# Uncle Vanya: every role by lines, words, and stage time > Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. 10 speaking roles, 13,913 words, about 99 minutes of speech. - URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/uncle-vanya - Last updated: 2026-10-08 **Astrov** has the most to say in Uncle Vanya: about 452 lines and 3,939 words, 28.3% of the play. Uncle Vanya unfolds on a country estate disturbed by the visit of a retired professor and his young wife. The largest part is not the title role but Astrov, with about 28% of the words; Voynitsky (Vanya) has about a fifth. Yelena and Sonya follow closely, and all five leading roles speak in every act. - Speaking roles: 10 - Scenes: 4 - Words: 13,913 - Speech time: 99 min ## Every role, largest first | Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Astrov | 452 | 3,939 | 28.3% | 28.1 | 4 | | Voynitsky | 340 | 2,831 | 20.3% | 20.2 | 4 | | Yelena | 291 | 2,318 | 16.7% | 16.6 | 4 | | Sonya | 241 | 1,970 | 14.2% | 14.1 | 4 | | Serebryakov | 161 | 1,425 | 10.2% | 10.2 | 4 | | Marina | 81 | 630 | 4.5% | 4.5 | 4 | | Telyegin | 70 | 582 | 4.2% | 4.2 | 4 | | Marya | 24 | 180 | 1.3% | 1.3 | 3 | | Labourer | 5 | 25 | 0.2% | 0.2 | 2 | | Watchman’s Voice | 3 | 13 | 0.1% | 0.1 | 1 | ## Who speaks in which scene Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: Act 1 = Act 1; Act 2 = Act 2; Act 3 = Act 3; Act 4 = Act 4. - **Astrov**: Act 1 (998), Act 2 (1,052), Act 3 (910), Act 4 (979) - **Voynitsky**: Act 1 (930), Act 2 (635), Act 3 (825), Act 4 (441) - **Yelena**: Act 1 (386), Act 2 (845), Act 3 (917), Act 4 (170) - **Sonya**: Act 1 (272), Act 2 (736), Act 3 (532), Act 4 (430) - **Serebryakov**: Act 1 (27), Act 2 (568), Act 3 (736), Act 4 (94) - **Marina**: Act 1 (238), Act 2 (146), Act 3 (63), Act 4 (183) - **Telyegin**: Act 1 (270), Act 2 (20), Act 3 (95), Act 4 (197) ## The longest speeches | Speech | Scene | Words | Lines | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Astrov: “I have my own table here, in this house … in Ivan Petrovitch’s room. When I am so exhausted that I feel completely stupefied, I throw everything up and fly here and amuse myself with this for an hour or two. … Ivan Petrovitch and Sofya Alexandrovna click their counting beads, and I sit beside them at my table and daub away—and I feel snug and comfortable, and the cricket churrs. But I don’t allow myself that indulgence too often—only once a month. … Now, look here! It’s a picture of our district as it was fifty years ago. The dark and light green stands for forest; half of the whole area was covered with forest. Where there is a network of red over the green, elks and wild goats were common. … I show both the flora and the fauna here. On this lake there were swans, geese and ducks, and the old people tell us there were “a power” of birds of all sorts, no end of them; they flew in clouds. Besides the villages and hamlets, you see scattered here and there all sorts of settlements—little farms, monasteries of Old Believers, water-mills. … Horned cattle and horses were numerous. That is shown by the blue colour. For instance, the blue colour lies thick on this neighbourhood. Here there were regular droves of horses, and every homestead had three on an average . Now look lower down. That’s how it was twenty-five years ago. Already, you see, only a third of the area is under forest. There are no goats left, but there are elks. Both the green and the blue are paler. And so it goes on and on. Let us pass to the third part—a map of the district as it is at present. There is green here and there, but only in patches; all the elks have vanished, and the swans and the capercailzies too. … Of the old settlements and farms and monasteries and mills there is not a trace. In fact, it’s a picture of gradual and unmistakable degeneration which will, apparently, in another ten or fifteen years be complete. You will say that it is the influence of civilisation—that the old life must naturally give way to the new. Yes, I understand that. If there were highroads and railways on the site of these ruined forests, if there were works and factories and schools, the peasants would be healthier, better off, more intelligent; but, you see, there is nothing of the sort! There are still the same swamps and mosquitoes, the same lack of roads, and poverty, and typhus and diphtheria and fires in the district. … We have here a degeneration that is the result of too severe a struggle for existence. This degeneration is due to inertia, ignorance, to the complete lack of understanding, when a man, cold, hungry and sick, simply to save what is left of life, to keep his children alive, instinctively, unconsciously clutches at anything to satisfy his hunger and warm himself and destroys everything heedless of the morrow. … Almost everything has been destroyed already, but nothing as yet has been created to take its place. I see from your face that it doesn’t interest you.” | Act 3 | 537 | 54 | | Astrov: “You can heat your stoves with peat and build your barns of brick. Well, I am ready to let you cut down wood as you need it, but why destroy the forests? The Russian forests are going down under the axe. Millions of trees are perishing, the homes of wild animals and birds are being laid waste, the rivers are dwindling and drying up, wonderful scenery is disappearing never to return; and all because lazy man has not the sense to stoop