Ivánov, now practically bankrupt, sits reading at a table, in a
melancholy dusk where the owls will soon be hooting. But his
peace is brief. His drunken estate-manager, Borkin, tiptoes in from
the garden and jestingly points a gun at Ivánov's face--a fore-
shadowing of the play's end. ²

Ivánov is not amused. And the pair proceed to quarrel over the
workmen who cannot be paid, and over the hare-brained schemes
of Borkin to raise money. Then Ivánov is further exasperated by
the arrival of his decadent old uncle, Shabelsky, whose one con-
solation in life lies in pronouncing mankind to be either fools or
knaves; and of his wife's doctor, the young Lvov, who pesters
Ivánov with angry warnings that Anna's very life depends on her
removal to the warmer climate of the Crimea. Ivinov fully realizes
that this is true. It tortures him with guilt. But he has become, as it
were, depersonalized--as helpless to lift a finger as a man lost in a
nightmare.

The sum of it is, my dear Doctor--(hesitates)--that, in a word,
when I married her, I was passionately in love, and swore to love her
always, but--well, after five years, she loves me still, but I--(waves his
hands). Now you tell me she will soon die; and I feel neither love nor
pity, only a sort of weariness and indifference. To anyone else it must
seem horrible; what is happening to me, I don't myself understand.

Indeed Ivánov so suffocates in his dismal home that now he
cannot bring himself to forgo an evening visit to his neighbours
and creditors, the Lébedievs, despite the appeals of his lonely and
suffering wife. (One may recall Boswell leaving his consumptive
Margaret, or Rossetti leaving his consumptive Lizzie Siddal, for
evenings of amusement in London.)

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