Maria Vasilyevna Voynitsky (Мария Васильевна Войницкая): the widow of a privy councilor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya's late sister, the Professor's first wife).She is of a marriageable age, but is considered plain. Sofia Alexandrovna Serebryakov (Sonya) (Софья Александровна Серебрякова): Professor Serebryakov's daughter from his first marriage.Helena Andreyevna Serebryakov (Yelena) (Елена Андреевна Серебрякова): Professor Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife.Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov (Александр Владимирович Серебряков): a retired university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the earnings of his late first wife's rural estate, managed for him by Vanya and Sonya. Rayfield cites recent scholarship suggesting Chekhov revised The Wood Demon during his trip to the island of Sakhalin, a prison colony in Eastern Russia, in 1891. By elucidating the specific changes Chekhov made during the revision process-these include reducing the cast-list from almost two dozen down to nine, changing the climactic suicide of the The Wood Demon into the famous failed homicide of Uncle Vanya, and altering the original happy ending into a more problematic, less final resolution-critics such as Donald Rayfield, Richard Gilman, and Eric Bentley have sought to chart the development of Chekhov's dramaturgical method through the 1890s. Uncle Vanya is unique among Chekhov's major plays because it is essentially an extensive reworking of his own play published a decade earlier, The Wood Demon.
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