IVANOV

He doesn’t pay his workers or settle his debts. Ivanov is overwhelmed by a ‘mal du vivre’ and doesn’t know how to cope with it. Ivanov is the perfect outcast in this small provincial society, rife with prejudice and boredom.

Ivanov epitomises the collective failure of his contemporaries, the Russian men and women of the 1890s… or is it perhaps us he is portraying? Fortunately, all this is ‘laugh-out-loud’ stuff to observe and describe, for, in the progressive tradition of the Enlightenment, Chekhov often prefers ‘to laugh at it rather than have to weep over it’.