Ivanov: A Play in Four Acts

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Chekhov's first major play (1887) follows Nikolai Ivanov, a Russian landowner in physical and spiritual collapse — unable to love his dying wife, unable to feel anything, watched with incomprehension by everyone around him. The play is less formally refined than the later masterpieces but has a rawness and urgency — Chekhov was barely twenty-seven — that later gave way to subtler methods. The portrait of depression and emotional paralysis is remarkably clinical for its era, and Ivanov's final suicide is more abrupt and shocking than anything in Chekhov's mature work. The play anticipates the themes of the great four plays while operating with the melodramatic machinery Chekhov would eventually abandon.