Uncle Vanya

Garden. Part of the house can be seen with the verandah. In the avenue under an old poplar there is a table set for tea. Garden seats and chairs; on one of the seats lies a guitar. Not far from the table there is a swing. Between two and three o’clock on a cloudy afternoon.

Marina, a heavy old woman, slow to move, is sitting by the samovar, knitting a stocking, and Astrov is walking up and down near her.

Marina

Pours out a glass of tea. Here, drink it, my dear.

Astrov

Reluctantly takes the glass. I don’t feel much like it.

Marina

Perhaps you would have a drop of vodka?

Astrov

No. I don’t drink vodka every day. Besides, it’s so sultry a pause. Nurse, how many years have we known each other?

Marina

Pondering. How many? The Lord help my memory.⁠ ⁠… You came into these parts⁠ ⁠… when? Vera Petrovna, Sonitchka’s mother, was living then. You came to see us two winters before she died.⁠ ⁠… Well, that must be eleven years ago. After a moment’s thought. Maybe even more.⁠ ⁠…

Astrov

Have I changed much since then?

Marina

Very much. You were young and handsome in those days, and now you have grown older. And you are not as good-looking. There’s another thing too⁠—you take a drop of vodka now.

Astrov

And the Professor?

Voynitsky

The Professor, as before, sits in his study writing from morning till dead of night.

“With furrowed brow and racking brains, We write and write and write, And ne’er a word of praise we hear, Our labours to requite.”

Poor paper! He had much better be writing his autobiography. What a superb subject! A retired professor, you know⁠—an old dry-as-dust, a learned fish. Gout, rheumatism, migraine, envy and jealousy have affected his liver. The old fish is living on his first wife’s estate, living there against his will because he can’t afford to live in the town. He is forever complaining of his misfortunes, though, as a matter of fact, he is exceptionally fortunate. Nervously. Just think how fortunate! The son of a humble sacristan, he has risen to university distinctions and the chair of a professor; he has become “your Excellency,” the son-in-law of a senator, and so on, and so on. All that is no great matter, though. But just take this. The man has been lecturing and writing about art for twenty-five years, though he knows absolutely nothing about art. For twenty-five years he has been chewing over other men’s ideas about realism, naturalism, and all sorts of nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been lecturing and writing on things all intelligent people know about already and stupid ones aren’t interested in⁠—so for twenty-five years he has been simply wasting his time. And with all that, what conceit! What pretensions! He has retired, and not a living soul knows anything about him; he is absolutely unknown. So that for twenty-five years all he has done is to keep a better man out of a job!

Voynitsky

But we have been talking and talking for fifty years and reading pamphlets. It’s about time to leave off.

Marya

You don’t like listening when I speak; I don’t know why. Forgive my saying so, Jean, but you have so changed in the course of the last year that I hardly know you. You used to be a man of definite principles, of elevating ideas.

Voynitsky

Oh, yes! I was a man of elevating ideas which elevated nobody a pause.⁠ ⁠… A man of elevating ideas⁠ ⁠… you could not have made a more malignant joke! Now I am forty-seven. Till last year I tried, like you, to blind myself with all your pedantic rubbish on purpose to avoid seeing life as it is⁠—and thought I was doing the right thing. And now, if only you knew! I can’t sleep at night for vexation, for rage that I so stupidly wasted the time when I might have had everything from which my age now shuts me out.

Sonya

Uncle Vanya, it’s so dreary!

Marya

To her son. You seem to be blaming your former principles. It is not they that are to blame, but yourself. You forget that principles alone are no use⁠—a dead letter. You ought to have been working.

Voynitsky

Working? It is not everyone who can be a writing machine like your Herr Professor.

Marya

What do you mean by that?

Sonya

In an imploring voice. Grandmamma! Uncle Vanya! I entreat you!

Voynitsky

I’ll hold my tongue⁠—hold my tongue and apologise.

A pause.

Yelena

What a fine day! It’s not too hot.

