Uncle Vanya  

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Uncle Vanya is a tragicomedy by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov published in 1899. Its first major performance was in 1900 under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski.

Uncle Vanya is unique among Chekhov's major plays because it is essentially an extensive reworking of a play published a decade earlier, The Wood Demon. By elucidating the specific revisions Chekhov made during the revision process, including reducing the cast-list from almost two-dozen down to a lean nine, changing the climactic suicide of the The Wood Demon into the famous failed homicide of Uncle Vanya, and altering the original happy ending into a more problematic, less final resolution, critics such as Donald Rayfield, Richard Gilman, and Eric Bentley have sought to chart the development of Chekhov's dramaturgical method through the 1890s.

Uncle Vanya was published in 1899, but it is difficult to determine when the work was originally finished, or when the revision process took place. Rayfield cites recent scholarship suggesting Chekhov revisited The Wood Demon during his trip to the island of Sakhalin, a prison colony in Eastern Russia, in 1891.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Uncle Vanya" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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