‘You know, in the first week of Lent I went to Malitskoe, because of the epidemic-spotted typhus….In the houses you could hardly move for sick people….

Dirt, stench and smoke everywhere…and calves mixed up with the sick on the floor….Young pigs there as well. I struggled with it all day, hadn’t a moment to sit down or to swallow a bit of food. But would they let me rest when I got home? No, they brought me a signalman from the railway. I laid him on the table to operate, and he went and died on me under the chloroform. And just when I least wanted it my feelings seemed to wake up again, and my conscience began to worry me as if I had killed him deliberately…I sat down, closed my eyes-just like this- and I started to think. I wondered whether the people who come after us in a hundred years time, the people for whom we are now blasting a trail- would they remember us and speak kindly of us? No, Nanny, I’ll wager they won’t!’ 

‘Uncle Vania: Scenes from country life in four acts’ was first performed in October 1899. Written by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a prolific and important writer, it was greatly in demand, and the theatre company that first staged it in Moscow told Chekhov after the event!  

Chekhov was a doctor as well as writer. He famously said that medicine was his wife, literature his mistress. Practically, medicine would interrupt his writing, just as his character above, Dr Astrov, is disturbed from his forestry projects: with the needs of the people during epidemics. In the final lines of the above quote Chekhov poses a legitimate question, but answers it too: ‘I will make them remember us, through this play.’ 

To think about: Astrov’s speeches about his passion for forestry, on the other hand, have not affected our forestry practices enough:  

‘Anyone who can burn up all that beauty in a stove, who can destroy something that we cannot create, must be a barbarian incapable of reason. (…) There are fewer and fewer forests, the rivers are drying up, the wild creatures are almost exterminated, the climate is being ruined, and the land is getting poorer and more hideous every day….’ 

Where do the limits of the power of the written word lie? 

Ivanov 

Based on the very sound principal of ‘writing what one knows’, there are often doctors in Chekhov’s short stories and plays. The supposed idyll of rural life in his vision suffers poverty and illness, suicide and boredom; all closed up inside dark claustrophobic houses. This is the subject of ‘Ivanov’, which was written in only 10 days in 1888; and a very interesting play from the doctor’s point of view. It even contains an aside on life in Australia! 

Ivanov is an important councillor and landowner who married a Jewess, Anna Petrovna, for her money. Anna, however, has terminal TB, and her parents disowned her and refused any dowry. Ivanov now feels a broken man, one who, to make things worse, simply doesn’t love his dying wife. He gambles, drinks and flirts by night; and then battles despair and self loathing in the daytime:  

‘I’m a rotten, pitiful, contemptible creature. You need to be a wretched, worn-out drunkard, like Pasha, to be able to love and respect me still. Oh, God, how I despise myself! I hate my voice, my footsteps, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Isn’t it ridiculous, isn’t it infuriating? It’s hardly a year since I was tough and healthy, in good spirits, too, energetic, enthusiastic…’ 

Ivanov is overworked and exposed to too much risk in his business, the rural estate part of which is managed by the annoying Shabyelsky, the bailiff. Shabyelsky makes things harder, and distracts with his endless remarks: “Scientists have been puzzling their brains since the world began, but they’ve never thought up anything nicer than a salt cucumber.” Another resident of the household is Dr Lvov, who graduated a year ago and has come to care for Anna. Shabyelsky’s greeting to Lvov is, by today, an old joke: “Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.”

As Lvov sees the dynamics of the family and its impact on the health of Anna, and as he fails to persuade Ivanov to let her move to a better climate, he comes to despise his employer. Lvov’s flaw is his sincerity and honesty, which is so extreme that he openly abuses Ivanov on numerous occasions: ‘I’m a doctor, and as a doctor I demand that you behave differently….Your conduct is killing Anna Petrovna.’ and ‘I used to love and respect human beings, but when I saw you…’. To Shabyelsky he honestly says ‘You are profoundly repugnant to me, Count’, and in return is regarded as a ‘narrow-minded, bigoted leech.’  

People forgive Lvov because of his youth and well-meaning sincerity, but these qualities come with a blindness to the needs of others besides his patient. It becomes increasingly obvious that Ivanov is seriously depressed, but Lvov still wants to duel with him a year after his wife has died, on the occasion of his second wedding. The passage of time, and the complicity of the world some call forgiveness, makes him indecisive. 

‘Melancholy! Noble anguish! Inexplicable grief! Only one thing’s lacking- I ought to write poetry!’ bewails Ivanov in a black humour. After another spat with Lvov and the family, he shoots himself dead. We have just discovered he was only 35.  

To think about: Lvov lives in the house of this man who has over a year become profoundly depressed. Lvov assigns moral causes to this, and is therefore blinkered to the possibility that Ivanov is sick also. What conditions could he have had? Could TB be one of them? 

Chekhov is one of history’s greatest playwrights. Reading Ivanov, observe how quickly he establishes characters, and how simple words and interactions combine to build complex emotional and narrative sequences. His plays can be read quickly and with ease, and are frequently staged around the world.

References and further reading 

Fen E (trans.)(1951) Chekhov: Plays   Penguin Classics 

Coulehan, J (ed) (2003) Chekhov’s Doctors   Kent State University Press