A pause.

Voynitsky

A fine day to hang oneself!

Telyegin tunes the guitar. Marina walks to and fro near the house, calling a hen.

Yelena

Ach! indolent and bored! Everyone abuses my husband; everyone looks at me with compassion, thinking, “Poor thing! she has got an old husband.” This sympathy for me, oh, how well I understand it! As Astrov said just now, you all recklessly destroy the forests, and soon there will be nothing left on the earth. In just the same way you recklessly destroy human beings, and soon, thanks to you, there will be no fidelity, no purity, no capacity for sacrifice left on earth! Why is it you can never look with indifference at a woman unless she is yours? Because⁠—that doctor is right⁠—there is a devil of destruction in all of you. You have no feeling for the woods, nor the birds, nor for women, nor for one another!

Voynitsky

I don’t like this moralising.

A pause.

Yelena

That doctor has a weary, sensitive face. An interesting face. Sonya is evidently attracted by him; she is in love with him, and I understand her feeling. He has come three times since I have been here, but I am shy and have not once had a proper talk with him, or been nice to him. He thinks I am disagreeable. Most likely that’s why we are such friends, Ivan Petrovitch, that we are both such tiresome, tedious people. Tiresome! Don’t look at me like that, I don’t like it.

Voynitsky

How else can I look at you, since I love you? You are my happiness, my life, my youth!

Alone. She is gone a pause. Ten years ago I used to meet her at my sister’s. Then she was seventeen and I was thirty-seven. Why didn’t I fall in love with her then and make her an offer? It might easily have happened then! And now she would have been my wife.⁠ ⁠… Yes.⁠ ⁠… Now we should both have been awakened by the storm; she would have been frightened by the thunder, I should have held her in my arms and whispered, “Don’t be frightened, I am here.” Oh, wonderful thoughts, what happiness; it makes me laugh with delight⁠—but, my God, my thoughts are in a tangle. Why am I old? Why doesn’t she understand me? Her fine phrases, her lazy morality, her nonsensical lazy theories about the ruin of the world⁠—all that is absolutely hateful to me a pause. Oh, how I have been cheated! I adored that Professor, that pitiful gouty invalid, and worked for him like an ox. Sonya and I squeezed every farthing out of the estate; we haggled over linseed oil, peas, curds, like greedy peasants; we grudged ourselves every morsel to save up halfpence and farthings and send him thousands of roubles. I was proud of him and his learning; he was my life, the breath of my being. All his writings and utterances seemed to me inspired by genius.⁠ ⁠… My God, and now! Here he is retired, and now one can see the sum total of his life. He leaves not one page of work behind him, he is utterly unknown, he is nothing⁠—a soap bubble! And I have been cheated.⁠ ⁠…

Everything ought to be beautiful in a human being: face, and dress, and soul, and ideas. She is beautiful, there is no denying that, but⁠ ⁠… You know she does nothing but eat, sleep, walk about, fascinate us all by her beauty⁠—nothing more. She has no duties, other people work for her.⁠ ⁠… That’s true, isn’t it? And an idle life cannot be pure a pause. But perhaps I am too severe. I am dissatisfied with life like your Uncle Vanya, and we are both growing peevish.

Sonya

You are dissatisfied with life, then?

Astrov

I love life as such, but our life, our everyday provincial life in Russia, I can’t endure. I despise it with every fibre of my being. And as for my own personal life, there is absolutely nothing nice in it, I can assure you. You know when you walk through a forest on a dark night, and a light gleams in the distance, you do not notice your weariness, nor the darkness, nor the sharp twigs that lash you in the face.⁠ ⁠… I work⁠—as you know⁠—harder than anyone in the district, fate is forever lashing at me; at times I am unbearably miserable, but I have no light in the distance. I expect nothing for myself; I am not fond of my fellow creatures.⁠ ⁠… It’s years since I cared for anyone.

Sonya

You care for no one at all?

Astrov