Chekhov uncle vanya pdf

Some of the techniques listed in Uncle Vanya may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.

If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to classics, cultural lovers. Your Rating:. Her youth has fled, her beauty has faded according to the laws of nature, and her lover is dead. What has she kept? She sits down and begins to read.

Some one hands her a glass of tea which she drinks without looking up. Go and see what they want. I shall pour the tea. I have come to see your husband. You wrote me that he had rheumatism and I know not what else, and that he was very ill, but he appears to be as lively as a cricket.

He had a fit of the blues yesterday evening and complained of pains in his legs, but he seems all right again to-day. And I galloped over here twenty miles at break-neck speed! No matter, though, it is not the first time. Once here, however, I am going to stay until to-morrow, and at any rate sleep quantum satis. Oh, splendid! You so seldom spend the night with us. Have you had dinner yet? So you will have it with us. We dine at seven now. I beg your pardon, my name is not Ivan, but Ilia, ma'am—Ilia Telegin, or Waffles, as I am sometimes called on account of my pock-marked face.

I am Sonia's godfather, and his Excellency, your husband, knows me very well. I now live with you, ma'am, on this estate, and perhaps you will be so good as to notice that I dine with you every day. He is our great help, our right-hand man.

He has sent me a new pamphlet. Yes, but strange. He refutes the very theories which he defended seven years ago. It is appalling! It seems you never want to listen to what I have to say. Pardon me, Jean, but you have changed so in the last year that I hardly know you. You used to be a man of settled convictions and had an illuminating personality——. I had an illuminating personality, which illuminated no one. You couldn't say anything more biting. I am forty-seven years old.

Until last year I endeavoured, as you do now, to blind my eyes by your pedantry to the truths of life. But now—Oh, if you only knew! If you knew how I lie awake at night, heartsick and angry, to think how stupidly I have wasted my time when I might have been winning from life everything which my old age now forbids.

You have forgotten that a conviction, in itself, is nothing but a dead letter. You should have done something. Done something! Not every man is capable of being a writer perpetuum mobile like your Herr Professor. The speckled hen has disappeared with her chicks. I am afraid the crows have got her. Is the doctor here? There is nothing for it, then, but to go. Yes, it is too bad, really.

You must come back to dinner from the factory. No, I won't be able to do that. It will be too late. However, let me bid you good-bye, ladies and gentlemen. My estate is small, but if you are interested in such things I should like to show you a nursery and seed-bed whose like you will not find within a thousand miles of here. My place is surrounded by government forests. The forester is old and always ailing, so I superintend almost all the work myself.

I have always heard that you were very fond of the woods. Of course one can do a great deal of good by helping to preserve them, but does not that work interfere with your real calling? You are still young, not over thirty-six or seven, I should say, and I suspect that the woods do not interest you as much as you say they do.

I should think you would find them monotonous. No, the work is thrilling. Astroff watches over the old woods and sets out new plantations every year, and he has already received a diploma and a bronze medal. If you will listen to what he can tell you, you will agree with him entirely. He says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments. Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle.

The inhabitants of such countries are handsome, tractable, sensitive, graceful in speech and gesture. Their philosophy is joyous, art and science blossom among them, their treatment of women is full of exquisite nobility——. All that is very pretty, but it is also unconvincing. You can burn peat in your stoves and build your sheds of stone. Oh, I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests?

The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever.

Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down and pick up their fuel from the ground. Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished.

The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness.

When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into young green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride and I—[Sees the WORKMAN, who is bringing him a glass of vodka on a tray] however—[He drinks] I must be off. Probably it is all nonsense, anyway.

You have behaved shockingly again. Ivan, what sense was there in teasing your mother and talking about perpetuum mobile? And at breakfast you quarreled with Alexander again. Really, your behaviour is too petty.

You hate Alexander without reason; he is like every one else, and no worse than you are. If you could only see your face, your gestures! Oh, how tedious your life must be. It is tedious, yes, and dreary! You all abuse my husband and look on me with compassion; you think, "Poor woman, she is married to an old man.

