Themes
Uncle Vanya is thematically preoccupied with frustrated hopes and what might be called the "wasted life"; Chekhov's characters are each unhappy, and (like Tolstoy's unhappy families) they are each unhappy in their own way. In this sense, there are many parallels with other Chekhov plays.
Arguably it remains somewhat difficult to organize these concepts into a coherent theme as they belong more to the play's "nastroenie," its melancholic mood or atmosphere, than to a distinct program of ideas.
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Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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