Act One: The Name-Day Dinner

The garden of Zheltukhin's estate, in summer. A house with a terrace; a table laid for lunch under the trees. A party for a name-day.

Leonid Zheltukhin, the host, was a rich young man, fussy and dull, who had studied at a technical institute and talked about it. His sister Yulya, eighteen, ran his house, and was practical and eager to please. They had invited the whole neighbourhood.

There was old Orlovsky, a hearty landowner, everyone's friend, and his son Fyodor, a swaggering, extravagant young man just back from the Caucasus, who boasted of his conquests. There was Dyadin, an impoverished, gentle gentleman whom everyone called "Waffles" for his pock-marked face, who rented a mill on the estate and had once been deserted by his wife on the day after their wedding — and still sent her money. There was Yegor Petrovich Voynitsky, "Uncle George," who had for twenty-five years managed the estate of his late sister's husband, the professor.

Voynitsky is the forerunner of Uncle Vanya; Dyadin ("Waffles") becomes Telegin. Zheltukhin, Yulya and the Orlovskys do not appear in the later play.

And there were the Serebryakovs: Professor Aleksandr Serebryakov, retired, gouty and self-important, who had written all his life about art without understanding it; his young second wife, Yelena Andreyevna, beautiful and listless; and Sonya, his daughter by his first marriage, twenty, plain, good, hard-working. They had settled on the estate, which had belonged to Sonya's dead mother, because they could no longer afford the city.

Voynitsky was bitter. He had worked for twenty-five years to send money to the professor, whom he had worshipped as a great man; now he saw that Serebryakov was a fraud, and that he had wasted his life. And he was in love with Yelena, and followed her about, and she was weary of it.

Last came Khrushchov, a landowner and a doctor, whom people called the Wood Demon because he planted forests and grieved over every tree that was cut down. He spoke passionately about the destruction of Russia's woods, the drying of rivers, the dying of birds and beasts. Some laughed at him; Sonya listened, and loved him.

Zheltukhin, too, was in love with Sonya, and hoped to marry her; Sonya did not want him.

Over the table, gossip went round that Yelena was Voynitsky's mistress. Khrushchov believed it. He was quick to condemn, and he condemned her; and he quarrelled with Sonya, who, he thought, looked down on him. The party broke up in ill-feeling.