Uncle Vanya by Anton ChekhovUncle Vanya is a play by the Russian
playwright Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1898 and received
its Moscow première in 1899 in a production by the Moscow Art Theatre,
under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski.The play portrays the
visit of an elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second
wife, Yelena, to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle.
Two friends-Vanya, brother of the professor's late first wife, who has
long managed the estate, and Astrov, the local doctor-both fall under
Yelena's spell, while bemoaning the ennui of their provincial existence.
Sonya, the professor's daughter by his first wife, who has worked with
Vanya to keep the estate going, suffers from her unrequited feelings for
Dr. Astrov. Uncle Vanya is unique among Chekhov's major plays because it
is essentially an extensive reworking of his own play published a decade
earlier, The Wood Demon. By elucidating the specific changes Chekhov
made during the revision process-these include reducing the cast-list
from almost two dozen down to nine, changing the climactic suicide of
The Wood Demon into the famous failed homicide of Uncle Vanya, and
altering the original happy ending into a more problematic, less final
resolution-critics such as Donald Rayfield, Richard Gilman, and Eric
Bentley have sought to chart the development of Chekhov's dramaturgical
method through the 1890s.Rayfield cites recent scholarship suggesting
Chekhov revised The Wood Demon during his trip to the island of
Sakhalin, a prison colony in Eastern Russia, in 1891.Aleksandr
Vladimirovich Serebryakov (Александр Владимирович Серебряков): a retired
university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the
earnings of his late first wife's rural estate, managed for him by Vanya
and Sonya.Helena Andreyevna Serebryakova (Yelena) (Елена Андреевна
Серебрякова): Professor Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife.
She is 27 years old.Sofia Alexandrovna Serebryakova (Sonya) (Софья
Александровна Серебрякова): Professor Serebryakov's daughter from his
first marriage. She is of a marriageable age, but is considered
plain.Maria Vasilyevna Voynitskya (Мария Васильевна Войницкая): the
widow of a privy councilor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya's late
sister, the Professor's first wife).Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky ("Uncle
Vanya") (Иван Петрович Войницкий): Maria's son and Sonya's uncle, the
title character of the play. He is 47 years old.