down and pick up the fuel from the ground. Am I not right, madam? One must be an unreflecting savage to burn this beauty in one’s stove, to destroy what we cannot create. Man is endowed with reason and creative force to increase what has been given him; but hitherto he has not created but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, the rivers are drying up, the wild creatures are becoming extinct, the climate is ruined, and every day the earth is growing poorer and more hideous. Here you are looking at me with irony, and all I say seems to you not serious and—perhaps I really am a crank. But when I walk by the peasants’ woods which I have saved from cutting down, or when I hear the rustling of the young copse planted by my own hands, I realise that the climate is to some extent in my power, and that if in a thousand years man is to be happy I too shall have had some small hand in it. When I plant a birch tree and see it growing green and swaying in the wind my soul is filled with pride, and I … . However , it’s time for me to go. Probably the truth of the matter is that I am a crank. I have the honour to take my leave!” | Act 1 | 309 | 31 | | Serebryakov: “Here is maman. I will begin, friends . I have invited you, gentlemen, to announce that the Inspector-General is coming. But let us lay aside jesting. It is a serious matter. I have called you together to ask for your advice and help, and, knowing your invariable kindness, I hope to receive it. I am a studious, bookish man, and have never had anything to do with practical life. I cannot dispense with the assistance of those who understand it, and I beg you, Ivan Petrovitch, and you, Ilya Ilyitch, and you, maman. … The point is that manet omnes una nox—that is, that we are all mortal. I am old and ill, and so I think it is high time to settle my worldly affairs so far as they concern my family. My life is over. I am not thinking of myself, but I have a young wife and an unmarried daughter . It is impossible for me to go on living in the country. We are not made for country life. But to live in town on the income we derive from this estate is impossible. If we sell the forest, for instance, that’s an exceptional measure which we cannot repeat every year. We must take some steps which would guarantee us a permanent and more or less definite income. I have thought of such a measure, and have the honour of submitting it to your consideration. Omitting details I will put it before you in rough outline. Our estate yields on an average not more than two percent on its capital value. I propose to sell it. If we invest the money in suitable securities, we should get from four to five percent, and I think we might even have a few thousand roubles to spare for buying a small villa in Finland.” | Act 3 | 304 | 31 | | Voynitsky: “The Professor, as before, sits in his study writing from morning till dead of night.” | Act 1 | 290 | 31 | | Voynitsky: “She is gone . Ten years ago I used to meet her at my sister’s. Then she was seventeen and I was thirty-seven. Why didn’t I fall in love with her then and make her an offer? It might easily have happened then! And now she would have been my wife. … Yes. … Now we should both have been awakened by the storm; she would have been frightened by the thunder, I should have held her in my arms and whispered, “Don’t be frightened, I am here.” Oh, wonderful thoughts, what happiness; it makes me laugh with delight—but, my God, my thoughts are in a tangle. Why am I old? Why doesn’t she understand me? Her fine phrases, her lazy morality, her nonsensical lazy theories about the ruin of the world—all that is absolutely hateful to me . Oh, how I have been cheated! I adored that Professor, that pitiful gouty invalid, and worked for him like an ox. Sonya and I squeezed every farthing out of the estate; we haggled over linseed oil, peas, curds, like greedy peasants; we grudged ourselves every morsel to save up halfpence and farthings and send him thousands of roubles. I was proud of him and his learning; he was my life, the breath of my being. All his writings and utterances seemed to me inspired by genius. … My God, and now! Here he is retired, and now one can see the sum total of his life. He leaves not one page of work behind him, he is utterly unknown, he is nothing—a soap bubble! And I have been cheated. … I see it—stupidly cheated. …” | Act 2 | 271 | 28 | | Yelena: “Nothing is worse than knowing somebody else’s secret and not being able to help. He is not in love with her—that’s evident; but why should he not marry her? She is not good-looking, but she would be a capital wife for a country doctor at his age. She is so sensible, so kind and pure-hearted. … No, that’s not it … . I understand the poor child. In the midst of desperate boredom, with nothing but grey shadows wandering about instead of human beings, with only dull commonplaces to listen to, among people who can do nothing but eat, drink and sleep—he sometimes appears on the scene unlike the rest, handsome, interesting, fascinating, like a bright moon rising in the darkness. … To yield to the charm of such a man … forget oneself … I believe I am a little fascinated myself. Yes, I feel bored when he does not come, and even now I am smiling when I think of him. … That Uncle Vanya says I have mermaid’s blood in my veins. “Let yourself go for once in your life.” Well, perhaps that’s what I ought to