As I started reading the second act of the play Uncle Vanya, I realized of an allusion that the author apparently makes about humanity (applying this text to the present world). In our society, our race has created facilities where the old-aged humans are taken care of daily by nurses who, most of the time, have no relationship with the family of the old being. Chekhov successfully depicts how the old become such an unbearable burden (allegedly) to the youth that surrounds it: “But wait a bit, soon I shall set you all free. I shan’t drag on much longer” (178). In this play, everyone is exhausted due to the fact that they have been taking special care of Aleksandr, an old man who apparently sits day and night in his room writing and thinking about life. As a reader, I don’t understand how taking care of an old man who apparently has little to no social activity in his life could be exhausting. The author could be simply demonstrating the burden that elders are for their younger family members, or he could be mocking the laziness and inconsideration of families by sending their old family members to retirement houses.
“A woman can become a man’s friend only in this sequence: first an acquaintance, then a mistress, and then a friend” (185). What is the author trying to say about women, or men in this sentence? In my opinion this order could be first an acquaintance, then a friend, and last a mistress, but never a mistress before than a friend. I was really perplexed when I read this expression, I had never thought of a woman in this way, and I had never heard someone refer to one as such. In a sense, Chekhov might be trying to express the importance of a friendship. The author may be saying that having a love life doesn’t necessarily mean that your relationship with that person is intimate and valuable; however, a friendship is always when this relationship turns to be an intimate relationship held together by trust. When this trust is incorporated in a relationship, according to the author, it becomes a friendship, whether is incorporates intercourse or it doesn’t.
As I kept on reading, I encountered an even more stunning expression than the one above: “As a rule I get drunk like this once a month… I don’t stop at anything! I undertake the most difficult operations and do them beautifully; I draw up the most far-reaching plans for the future…” (186). This expression, applied to the present day fits perfectly when speaking of people who state that when they are drunk or high on drugs they feel enlightened; although there are few people who state this, this expression will fit them completely in a mocking sense, well, no surgeon can perform an operation drunk, without killing his/her patient. Some people may argue, however, that Astrov did feel sorry and moral stricken for killing a patient under the effects of chloroform as a consequence of being drunk. But he never intended to perform a surgery on that patient, while he mentions that he did perform surgeries when being drunk in this quote. Seen in another perspective, Chekhov might have been trying to reflect through this character that although he is most of the time drunk, and he performs surgeries drunk, people don’t seem to care. This reminds me of a book I recently read called Slaughterhouse-Five where Vonnegut mocks the fact that people despise a robot for his halitosis and not for the fact that he had dropped napalm on other people.
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