I recently saw a riveting production of UNCLE VANYA from the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg Russia.

The play’s director Lev Dodin wrote a short bittersweet piece about this piece specifically and Chekhov in general. One has to make hard choices throughout one’s life as Dodin beautiful notes. To call this phase of life a middle age crisis would demean and marginalize it.

“Life flows by, and sooner of later a man begins to see his years lived as a treasure he didn’t manage to put to good use.  He starts to see visions of other possible but unlived lives.  In these other lives all his secret dreams come true, all his hopes are fulfilled, all his sweetest fantasies become real.  The man furiously burns up the past, denies the present, and gives himself complete to this other life which he could have lived, but didn’t manage it.  The fuller the man understands life, the sharper he feels this gap, this contradiction which grows into a tragedy.  Time goes by, and gradually you are faced with a choice — to either refuse this life completely, or to find courage to live out the life given to you by God and fate, which you have been carrying out — alone — with your will power and personality.”

Fatally ill doctor Chekhov knew this paradox only too well, and he analyzed it with amazing tenderness and desperate ruthlessness. This, among many other things, define Chekhov’s plays, and the most beautiful of them — Uncle Vanya — carries a simple but eternal melody and themes.