As Astroff said just now, see how you thoughtlessly destroy the forests, so that there will soon be none left. So you also destroy mankind, and soon fidelity and purity and self-sacrifice will have vanished with the woods.

Why cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours? Because, the doctor was right, you are all possessed by a devil of destruction; you have no mercy on the woods or the birds or on women or on one another. That doctor has a sensitive, weary face—an interesting face. Sonia evidently likes him, and she is in love with him, and I can understand it. This is the third time he has been here since I have come, and I have not had a real talk with him yet or made much of him.

He thinks I am disagreeable. Do you know, Ivan, the reason you and I are such friends? I think it is because we are both lonely and unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. Don't look at me in that way, I don't like it. How can I look at you otherwise when I love you? You are my joy, my life, and my youth. I know that my chances of being loved in return are infinitely small, do not exist, but I ask nothing of you.

Only let me look at you, listen to your voice—. It is night. Your shawl has slipped down. No, leave it open; I am suffocating. I dreamt just now that my left leg belonged to some one else, and it hurt so that I woke. I don't believe this is gout, it is more like rheumatism. What time is it? I want you to look for Batushka's works in the library to-morrow. I think we have him. Look for Batushka to-morrow morning; we used to have him, I remember. Why do I find it so hard to breathe?

They say that Turgenieff got angina of the heart from gout. I am afraid I am getting angina too. Oh, damn this horrible, accursed old age! Ever since I have been old I have been hateful to myself, and I am sure, hateful to you all as well. You are quite right, of course. I am not an idiot; I can understand you. You are young and healthy and beautiful, and longing for life, and I am an old dotard, almost a dead man already. Don't I know it? Of course I see that it is foolish for me to live so long, but wait!

I shall soon set you all free. My life cannot drag on much longer. It appears that, thanks to me, everybody's power of endurance is being overtaxed; everybody is miserable, only I am blissfully triumphant. Oh, yes, of course! It is funny that everybody listens to Ivan and his old idiot of a mother, but the moment I open my lips you all begin to feel ill-treated.

You can't even stand the sound of my voice. Even if I am hateful, even if I am a selfish tyrant, haven't I the right to be one at my age? Haven't I deserved it? Haven't I, I ask you, the right to be respected, now that I am old? No one is disputing your rights. Your rights have never been questioned by anybody. I have spent my life working in the interests of learning. I am used to my library and the lecture hall and to the esteem and admiration of my colleagues.

Now I suddenly find myself plunged in this wilderness, condemned to see the same stupid people from morning till night and listen to their futile conversation. I want to live; I long for success and fame and the stir of the world, and here I am in exile! Oh, it is dreadful to spend every moment grieving for the lost past, to see the success of others and sit here with nothing to do but to fear death.

I cannot stand it! It is more than I can bear. And you will not even forgive me for being old! Father, you sent for Dr. Astroff, and now when he comes you refuse to see him. It is not nice to give a man so much trouble for nothing. What do I care about your Astroff? He understands medicine about as well as I understand astronomy. Can't you understand me? Can't I ask you to do a thing? Please don't be captious with me.

Some people may like it, but you must spare me, if you please, because I don't. Besides, I haven't the time; we are cutting the hay to-morrow and I must get up early. A thunderstorm is coming up. Go to bed, Helena and Sonia. I have come to take your place. Don't leave me alone with him! Oh, don't. He will begin to lecture me. But you must give them a little rest. They have not slept for two nights. Then let them go to bed, but you go away too! Thank you.

I implore you to go. For the sake of our former friendship do not protest against going. We will talk some other time——.

No one can go to bed. They are all worn out, only I enjoy perfect happiness. Does it hurt? My own legs are aching too, oh, so badly. Sonia's dead mother used to stay awake with you too, and wear herself out for you. She loved you dearly. I shall pray to God for you. My own feet are aching so badly, oh, so badly! You were still little and foolish then, Sonia. Come, come, master.

