Uncle Vanya

Anton Chekhov’s play of Ivan Voitski, Uncle Vanya, who has spent his life running a country estate for his brother-in-law, a retired professor, and turns against him when the professor comes to stay with his young second wife.

Start reading4 acts, about 17,000 words

Famous quotes

• Will our descendants two hundred years from now, for whom we are breaking the road, remember to give us a kind word? No, nurse, they will forget.

  Act I, spoken by AstroffIn context

  • Time
  • Work

• Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.

  Act I, spoken by AstroffIn context

  • Nature

• The world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling.

  Act II, spoken by HelenaIn context

  • Anger
  • Good & Evil

• When real life is wanting one must create an illusion. It is better than nothing.

  Act II, spoken by VoitskiIn context

  • Life & Death
  • Truth & Lies

• A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the mind, the thoughts.

  Act II, spoken by AstroffIn context

  • Beauty
  • Character

• When a woman is ugly they always say she has beautiful hair or eyes.

  Act III, spoken by SoniaIn context

  • Beauty
  • Women

• My life has been a failure. I am clever and brave and strong. If I had lived a normal life I might have become another Schopenhauer or Dostoieffski.

  Act III, spoken by VoitskiIn context

  • Failure

• If only I could live the rest of my life in some new way! If I could only wake some still, bright morning and feel that life had begun again; that the past was forgotten and had vanished like smoke.

  Act IV, spoken by VoitskiIn context

  • Change
  • Life & Death

• We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see all evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith.

  Act IV, spoken by SoniaIn context

  • Faith
  • Hope
  • Life & Death

Contents

1. Act I
2. Act II
3. Act III
4. Act IV