Ivanoff: A Play

Chekhov's first full-length drama introduces us to Nikolai Ivanov, a young estate owner suffocating in the provincial darkness of 1880s Russia. He is brilliant, restless, and deeply exhausted by a life that offers him nothing to do. His wife Anna is dying of tuberculosis, her devotion a constant reproach to his emotional absence. When the luminous young Sasha enters his orbit, Ivanov finds himself drawn toward a transgression that will confirm every ugly suspicion his critics have whispered about him. But this is no mere melodrama of adultery. Chekhov dismantled the theatrical conventions of his era, refusing to let his characters become either villains or victims. The humor cuts sharp and sudden. The tragedy arrives without announcement. Ivanov is that most Russian of creatures: the superfluous man, educated and empty, yearning for meaning in a world that has none to offer. The play scandalized its first audiences because it refused to judge anyone, because it looked at human failure with the same clear, compassionate eye we turn upon the weather.