You are exhausted by him, and I am exhausted by my own self. I have not slept for three nights. Something is wrong in this house. Your mother hates everything but her pamphlets and the professor; the professor is vexed, he won't trust me, and fears you; Sonia is angry with her father, and with me, and hasn't spoken to me for two weeks; I am at the end of my strength, and have come near bursting into tears at least twenty times to-day.

You are cultured and intelligent, Ivan, and you surely understand that the world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling. It is your duty to make peace, and not to growl at everything. Help me first to make peace with myself. My darling! Soon the rain will be over, and all nature will sigh and awake refreshed.

Only I am not refreshed by the storm. Day and night the thought haunts me like a fiend, that my life is lost for ever. My past does not count, because I frittered it away on trifles, and the present has so terribly miscarried! What shall I do with my life and my love? What is to become of them? This wonderful feeling of mine will be wasted and lost as a ray of sunlight is lost that falls into a dark chasm, and my life will go with it.

I am as it were benumbed when you speak to me of your love, and I don't know how to answer you. Forgive me, I have nothing to say to you.

What are you waiting for? What accursed philosophy stands in your way? Oh, understand, understand——. In there, spending the night with me. Perhaps I am drunk, perhaps I am; nothing is impossible. You never used to drink, and you never used to talk so much. Go to bed, I am tired of you. I met her first ten years ago, at her sister's house, when she was seventeen and I was thirty-seven.

Why did I not fall in love with her then and propose to her? It would have been so easy! And now she would have been my wife. Yes, we would both have been waked to-night by the thunderstorm, and she would have been frightened, but I would have held her in my arms and whispered: "Don't be afraid! I am here. My head reels! Why am I so old? Why won't she understand me?

I hate all that rhetoric of hers, that morality of indolence, that absurd talk about the destruction of the world——[A pause] Oh, how I have been deceived! For years I have worshipped that miserable gout-ridden professor. Sonia and I have squeezed this estate dry for his sake. We have bartered our butter and curds and peas like misers, and have never kept a morsel for ourselves, so that we could scrape enough pennies together to send to him.

I was proud of him and of his learning; I received all his words and writings as inspired, and now? Now he has retired, and what is the total of his life? A blank! He is absolutely unknown, and his fame has burst like a soap-bubble. I have been deceived; I see that now, basely deceived.

He has his coat on, but is without his waistcoat or collar, and is slightly drunk. What a beautiful woman! What a variety we have; prescriptions from Moscow, from Kharkoff, from Tula!

Why, he has been pestering all the towns of Russia with his gout! Is he ill, or simply shamming? What is the matter with you to-night? You seem sad. Is it because you are sorry for the professor? A woman can only become a man's friend after having first been his acquaintance and then his beloved—then she becomes his friend.

What do you mean? Yes, I must confess I am getting vulgar, but then, you see, I am drunk. I usually only drink like this once a month. At such times my audacity and temerity know no bounds.

I feel capable of anything. I attempt the most difficult operations and do them magnificently. The most brilliant plans for the future take shape in my head.

I am no longer a poor fool of a doctor, but mankind's greatest benefactor. I evolve my own system of philosophy and all of you seem to crawl at my feet like so many insects or microbes. My dear boy, I would with all my heart, but do listen to reason; everybody in the house is asleep. I want a drink. Come, we still have some brandy left. And then, as soon as it is day, you will come home with me. Uncle Vanya, you and the doctor have been drinking! The good fellows have been getting together!

It is all very well for him, he has always done it, but why do you follow his example? It looks dreadfully at your age. Age has nothing to do with it. When real life is wanting one must create an illusion. It is better than nothing. Our hay is all cut and rotting in these daily rains, and here you are busy creating illusions! You have given up the farm altogether. I have done all the work alone until I am at the end of my strength—[Frightened] Uncle! Your eyes are full of tears!

Nonsense, there are no tears in my eyes. You looked at me then just as your dead mother used to, my darling—[He eagerly kisses her face and hands] My sister, my dearest sister, where are you now? Ah, if you only knew, if you only knew! My heart is bursting. It is awful. No matter, though.

