Uncle Vanya

A performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

As I was walking into the Power Center, I saw my housemate Ilya, a UM graduate student who is originally from Estonia and speaks Russian fluently, buying a ticket at the box office. Ilya wised me on to the fact that the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg is considered to be the premier interpreter of Chekhov in the world. I had an idea that they were famous, but I didn't know that they were that famous.

So, it was with expectations raised sky-high that I walked into the auditorium. (Incidentally, when I had picked up my tickets from the Mendelssohn Theater box office, the nice people at the desk had handed me a leaflet that said that, at the request of the Maly Theater, the production was supposed to begin exactly at the listed time and that everyone should be in their seats accordingly. I had been so intimidated by this injunction that I made sure to take my seat before the hour of 8:00 pm struck -- but the play, strangely, did seem to start at Michigan time after all. In any case...)

The first thing to notice about this production was that the production was much longer than I expected. Uncle Vanya is a very short play -- on the printed page, that is. I expected it to be over very quickly, but the Maly Theater had found out, it seemed, a way to wring duration out of Chekhov's habitual brevity of style.

In psychobabble-speak, one could describe Uncle Vanya, perhaps, as a play about mid-life crises. At the age of forty-seven, Vanya wakes up to the reality that he has been a failure and that none of the dreams he had as a youth have come to fruition. The melancholy note of the play derives from Vanya's realization that he had dedicated his life to selflessly serving a man (the self-important and narcissistic professor Serebryakov) who feels nothing but callous disregard for him. Vanya is a tragicomic figure -- we both laugh at him and feel pity and terror at his fate, knowing in our hearts that Vanya's destiny is, after all, a common human condition that could well befall ourselves, too, in one way or the other.

It is this sense of tragicomedy that is very difficult to pull off successfully, and in doing which the Maly Theater succeeded quite well. The tragicomedy demands quicksilver transitions of mood, as the play seems constantly to turn on a dime between sly humor and high tragedy. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of the banality of cheap laughter and the mushiness of shallow sentimentalism, the Maly Theater production guided the audience with a firm hand through these mood swings almost like a matador leads the bull this way and that with nothing but minute movements of the cape, so that the audience kept snickering and guffawing at one moment and falling into a stunned and awe-struck silence at the end. And at the amazing conclusion of the play -- Sonya's heroic attempt to wrest dignity and meaning out of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that flesh is heir to, her impassioned, piercing and repeated cry of "Mi otdokhnyom" ("We will rest"), I had tears flowing down my cheeks.

Vladimir Nabokov (whom I always find very insightful on the topic of Russian literature) had this to say about his fellow country-man Chekhov, which describes chartacters like Astrov and Vanya in the play to a "t":

"[...]It is not quite exact to say that Chekhov dealt in charming and ineffectual people. It is a little more true to say that his men and women are charming because they are ineffectual.

"But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad [...] Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes—in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov's stories ..."

I find Nabokov's emphasis in this passage on the Russian-ness of Chekhov interesting, in the light of how the Maly Theater succeeded in transcending the language barrier (the surtitles helped, of course, but they are never the whole thing) in communicating the essence of the play to a largely non-Russian-speaking audience.