“The world perishes not from robbers, not from
fires, but from hatred, hostility, from all these petty squabbles.”—Russian
playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts (1896), translated by
Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2018)
It’s funny how, despite numerous times reading a
great work of art or seeing it performed, certain lines jump out at you as if you’re
hearing them for the first time. Such was the case last night when I was
watching one of my favorite plays, Uncle Vanya, in a marvelous PBS broadcast
of Richard Nelson’s adaptation.
In the above quote, Yelena is upbraiding the title
character for his recent peevishness, choosing to overlook a fact by now
obvious to her: that Vanya’s drinking and intemperate outbursts have been
triggered by the notion that this young beauty he adores is possessed by his
brother-in-law, a retired academic whose pomposity he can no longer abide.
Even with all these ironies behind Yelena’s attempt
to affect Vanya, though, the essential truth of her statement has become more
and more apparent this past week.
Even with fires in the Amazon increasingly
the likelihood of global warming (an outcome that would alarm and dismay
another Yelena admirer, Dr. Astrov), the world in recent days has become more
mindful than before that public policy is inordinately affected by outbreaks
both of tribal hatreds and leaders’ incomprehensible temper tantrums.
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