I must go. Are you awake? Please come here for a minute. Drink as much as you please yourself if you don't find it revolting, but I implore you not to let my uncle do it. It is bad for him. Very well; we won't drink any more. I am going home at once. That is settled. It will be dawn by the time the horses are harnessed.

The storm is blowing over. This is only the edge of it. And please don't ask me to come and see your father any more. I tell him he has gout, and he says it is rheumatism. I tell him to lie down, and he sits up. To-day he refused to see me at all. He has been spoilt.

I love to eat at night. I am sure we shall find something in here. They say that he has made a great many conquests in his life, and that the women have spoiled him. Here is some cheese for you. I haven't eaten anything to-day. Your father has a very difficult nature. Do you know, I could not stand living in this house for even a month? This atmosphere would stifle me. There is your father, entirely absorbed in his books, and his gout; there is your Uncle Vanya with his hypochondria, your grandmother, and finally, your step-mother—.

A human being should be entirely beautiful: the face, the clothes, the mind, the thoughts. Your step-mother is, of course, beautiful to look at, but don't you see? She does nothing but sleep and eat and walk and bewitch us, and that is all. She has no responsibilities, everything is done for her—am I not right? And an idle life can never be a pure one.

Like your Uncle Vanya, I am discontented, and so we are both grumblers. I like life as life, but I hate and despise it in a little Russian country village, and as far as my own personal life goes, by heaven! Haven't you noticed if you are riding through a dark wood at night and see a little light shining ahead, how you forget your fatigue and the darkness and the sharp twigs that whip your face?

I work, that you know—as no one else in the country works. Fate beats me on without rest; at times I suffer unendurably and I see no light ahead. I have no hope; I do not like people. It is long since I have loved any one. Not a soul. I only feel a sort of tenderness for your old nurse for old-times' sake.

The peasants are all alike; they are stupid and live in dirt, and the educated people are hard to get along with. One gets tired of them. All our good friends are petty and shallow and see no farther than their own noses; in one word, they are dull.

Those that have brains are hysterical, devoured with a mania for self-analysis. They whine, they hate, they pick faults everywhere with unhealthy sharpness. They sneak up to me sideways, look at me out of a corner of the eye, and say: "That man is a lunatic," "That man is a wind-bag. I like the woods; that is strange. I don't eat meat; that is strange, too.

Simple, natural relations between man and man or man and nature do not exist. It is so unworthy of you. You are well-bred, your voice is sweet, you are even—more than any one I know—handsome.

Why do you want to resemble the common people that drink and play cards? Oh, don't, I beg you! You always say that people do not create anything, but only destroy what heaven has given them.

Why, oh, why, do you destroy yourself? Oh, don't, I implore you not to! I entreat you! I have done with it. You see, I am perfectly sober again, and so I shall stay till the end of my life. I am old, I am tired, I am trivial; my sensibilities are dead. I could never attach myself to any one again.

I love no one, and never shall! Beauty alone has the power to touch me still. I am deeply moved by it. Helena could turn my head in a day if she wanted to, but that is not love, that is not affection—. It is time to forget that. I don't think I should do anything. I should make her understand that I could not return her love—however, my mind is not bothered about those things now. I must start at once if I am ever to get off. Good-bye, my dear girl. At this rate we shall stand here talking till morning.

Sonia's mother was still alive—it was two winters before she died; that was eleven years ago—[thoughtfully] perhaps more. Oh, yes. You were handsome and young then, and now you are an old man and not handsome any more. You drink, too. Yes, ten years have made me another man. And why? Because I am overworked. Nurse, I am on my feet from dawn till dusk. I know no rest; at night I tremble under my blankets for fear of being dragged out to visit some one who is sick; I have toiled without repose or a day's freedom since I have known you; could I help growing old?

And then, existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable. A foolish, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as the rest, nurse, but not as stupid; no, I have not grown stupid.