'For I have lost the race I never ran.'

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

Between 1887 and 1901 Chekhov altered this repeatedly. Seven
revisions exist. Here it will suffice to deal with its final form. For it
seems not a very good play--its main interest is historical, as a stage
in Chekhov's development.

Its hero, Nicholas Ivánov, is a country gentleman of thirty-five,
whose youth had been fired with idealism and enterprise. But, the
author wrote to Suvórin ( 30/12/1888), 'Russian idealism possesses
one specific quality--it is quickly followed by fatigue'. No such
tendency to swift fatigue has been conspicuous in the Soviet Union.
But in the Russia of the nineteenth century it seems to have been
often all too true.

In such a state of nervous exhaustion a man drifts, with brief
spasms of resurgence, ever downward. Ivánov is like an athlete who
has permanently overstrained his back. He is crippled like Hamlet--
that character as deeply interesting to Chekhov as to Turgenev (who
even wrote an essay unfavourably contrasting the impotent Prince
of Denmark with the at least active Don Quixote). ¹

Five years ago, when still a buoyant idealist, Ivánov fascinated a
Jewish girl, Sarah Abramson, so that she forsook her rich parents
and her faith, like another Jessica, to marry him. But her angry
parents cast off the renegade 'Anna', as she now called herself; she
grew consumptive; and for the last year Ivánov has succumbed to
fits of melancholy during which he finds the poor woman's presence
unendurable. He was not, Chekhov passionately insisted, always a
hopeless character--he has become one, under the stress of exhaus-
tion, boredom, loneliness, financial worry, and emotional conflicts.

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