do. … If I could fly, free as a bird, away from all of you—from your sleepy faces, from your talk, forget your existence. … But I am cowardly and diffident. … My conscience troubles me. … He comes here every day. I guess why he comes, and already I have a guilty feeling. I am ready to throw myself on my knees before Sonya, to beg her pardon, to cry. …” | Act 3 | 253 | 26 | | Yelena: “It is not a question of forests and medicine. … My dear, you must understand he has a spark of genius! And you know what that means? Boldness, freedom of mind, width of outlook. … He plants a tree and is already seeing what will follow from it in a thousand years, already he has visions of the happiness of humanity. Such people are rare, one must love them. … He drinks, he is sometimes a little coarse—but what does that matter? A talented man cannot keep spotless in Russia. Only think what sort of life that doctor has! Impassable mud on the roads, frosts, snowstorms, the immense distances, the coarse savage peasants, poverty and disease all around him—it is hard for one who is working and struggling day after day in such surroundings to keep spotless and sober till he is forty . I wish you happiness with all my heart; you deserve it … . But I am a tiresome, secondary character. … In music and in my husband’s house, and in all the love affairs, everywhere in fact, I have always played a secondary part. As a matter of fact, if you come to think of it, Sonya, I am very, very unhappy! There is no happiness in this world for me, none! Why do you laugh?” | Act 2 | 215 | 22 | | Astrov: “Yes. … In ten years I have become a different man. And what’s the reason of it? I am overworked, nurse. From morning till night I am always on my legs, not a moment of rest, and at night one lies under the bedclothes in continual terror of being dragged out to a patient. All these years that you have known me I have not had one free day. I may well look old! And the life in itself is tedious, stupid, dirty. … This life swallows one up completely. There are none but queer people about one—they are a queer lot, all of them—and when one has lived two or three years among them, by degrees one turns queer too, without noticing it. It’s inevitable . Ough, what a huge moustache I’ve grown … a stupid moustache. … I’ve turned into a queer fish, nurse. I haven’t grown stupid yet, thank God! My brains are in their place, but my feelings are somehow blunter. There is nothing I want, nothing I care about, no one I am fond of … except you, perhaps—I am fond of you . I had a nurse like you when I was a child.” | Act 1 | 196 | 20 | | Astrov: “No. In the third week of Lent I went to Malitskoe, where there was an epidemic … spotted typhus … in the huts the people were lying about in heaps. There was filth, stench, smoke … calves on the ground with the sick … little pigs about too. I was hard at work all day, did not sit down for a minute, and hadn’t a morsel of food, and when I got home they wouldn’t let me rest. They brought me a signalman from the line. I laid him on the table to operate upon him, and he went and died under the chloroform. And just when they weren’t wanted, my feelings seemed to wake up again, and I was as conscience-stricken as though I had killed him on purpose. I sat down, shut my eyes like this, and thought: those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, for whom we are struggling now to beat out a road, will they remember and say a good word for us? Nurse, they won’t, you know!” | Act 1 | 174 | 18 | | Astrov: “No one. I feel a certain affection for your nurse—for the sake of old times. The peasants are too much alike, undeveloped, living in dirt, and it is difficult to get on with the educated people. They are all wearisome. Our good friends are small in their ideas, small in their feelings, and don’t see beyond their noses—or, to put it plainly, they are stupid. And those who are bigger and more intelligent are hysterical, morbidly absorbed in introspection and analysis. … They are forever whining; they are insanely given to hatred and slander; they steal up to a man sideways, and look at him askance and decide “Oh, he is a neurotic!” or “he is posing.” And when they don’t know what label to stick on my forehead, they say “he is a queer fellow, very queer!” I am fond of forestry—that’s queer; I don’t eat meat—that’s queer too. There is no direct, genuine, free attitude to people and to nature left among them. … None, none!” | Act 2 | 170 | 17 | ## Small roles that can be doubled These pairs of small roles never speak in the same scene, so one actor could play both. Check entrances and silent appearances in your script before you cast it this way. - Marya and Watchman’s Voice - Labourer and Watchman’s Voice ## Questions actors ask ### Who has the most lines in Uncle Vanya? Astrov, with about 452 lines and 3,939 words, 28.3% of everything spoken in the play. Voynitsky is next, with about 340 lines (20.3%). ### How long is Uncle Vanya? The full text has 13,913 spoken words, about 99 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary. ### How many speaking roles are in Uncle Vanya? 10 named roles speak in this edition, across 4 scenes. 3 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled. ## How we count Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anton-chekhov/uncle-vanya/constance-garnett) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).