I re-read Uncle Vanya after watching the Academy Award winning movie, ‘Drive My Car’.  In that film, based on a short story by one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, the leading character is a depressed actor and director who is a director-in-residence at a Japanese theater where he decides to present Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’.  When the lead character is arrested for killing a stranger, the director steps in to play the role of Vanya.  The role is especially poignant because the actor/director, like Vanya in the play, feels like his life has been a waste and that he has suffered beyond endurance.  He and his wife had lost a four year old daughter to illness and then his wife died suddenly of a stroke.  Like Vanya, he is in despair and feels hopeless and like Vanya, he is comforted and finds strength in a young woman who is not available to him as a lover, but only as a friend.  In the play, it is Sonia, Vanya’s niece.  In the movie, it is the girl who drives the actor-director back and forth from his hotel to the theater.

Chekhov’s play is replete with characters who make strong impressions and carry the themes forward with powerful momentum.  The Professor, ailing and ignored by the academic world he had spent his life in; his daughter, Sonia whose love for the Doctor is unreturned; the Professor’s young wife, bored and unable to respond to the love overtures of both Vanya and the Doctor; and the Doctor, stuck in this rural backwater and wasting  his talent and life.  All in all, it’s a pretty grim scene, but Sonia provides the antidote when she tells Vanya:  “What can we do? We must live.  And live we shall, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long, long line of days and endless nights. We shall patiently bear the trials fate has in store for us. We shall work for others and know no rest.  And when our time comes, we shall die a humble death….And God will have mercy on us. And you and I, dear Uncle shall find a life that is bright and beautiful and fine.  We shall rejoice and look back on our present misfortunes with tenderness and smiles…. We shall rest.”  

I’ve always had some degree of envy for those true believers who view their time on earth as but a prelude to their eternal happiness in heaven, but I’ve never been able to buy into that story.  This life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.  So if I’m Vanya or the actor-director in the movie, I’m not sitting back, suffering, and waiting for things to improve after death.  Better to deal with the here and now on this earth and slug it out for better or for worse.  A great play stimulates thought and introspection.  Chekhov’s plays do all of that.  Worth re-reading.