Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekov's most notable dramas and a mainstay of the theater. The play is set at the estate of the first wife of Professor Serebryakov, where he and his second wife are temporarily forced to stay. Their stay throws the house into turmoil; there is unrequited love, an attempted murder, disillusionment and despair, and ruminations on old age and the meaning of life. Chekov composed the work at the end of his life and published it in 1896, a year before it was actually staged. It was a reworking of an earlier play, The Wood Demon (1888); one of the main shifts in Uncle Vanya is from Astrov as the central character to a focus on all of the characters more equally. He may have done this revision during his visit to the Sakhalin prison colony in 1891. Notably, Uncle Vanya was also staged in the provinces before it was staged in a metropolitan area. It opened in Moscow at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski (who also starred as Astrov). Chekov himself was too ill to see early performances and only saw his work live on April 10th, 1900 in Sevastopol.