On Chekov and Translating: Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersberg’s Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is a play that drives literary critics crazy: there is no main character, there is little plot and many of the monologues make little sense. The play centers on the aged Professor Serebriakov (who isn’t the main character) and his relatives, who spend their time on the Professor’s country estate having rather complicated relations with each other and going through a “midlife crisis.” A realistically bittersweet portrayal of regrets about opportunities missed and lives wasted, it is also a play about the search to create a new life, one that will exist a hundred or two hundred years from now, when people will know how to be happy. And the fact that nothing happens except reminiscences, conversations, and attempts to find too late the happiness that slipped through one’s fingers – that is Chekov’s way of making his point. As the play goes on, the audience too feels the dull reality of the characters, and understands the madness of their desires. It is poignant – and yet heartbreaking – to watch the madness of people who have missed their chances or who (like Sonya, suffering from unrequited love) see their chances slip through their fingers and their dreams break.

The audience, however, seemed to find the Maly Drama Theatre’s performance of this “tragicomic masterpiece,” as it has been called, funnier that it was intended to be. A tragicomedy is something between a comedy (which means not that it’s supposed to be funny, but that everything will end “happily”) and a tragedy (where everything does not end “happily,” such as in the story of Oedipus). In short, it is a play whose ending is neither “happy” nor tragic, and that is not intended to be funny. There is nothing inherently amusing about Uncle Vanya trying to make up for the opportunity he missed years ago by courting Elena, for example, or in Sonya’s sometimes unreasoned actions due to love. Yet the audience laughed.

Perhaps the audience’s misinterpretation of the play was due in part to the overtitles; Russian being my first language, I was lucky enough to be able to understand the play in the original, however, I occasionally followed the translation - enough to realize both its inexactness and the difficulty of translating this play. A viewer will obviously not have time to ponder the nuances of a particular word or phrase as the play is going on, yet I found the overtitles inexact to the extent that they were misleading. Phrases were left out, the song sung by Doctor Astrov was completely different than the text in the overtitles…and the significance of some key phrases was lost. The Professor’s phrase about the necessity of “doing the deed,” for example, was not a sexual reference, but an ironic statement by somebody who has spent his life reading and writing to the hardworking people around him that they have been doing nothing and that they must start doing work; Elena’s response to Uncle Vanya’s vows of love, translated as “Your love…it makes me numb,” suggests in the original that Elena could be becoming blunt, numb, or stupid, and the emphasis seems to be on the idea that his vows of love make her unresponsive, blunt, withdrawn – she simply does not care, and his vows do not move her. These nuances are difficult to convey in a written translation, and even more so in overtitles, but I found myself disappointed that a greater attempt was not made to capture the essence of Chekov’s meaning.

In the end, however, the words were no more powerful than the lack of them. The agony, anguish and despair of the characters (so brilliantly portrayed by this troupe of actors) and the tense moments of silence (possibly the director Lev Dodin’s addition) were as full of feeling as the powerful speeches, and required no translation to convey the pain of people who are searching for a way to make the world happy one day, even though their dreams of happiness were thwarted and their hopes melted into mist.

By: Ana Klimchyskaya
UMSSC Member