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 June 10, 2023 June 3, 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
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
Yelena enters the room and informs Voynitsky that her husband has sent for him. Begging her father to reconcile with the professor, Sonya exits with him. Yelena and Astrov say their goodbyes. The doctor makes one more attempt to convince her to stay; Yelena declines. The two shake hands, and Astrov reflects on her stay at the estate, echoing Sonya's remarks from Act III. Yelena's idleness is infectious, disruptive to everyone on the estate. Though he claims to be joking, he is certain that had she remained, great "devastation" would ensue. Abruptly he breaks from his ominous prophecies: "Well, you'd better be on your way. Finita la commedia! ("The comedy is finished").
Yelena takes his pencil as a memento, and the two part. The other members of the household enter. Apparently Serebryakov and Voynitsky have reconciled; "Everyone will be just as it was," the latter murmurs grimly to the enthusiastic professor. Serebryakov makes a pompous exit; ironically, he repeats Maria's cry that "[s]omething useful ought to get done!" as he leaves his relations to their toil. Yelena and an apologetic Voynitsky share a brief, moving farewell, Voynitsky telling his in-law that she will never see him again. Terribly depressed, Voynitsky and Sonya return to their long-deferred work; Marina sits and knits a stocking. Astrov remarks on the map of Africa. Shortly thereafter he departs after telling Sonya he will not return for a long time and takes a drink from Marina. As the sound of Astrov's harness bells ring out, Voynitsky counts the expenses ("February second, oil, twenty pounds February sixteenth, again oil, twenty pounds"). "Oh, our sins" Marina yawns; Telegin begins playing the guitar.
Voynitsky then turns to Sonya with a plea: "Oh, if you only knew how it breaks my heart!" Though sympathetic, once again his listener will not hear him. Sonya tells him that they must keep on living, that they must endure their trials without rest and wait for death, the time when God will take pity on them. Only then will they come to a beautiful life and look back upon their past miseries in peace. Laying her head on his lap, Sonya conjures a vision of heaven, and Vanya weeps. The watchman taps; Telegin plays quietly. Indifferently Maria makes notes on her pamphlet, and Marina knits. The play closes with Sonya's repeated refrain "We shall rest we shall rest!"
Once it is clear that they will part, Astrov rehearses Sonya's teasing remarks from Act III on Yelena's idleness but in a more deliberate fashion. Though he claims to be joking, it is clear that we are to take these thoughts more seriously this time. Elliptically, and almost mystically, Astrov poses Yelena and her husband as bearers of destruction. To recall the parallel Eugene Bristow draws between the ruin of the land and the ruin in the characters' inner lives, one could say that Yelena and the professor have both sent the estate ruin with their apathy and precipitated the internal crises of its members as well.
As noted in Act III, this scene also includes Astrov's famous elegiac lines: "It is strange somehow, we never got to know each other, and all at once for some reason—we shall never meet again. So it is with everything in the world." Again, one might refer this wistful goodbye to the theme of the may-have-been. Their farewell is nostalgic, the pair experiencing a loss that they (having never realized their "fascination") cannot even be certain that they suffered, not a loss, but a potential loss. Though their parting in no way reaches tragic proportions, it is filled with regret and disappointment: the misery here is subtle, intimate. One might add that this farewell evokes Voynitsky's illusions of what could have been if he had married Yelena when they first met.
The last scene choreographs a series of brief and understated farewells—between Astrov and Sonya, Voynitsky and Yelena, and Voynitsky and Serebryakov—all the more poignant in that they quietly discard, under the cover of sociability or otherwise, the tortured complications and tensions we have witnessed thus far. Astrov, for example, takes a drink, remarks idly on the climate in Africa, and talks of his horses before finally departing, with little concern for Sonya or Voynitsky. The comedy is certainly finished, and it would appear little has changed. Nevertheless, though left unstated, the misery underneath the everyday farewells is omnipresent. Note, for example, how the apparently commonplace dialogue wistfully underlines the absence left by the guests' departure: "They've gone." Marina announces after Yelena and Serebryakov have ridden off; "They've gone." Sonya repeats upon entering the room herself.
Please wait while we process your payment