Act One: The Homecoming

The drawing room of the Voynitsev house, on an estate in southern Russia, at the beginning of summer. The French windows opened on to the garden.

Anna Petrovna Voynitseva, a young widow, the second wife of the late General Voynitsev, had come back from the town to the country for the summer, and the neighbourhood came to call on her. She was clever, warm, restless, a little reckless, and used to being admired. The estate was hers for her lifetime, and it was mortgaged far beyond its value; the general had left nothing but debts. Among the guests were the men who held those debts: Petrin, a sly, bullying old man, and Abram Vengerovich, a rich local merchant, with whom she had to be polite. There was also the old landowner Glagolyev, a solemn, romantic man of the old school, who was in love with Anna Petrovna, and hinted that he would marry her and save the estate.

Sergei Voynitsev, the general's son by his first marriage, a cheerful, well-meaning young man who talked a great deal about great things, had just married. He had brought home his bride, Sofya Yegorovna, a serious, beautiful young woman.

The doctor Nikolai Triletsky, young, lazy, joking, who was always borrowing money, was there, with his father, an old retired colonel; and Marya Grekova, a girl of twenty, a student of chemistry, earnest and easily hurt, whom Triletsky was half courting.

Then Platonov came, with his wife Sasha, Triletsky's sister.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Platonov is the village schoolmaster, about twenty-seven. He was once a student of great promise, but left the university; he lives in the schoolhouse with his wife, who is simple, devoted, and not clever, and with their small son.

Platonov was the life of every gathering, and its scourge. He was quick, witty, cruel, honest in a way that was itself a kind of vanity, and women loved him. He mocked everyone: Glagolyev for his old-fashioned talk of the nobility of the past; the young Grekova, until she was in tears; Vengerovich, whom he despised for his money and treated with open contempt. Anna Petrovna laughed at him and with him; there had long been an understanding between them, never spoken.

And then he was introduced to Voynitsev's new wife — and recognised her. Sofya had been his first love, years before, when he was a student and she a girl; they had lost each other. She was shaken. He spoke to her teasingly, as if nothing had happened, and then, alone with her, asked what had become of her — of all her fine plans. It was clear that the old feeling was still there, on both sides.

Glagolyev, meanwhile, talked to Anna of marriage, in his grave way, and she put him off with jokes. The guests sat down to dinner.