ARTicles vol. 1 i.1: Converting the Demon

“I hate the play and I’m trying to forget it,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1899 about The Wood Demon, an early version of Uncle Vanya. “It would be a real blow to me if some unknown force were to drag it out of obscurity and bring it to life. There’s a fine example of perverted parental love for you.”

The torturous path from The Wood Demon to Uncle Vanya makes Chekhov’s rejection of the first script understandable. During The Wood Demon premiere in 1889, actors from a rival theatre, jealous that they hadn’t received Chekhov’s latest play, howled, whistled, and jeered from the boxes. The din of the audience made it impossible to hear the players, but it didn’t make a difference since the actors forgot their lines and the actresses were atrocious. The audience booed, and Chekhov had the play withdrawn immediately from the repertory. Concerned that the sprawling script was as much to blame as the actors, he refused to include The Wood Demon in the first comprehensive edition of his works. Chekhov’s loathing for his play has been shared by most producers since the premiere: The Wood Demon wasn’t staged again in Moscow until 1960.

Humiliated by the critics’ lambasting of what he had described as his “big romantic comedy,” Chekhov resolutely turned his back on the theatre after The Wood Demon fiasco and refocused his energies on his primary profession: medicine. In the spring of 1890, he left Moscow for the island of Sakhalin, a notorious penal colony on the Pacific frontier of the vast Russian empire. After a grueling three-month, trans-Siberian odyssey, Chekhov reached the desolate island and spent four months studying the inhabitants’ savage living conditions.

Sometime between Sakhalin and 1896, Chekhov revisited The Wood Demon and transformed his “romantic comedy” into “scenes from country life.” When exactly Chekhov reworked the play is a source of critical debate, though most scholars date the revision to 1896, when the playwright mentioned his new script in a letter to his publisher Alexei Suvorin.

Chekhov began by pruning The Wood Demon, eliminating three of the major characters and combining an alcoholic flirt with the eponymous conservationist to form one character, Dr. Astrov. By trimming the cast, Chekhov heightened the tension among the characters. The opening act of The Wood Demon is unfocused; in Uncle Vanya, however, the first act immediately establishes the two triangular tensions of the play. Sonya and Yelena both find themselves drawn towards Astrov, while Astrov and Vanya compete for Yelena’s attention. In The Wood Demon, Chekhov develops sexual tension slowly through hide-and-seek flirtations. In Uncle Vanya, crisscrossed desires quickly force the characters into a more intense sexual strife.

Chekhov retained much of the structure and language of the second and third acts of The Wood Demon in Uncle Vanya, but he completely rewrote the climax. In The Wood Demon, George, the precursor to Vanya, shoots and kills himself at the end of the third act. In Uncle Vanya, the title character takes aim at the Professor, misses, and lives to face the humiliating consequences of his failed homicide.

The Wood Demon ends in a sentimental series of reconciliations and eleventh-hour disclosures of love – a “happy ending,” as Chekhov described it, brought about by the characters’ reflections on George’s suicide. The fourth act of Uncle Vanya doesn’t have this tidy sense of comic completion. Almost all of the characters are left unfulfilled, forced to accept their frustrated desires and move on with their lives.

The audience had scoffed at Chekhov’s conventional resolution to The Wood Demon, but the ending of Uncle Vanya had a completely different impact. People saw their own doubts and fears played out in the characters’ struggle to find meaning in their existence. When Maxim Gorky saw Vanya in Nizhny Novgorod, he penned an enthusiastic letter to Chekhov: “[I] wept like a female . . . I went home stupefied, shattered by your play . . . I felt as I watched its characters as if I were being sawn in half by a dull saw. Its teeth go straight to the heart, and they make the heart clench, groan, cry out. . . Your Uncle Vanya is an entirely new form of dramatic art, a hammer you use to beat on the empty pate of the public.”

Ryan McKittrick is A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.

Quotations taken from The Oxford Chekhov, edited by Ronald Hingley and The Chekhov Theatre, by Laurence Senelick.