Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’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.
Chekhov 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...
