Stanislavsky went so far as to proclaim that ‘talented people like Vanya ... and Astrov rot away in dark corners’ while Serebryakov ‘is shown up as a fraud.’

No such exposure occurs. Vanya labels him a fake but, unpleasant and self-centred as he is, Serebryakov is not shown to be fraudulent. Similarly, while Astrov may have some talent (he does have considerable charm), Vanya, for all his protestations of having been cheated out of his potential greatness by Serebryakov — ‘I might have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoyevsky’ (he names, significantly, a pair of most gloomy giants!), seems entirely talentless, an injustice-collector who seizes on Serebryakov as an excuse for his own emptiness.

The play’s neglected heroes are its women, Yelena and Sonya. Yelena, with whom both Vanya and Astrov are smitten, is thoroughly misunderstood both by her would-be lovers and by critics like Eric Bentley, ordinarily so sagacious, but as wrong as possible when he calls her ‘artificial, sterile, useless’.

Yelena does complain about being bored and having nothing to do, but this is, I believe, as so often in Chekhov’s plays, a defence against revealing deeper or more dangerous feelings and conditions: how uncomfortable she feels in this house, how unhappy she is in her marriage, how insulted by Vanya’s and Astrov’s amorous importunities.

After the play appeared, an amateur actress named Marianna Pobedimskaya wrote to Chekhov asking if Yelena was ‘an intelligent woman ... thinking and decent ... or is she an apathetic, idle ... incapable of thinking or loving? I cannot reconcile myself to [this latter view] ... I see her as a reasoning, thinking person ... made unhappy ... by dissatisfaction with her present life.’ Chekhov replied, ‘Your opinion of Yelena . . . is completely justified.’ Actually, Yelena, the victim of male chauvinism, has a sharp wit, a fine sensitivity and a generous spirit. One of Chekhov’s central perceptions is that her decision to stay true to her vows by remaining with her tiresome husband wouldn’t be approved of or understood by her fellow characters or the world at large.

As is so often true in these plays, the unmistakable focus of Uncle Vanya’s moral and spiritual life is a woman, Sonya. Before looking at her position I need to say something about what I believe to be Uncle Vanya’s origin.

In a story of 1887, ‘The Enemies’, Chekhov wrote of the ‘subtle, elusive beauty of human grief, a beauty which would not be understood ... for a long time ... Kirilov and his wife [whose small son has just died] were silent; they were not crying. It was as if they were conscious of the lyricism, as well as the burden, of their loss.’

The heaviness and simultaneous beauty of loss or sorrow suffuse Chekhov’s last three plays, most pointedly in Uncle Vanya, where it presents itself with artistic splendour in Sonya, another figure of existential or ontological sobriety. It should be noticed that from the moment she learns that Astrov doesn’t love her she never speaks of love again, never gives the slightest sign of her inward suffering. This isn’t simple stoicism, but a mark of her self-control and generosity of spirit: she’ll trouble no one with her sorrow.

The play’s final moments rank among Chekhov’s most memorable. In one production I saw, Sonya cradles Vanya’s head in a Pietà-like tableau as she delivers her great last speech. Her words are rightly felt as a prayerful utterance, but I think it a mistake to interpret them as formally religious. Instead, they constitute a kind of spiritual music, the lyricism of grief; what makes up grief’s burden is painfully obvious. Magarshack’s optimistic reading is, I think, based squarely on Sonya’s compassion, her honesty, and her generous heart; she suffers more than any other character, but accepts her joyless future and sustains her poor sad Uncle Vanya as she goes.

TIME

The inherent problem Chekhov faced in Three Sisters was, I think, how to write a drama about time, not simply taking place in time — all plays do that — but about how we exist in and with it as though it were a place and a being. Beckett’s ‘double-headed monster of damnation and salvation’, the cradle and ground of all we do, home of our myths, imaginings and actualities. Time as place, place as time, Proustian, Einsteinian, a pact among the tenses, the scene of an appointment for which we’re always too early or too late.

Odd as it may sound, Three Sisters may be described as a ‘replica of time’: how it feels to live in it, play with it, spend it, waste it, ‘kill’ it, trisect it into past, present and future. It is, paradoxically enough, a plotless play with many subplots: the only ’story’ we can pluck from it is a negative one — the sisters’ failure to get to Moscow. In that regard the writer William Gerhardi wrote in the 1920s a piece of fatally obtuse criticism, a tiny primer for misunderstanding Three Sisters and Chekhov: ‘Good God! How can there be such people? Why can’t people know what they want and get it?’ Which is rather like asking, about Hamlet, ‘What’s wrong with that fellow? Why can’t he make up his mind?’ or saying about Lear, ‘What that chap needs is a sharp estate planner.’ Gerhardi’s breathtaking insensitivity, his plain dumbness, would, I think, have driven Chekhov, that model of patience, to despair.

Well, why don’t the sisters get to Moscow? The simple answer is that they don’t get to Moscow because the play they’re in is about not getting there. Just as Godot doesn’t arrive in Beckett’s drama, so Moscow isn’t attained in Chekhov’s.