Uncle Vanya Study Guide

Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

Uncle Vanya is the story of a wealthy professor who has remarried to a young and beautiful woman and returns to his country estate with the aim of selling it. Several people connected to his first wife, though, depend on the estate for their livings and for their senses of purpose. Among these people are the professor's daughter from a previous marriage and his first wife's brother, the title character Vanya.

Uncle Vanya is thematically preoccupied with frustrated hopes and what might be called the "wasted life"; Chekhov's characters are each unhappy, and (like Tolstoy's unhappy families) they are each unhappy in their own way. In this sense, there are many parallels with other Chekhov plays.

Arguably it remains somewhat difficult to organize these concepts into a coherent theme as they belong more to the play's "nastroenie," its melancholic mood or atmosphere, than to a distinct program of ideas.

Astrov's speeches about the destroying of forest and disappearance of birds and beasts is one of the first passages in world literature about ecological problems.

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