ABSTRACT
. . .‘Ivanov’ is generally described as Chekhov's attempt to write a Russian ‘Hamlet,’ and the description is a good one. Ivanov, the principal figure, is a man whose will has been broken. . . . He is sick with self-disgust. Before the curtain rises we are given to understand that he was a particularly fine specimen among Russian landowners, an active, aspiring, generous young man of high ability. He married for love a Jewess whose rich parents discarded her for making a ‘mixed marriage’. You remember that in Hamlet's case, too, we must understand that the young Prince was full of promise. We catch through that play glimpses of the earlier Hamlet; in Chekhov's play (I think this is a defect in it), there is only one flash of the hero's quondam spirit. It tells in his last cry, ‘My youth has come back - the old Ivanov is alive again’ - uttered just before he shoots himself, but only there. During the rest of the play he is exhibited to us as helpless, morbid, vacillating, crushed by shame. . . .
