Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews March 26, 2023 March 19, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
Act I opens on a muggy autumn afternoon in the garden of Professor Serebryakov's estate. Marina, an old nanny, sits knitting by a samovar as Astrov, the country doctor, paces back and forth. Astrov reminisces about the time when he first came to the region, a time when Vera Petrovna—Serebryakov's first wife and mother to his daughter Sonya—was still alive. Marina notes that since then Astrov has lost his good looks, started to show signs of age, and taken to drinking. Astrov then goes into an extended speech about his "boring, stupid, sordid" life, a life in which he is overworked and surrounded by "eccentric people". As a result, his feelings are "dead to the world": Astrov needs nothing, wants nothing, and loves no one.
Refusing Marina's offer of food, Astrov then recounts how he went to Malitskoe over Lent to treat an epidemic of spotted typhus. One of his patients died while under chloroform, and he is plagued with guilt. Astrov also laments that future generations will not bother to remember those living in the present. Marina comforts him: God will remember.
Voynitsky (or Uncle Vanya), Serebryakov's brother-in-law by his marriage to Vera Petrovna and caretaker of the estate, then enters yawning. He complains that the professor and his wife, having recently relocated to the estate from the city, have thrown the estate out of kilter, drawing everyone into sleep, boredom, and lethargy. Marina concurs, bemoaning the disruption of their dining schedule.
Suddenly Serebryakov,—ridiculously over-dressed in an overcoat, a pair of galoshes, and a pair of gloves—his current young wife Yelena, Sonya, and Telegin, an impoverished landowner dubbed "Waffles" for his pockmarked face, return from a stroll. Speaking of plans to visit a forest preserve, the party enters the house; Telegin joins the group in the garden.
Dreamily Voynitsky sighs about Yelena's beauty. When Astrov reproaches him for not joining the conversation, Voynitsky replies listlessly that he has nothing to say, that he has grown old and lazy. Bitterly, he goes on to caricaturize the other members of the household. His mother, Maria, is a "lazy old crow" who has "one eye fastened on the grave" and the other fixed on her pamphlets "for the dawn of a new life." The professor is an "old, dried up biscuit, a learned, smoke-cured fish", a pompous charlatan of an art historian who knows nothing about art and has already faded into obscurity. Indeed, Serebryakov has spent his life "pouring from one empty pot into the next"—the empty pot of this joke referring to the vacant bodies of his mind, ideas, works, and students.
When Astrov remarks that Voynitsky seems to envy Serebryakov, he readily concurs. In particular, Voynitsky envies Serebryakov's success with women: the examples he adduces are his angelic late sister, his mother (who worships the professor), and the beautiful Yelena. He then points out the illogic of Yelena's fidelity to her dottering, decrepit husband. He questiones how it can be moral to deny one's vitality and youth while immoral to deceive a husband one despises.
Please wait while we process your payment