Act One: The Garden

A garden, on a grey summer afternoon, after three o'clock. A table is laid for tea under an old poplar. A guitar lies on a bench; a swing hangs nearby.

The old nurse, Marina, a stout, slow old woman, sat knitting by the samovar. Astrov, the district doctor, walked up and down. She offered him tea; he did not want it. Perhaps a little vodka? "No. I don't drink vodka every day. Besides, it's close."

"Nanny, how long have we known each other?" Eleven years, she thought; Sonya's mother was still alive when he first came. "And have I changed much since then?" "Very much. You were young then, and handsome; now you've grown old, and you're not so handsome. And you drink too." "Yes. In ten years I've become another man. And why? I've worked too hard, nanny. On my feet from morning to night, no rest; at night I lie under the blanket and I'm afraid they'll drag me off to a patient . . . How can I help growing old? And life itself is dull, stupid, dirty . . . Life drags you down. All around you are cranks, nothing but cranks; and you live with them two or three years and gradually, without noticing, you become a crank yourself."

He told her about a patient, a railwayman, who had died under the chloroform during an operation he performed in the epidemic. "Those who will live a hundred, two hundred years after us, for whom we are now making the way — will they remember us with a kind word? Nanny, they won't remember!" "People won't remember, but God will remember."

Vanya came out of the house, sleepy and dishevelled, after his lunchtime nap. Since the professor and his wife had come to live on the estate, he said, life had gone off the rails. Everyone slept at the wrong times, ate the wrong things; the samovar had been on the table since morning. "Before, I never had a free minute — Sonya and I worked like oxen; and now only Sonya works, and I sleep, eat, drink. That's bad."

And he talked about the professor, his brother-in-law, with contempt. For twenty-five years the man had been writing about art, without understanding anything about art; for twenty-five years he had been chewing over other people's ideas about realism and naturalism and all such nonsense, and telling people what clever people already knew and stupid people did not care about. And now he had retired, with gout and rheumatism, and come to live in the country, because he could not afford to live in town; and complained of his misfortunes, though he was extraordinarily lucky. A son of a common sacristan, he had become a professor, a "your excellency," the son-in-law of a senator; and he had married first Vanya's sister — a beautiful, gentle creature, pure as the blue sky — and when she died, he had married a second wife, beautiful and clever, younger than himself, who had given him her youth, her beauty, her freedom. "Why? What for?"

The professor himself came in from a walk, with his wife Yelena, his daughter Sonya, and Telegin — a ruined landowner nicknamed "Waffles" for his pock-marked face, who lived on the estate as a dependant. The professor went in to work, and asked for his tea to be sent to his study.

Vanya watched Yelena. "Lovely woman. Lovely!" Yelena was bored; she was always bored. Vanya's old mother, Maria Vasilyevna, read her pamphlets and adored the professor, and scolded her son: he had changed so in the past year; he used to be a man of convictions, a shining personality. "A shining personality! . . . I'm forty-seven years old. Until last year I tried, as you do, deliberately to cloud my eyes with your scholasticism, so as not to see real life — and thought I was doing right. But now, if you only knew! I lie awake at night with anger, with vexation, that I let the time slip by so stupidly, when I could have had everything that my old age now denies me!"

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Astrov had been called to the estate to see the professor, who was ill — and the professor had not wanted to see him. Sonya asked him to stay for dinner. He agreed.

And he talked about forests. He had planted a forest himself, he said; he looked after the peasants' woods. Sonya explained it to Yelena with shining eyes: "Mikhail Lvovich plants new forests every year . . . He says forests adorn the earth, they teach man to understand beauty, they inspire a lofty mood. Forests soften a harsh climate . . ." Vanya laughed at it. And Astrov answered, half to himself:

"Russian forests are crashing down under the axe; millions of trees are perishing; the dwellings of beasts and birds are being destroyed; the rivers are growing shallow and drying up; wonderful landscapes are vanishing irrevocably — and all because lazy man hasn't the sense to bend down and pick up fuel from the ground . . . When I walk past the peasants' woods which I have saved from felling, or when I hear the rustling of the young forest I planted with my own hands, I realise that the climate is a little in my power too, and that if in a thousand years man is happy, then I too shall have had a small part in it."

He was called away to a patient, and left. Sonya watched him go.

Yelena, alone with Vanya, told him plainly that she knew he was in love with her, and asked him to stop. He could not. "My joy, my life, my youth!" She told him he was being unbearable. "Leave me alone. This is odious."