Enthralled by Beauty, Distracted from Duty: Temptation, Jealousy, and Contempt in Uncle Vanya Chloe Mandel 11th Grade

Through scenes of indirect action involving comically forlorn and hopeless characters, Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya addresses three predominant themes: work, love, and misery. The two central male characters in the play, Vanya and Astroff, experience feelings of romance and melancholy that distract them from their daily labor. They share a similar sense of bitterness towards others, along with a fascination with the same woman, the beautiful but shallow Helena; in addition, both find themselves growing idle in the face of their infatuation and resentment. While Vanya’s sullenness, idleness, and pursuit of Helena all spawn from the same source, his brother-in-law the professor whom he despises and envies, Astroff’s contempt for the ignorance of Russian society as a whole directly influences his emotional state and work habits, and his infatuation with Helena derives from little more than outward attraction. Each allows those around him to distort his attitude, adding to his misery.

Vanya uses the professor as a scapegoat for his own inattention to duty and routine; having realized the fruitlessness of his former devotion to a man he now deems selfish and phony, he loses the motivation to attend to his estate productively as...