"A Subject Worthy of Ayvazovsky's Brush": Vanya's Misdirected Fury

"A Subject Worthy of Ayvazovsky's Brush": Vanya's Misdirected Fury KARL D. KRAMER In Uncle Vanya I1 'ya I1'ich Telegin possesses a remarkable ability to either cloud an issue by stating the obvious in an involuted manneror utterly misrepresent it by calling it the reverse of what it is. Thus, when Sonya observes, "Cold tea," Telegin responds, "The temperature in the samovar has already decreased considerably.'" When Vanya begins praising Yelena's beauty, a subject highly distressing to Telegin because any whiff of infidelity portends disaster, he comments to the old nurse, "The weather is charming, the little birds are singing. we all live in peace and harmony - what more do we need?" (149). In the midst of Vanya's scathing attack on Serebryakov in the third act, Telegin pleads with him: "Vanya, friend, don'!.. .. I'm trembling.... Why spoil good relations?" (178). "Good relations" had obviously been spoiled long before the play begins. But surely his crowning moment occurs at the beginning of the fourth act when he and Marina are discussing Vanya's two failed attempts to kill Serebryakov at nearly point-blank range: "Yes, a subject worthy of Ayvazovsky's brush" (I8I). The nineteenth-century Russian painter Ivan Ayvazovsky specialized in gigantic maritime paintings. most commonly of battIes and storms at sea. His work invariably strove for a monumental quality that is, of course, wholly lacking in Vanya's vain effort to redress the wrongs he blames on the Professor. Telegin brands this dismal failure as an event of immense significance, thereby unwittingly revealing its complete insignificance. In her exemplary study The Pragmatics ofInsignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko , Gogol, Cathy Popkin has called attention to this aspect of Chekhov's work in the stories. The case of Uncle Vanya alone testifies to its key role in the plays as well. Popkin suggests that Chekhov has four strategies for manipulating commonly accepted notions of the insignificant and the significant. The first is to maximize the minimum; "The Death of a Government Clerk," in which a sneeze leads to the demise of the central character, is a typical Modern Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 51 I 512 KARL D. KRAMER example, The second strategy she calls minimizing the maximum, whereby an event seemingly of some consequence turns out to be trivial. The third strategy is to offer a double perspective on an event: one character sees as significant what for another is simply an everyday occurrence, In the fourth, an event of major import simply fails to occur.' In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov is obviously working with the second category, minimizing the maximum, Popkin speaks of "the exposure of a 'big' event as simply normal and inevitable and hence not particularly tellable,"3 This is certainly what happens to the big event as it gets evaluated in the fourth act of the play, a subject I shall return to later, I shall try to suggest that Uncle Vanya represents a whole cast of characters who are determined to make a melodrama out of something that is simply ordinary human experience. Of course, the phenomenon to which Popkin draws attention has frequently been noted in dramatic criticism. Minimizing the maximum could easily serve as a definition for anticlimax, and critics have long talked of Chekhov's use of anticlimax in Uncle Vanya in particular. John Styan refers to the playas "a great comedy of anticlimax" and as "a play of anticlimaxes,'" Certainly, the final scene in Act Three is a case in point. Vanya delivers an emotional tirade that falls on absolutely deaf ears, Serebryakov has no idea why Vanya is attacking him, and even Vanya's appeal to his mother results in her siding with the Professor. Most of the characters in Uncle Vanya set .themselves up for situations in which it is relatively easy to undercut them precisely because they try to maximize the minimum, creating the effect of anticlimax, The way they do this is by regularly resorting to self-dramatization or indulging in self-pity, The play consists of a coJ1ection of characters who are de~errnined to see the drama in their own lives, but who at the same time debunk one another's dramas. Serebryakov is...