UNCLE VANYA
Well, the people haven’t remembered, not most of them anyway. Audiences these days don’t flock to Uncle Vanya (1899), nor to most of Anton Chekhov’s plays. Though generally praised for his perceptive portraits of the human condition–the humor and sorrow inherent in the frustration and disillusion of average lives–Chekhov isn’t particularly popular. Audiences have been put off over the years by academic, stiffly “eloquent” translations; by productions that overstress either the comedy or the pathos of each play; and by reams of critical analysis focusing on Chekhov’s insights into the ennui of the Russian soul at the end of the 19th century.
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Much is made of the universality of Chekhov’s vision, but rarely is that universality brought to life. Chekhov’s characters so often seem bogged down in their own lassitude that the plays don’t speak to the present the way they’re supposed to. They seem like relics of another time and place, creations of a very special sensibility–historically important, of course, but not actually very interesting.
In this spare and simple story, Chekhov not only paints a vivid picture of lives lived in quiet desperation, he also weaves an ironic yet compassionate meditation on the loss of faith by reworking in distinctly human terms the myth of Adam and Eve in Eden. In Chekhov’s version, it is God, not the humans, who is expelled from the garden: Serebryakov gets away from the farm as soon as he can, barely clinging to a semblance of his former dignity, while Vanya and Sonya stay behind. Chekhov establishes Serebryakov as the play’s God figure early on–he’s almost literally worshiped by Vanya’s mother and tended to with priestly sacrificial devotion by Yelena, and Vanya’s denunciations of him sound exactly like the rantings of an angry atheist. Events expose Serebryakov as an illegitimate god, a hollow authority figure who has wielded ridiculous dominance over Vanya and Sonya’s lives. But rather than taking control of their own lives, Vanya and Sonya cling harder than ever to the illusion of a God who will reward them with merciful love and eternal peace.
