SOURCE: "Uncle Vanya as Prosaic Metadrama," in Reading Chekhov's Text, edited by Robert Louis Jackson, Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 214-27.

In the following essay, Morson reads Uncle Vanya as a "metaliterary satire of histrionics and intelligentsial posing."

Solyony: I have never had anything against you, Baron. But I have the temperament of Lermontov. [Softly] I even look like Lermontov …so they say …

—Chekhov, The Three Sisters

It might be said that the fundamental theme of Chekhov's plays is theatricality itself, our tendency to live our lives "dramatically." In Chekhov's view, life as we actually live it does not generally conform to staged plots, except when people try to endow their lives with a spurious meaningfulness by imitating literary characters and scenes. Traditional plays imitate life only to the extent that people imitate plays, which is unfortunately all too common. There are Hamlets in life primarily because people...