is all of these at once.* First of all, Chekhov eliminated five of the thirteen characters in The Wood Demon. The removal of so much doubling of roles shortened the play considerably. He kept much of the second and third acts, but totally transformed the first and fourth both in content and in emotional tonality. And he added one character who was not in the earlier play: the old nanny Marina, who is of great importance to the play’s inner life. He also unified the setting. The Wood Demon takes place on two different estates and at a forest house/watermill belonging to Dr. Khrushchev, the wood demon of the title; Uncle Vanya is set on one and the same estate throughout. At the end of Act Three of The Wood Demon, Voinitsky, the future Uncle Vanya, whose first name here is Yegor, shoots himself offstage, despite which the play goes on to a happy ending in Act Four with one reunion and two marriage proposals, laughter, kisses, and cries of: Delightful! Delightful! In Uncle Vanya the shooting in Act Three plays out quite differently and the resolution in Act Four

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