Summary
There is a clarity of vision in Uncle Vanya not present in The Seagull. The broad divisions between the generations in The Seagull invited moral judgments too easily; in Uncle Vanya, Chekhov risks the comfort of his audience in teaching them to understand his characters without sentimentality, to recognize individuality. He pursues this purpose with a precision and honesty which subjects him as a playwright to a fiercer discipline, and his dramaturgy to a radical reform. The uncertain response of the first Moscow audiences to the play testifies to the extremes to which Chekhov now goes in reducing conventional theatricality.
Working over his own material in The Wood Demon of 1889, Chekhov deliberately evokes a tawdry, provincial world, with mostly trivial, mediocre people living in it. It is rural Russia again, but this time wholly without glamour. Chekhov subtitles his play Scenes from Country Life, a title borrowed from Alexander Ostrovsky. In fact, Uncle Vanya in 1897 takes a big step towards realizing the naturalistic ideal of drama as documentary, one which neither Ibsen nor Strindberg chose to take. In letting actuality seem to speak for itself, Chekhov also makes a clean break with the Russian tradition of didactic purpose in writing for the stage.
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- Chekhov in Performance , pp. 89 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1971