‘I did not portray a single villain or a single angel ... did not blame nor exculpate anyone.’ The subversive effects of this remark would continue to our own day.

Ordinarily Chekhov considered the quest for originality foolish and fruitless; originality was there or it wasn‘t, but you couldn’t pursue it. Yet in Ivanov’s case he felt on sure ground. The ‘plot’ was indeed original. As he’d told Aleksandr, the play had no villains or angels and this marked a drastic break with almost the entire history of drama, and fiction too, for that matter.

From the beginnings of literature, through classic drama, epic poetry, romance and, later, the novel, the literary imagination had been largely propelled by the pitting of good against evil, darkness against light, a Manichaean division from which rose our categories of heroes and villains; both pulp fiction and its various derivatives, and popular plays, which we might call pulp drama (successful lowbrow melodramas), as well as nearly all recent mainstream movies and TV dramas, are built around this tension and struggle between ‘good guys’ (or gals) and bad, between the forces of light and darkness. Today when a work of drama or fiction or film tries to evade this cops-and-robbers structure it has usually, at best, been damned with the faint praise of ‘offbeat’.

The Moscow premiere of Ivanov, badly acted and under-rehearsed, was greeted largely with bafflement, rage, or scorn, with a smattering of praise for the play itself by a few astute critics and a handful of discerning audience members. The loudest complaints, ironically, were precisely that the ostensible hero and villain weren’t drawn sharply or accurately enough. How could one find heroic stature in a neurotic, weak figure like Ivanov? And Lvov? Why hadn’t Chekhov portrayed him more sympathetically? Even Chekhov’s brother Mikhail asked him to rewrite the two characters to bring them closer to the conventions of drama.

Chekhov naturally refused, as he did Suvorin’s plea to depict the character he rightly saw as the implicit villain of the piece, Lvov, even more broadly than Chekhov had drawn him. The public and the literati simply couldn’t cope with the absence of the poles of good and evil through which they had always manoeuvred their frail understanding.

Besides its moral-thematic originality, Ivanov presented some technical innovations, a few of which had tentatively shown themselves in Platonov: dialogue that sometimes wasn’t logical or consecutive, characters at times leaving speeches addressed to them unanswered or making irrelevant responses (German has a word for such dialogue, Aneinandervorbeisprechen, which can best be translated as ‘talking past one another’ and which seems to have first appeared on the stage in the 1830s with Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Woyzeck); actions that seemed to come from nowhere, and lead nowhere, such as two unnamed characters at the Lebedevs’ party crossing the stage in search of refreshments and another character, named Kosykh, mumbling to the empty air about a whist game. There was also some use of pauses, a Chekhov trademark that was really a kind of ‘silent speech’, a stretch of time during which any number of different mental actions could take place: the preceding speech or action might be tacitly refuted or the coming one undermined; or the characters and audience might simply be given time for reflection, intellectual organization of what has been said and done up to now and what might come. The famous pauses in Beckett or Harold Pinter owe much to Chekhov’s example.

Ivanov frustrated its first audiences by its lack of familiar moral structure and resolution. What were they supposed to make of Nikolay’s suicide? What, for that matter, were they supposed to think of Nikolay himself, that unprecedented protagonist? And Lvov? Didn’t he incarnate goodness, set against Nikolay’s evil? Then why do Shabelsky and Anna mock him?

For Chekhov, Ivanov seems to have begun as something of a polemic against several contemporary stereotypes, the so-called superfluous man, usually well-educated and well-intentioned, who, suffering from what we might now call an existential crisis, or burn-out, felt left out of society; and the Hamlet figure, a person marked by indecision and mysterious inner struggles. At century’s end Russian literature and table-talk were filled with superfluous men and Hamlet types, the two sometimes being combined as they are in Nikolay. They were joined in Ivanov by another stereotype, a narodnik, a kind of self-righteous, soi-disant saint devoted to abstract words and causes, like the ‘people’, ‘progress’ and ‘the peasantry’. Lvov is roughly such a figure, as Ivanov is a representative ‘superfluous man’.

The first step in grasping Nikolay is to accept that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him; he simply doesn’t know. The abominable way he treats his wife, for example, is as mysterious to him as it is to everyone else. For before the onset of his malady, he was, and at bottom remains, a good, if bewildered man, as the following desperate, loving speech by Anna attests. In the evenings Nikolay wants to go to the Lebedevs’ for amusement and distraction, and Anna heartbreakingly pleads with him: ‘Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did ... You stay in, we’ll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we’ll drive away your depression in a flash. I’ll sing if you like. Or else let’s go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you’ll tell me about your depression ... You have such suffering eyes. I’ll look into them and cry, and we’ll both feel better ... [Laughs and cries.] How does it go, Kolya? The flowers come up again every spring, but joy there is none. Is that it? So go off, go ...’

For Lvov, the narodnik, everything is simple: Nikolay pins him down in his self-righteous cocksureness in an important late scene that widens the play’s scope from its local settings and parochial typologies towards more universal ones. Nikolay tells Lvov: ‘You think I’m the easiest thing in the world to understand. Right? ... Man is such a simple and uncomplicated machine,’ and goes on: ‘we all have too many wheels, screws and valves for us to be able to judge each other ...’ Ivanov can now be seen as a play about our destructive need for tags and labels: Mrs Lebedev and Borkin see Nikolay with their mercenary gazes, Sasha with her romantic one; Lvov with his pious superiority. If it is intelligently performed, Ivanov isn’t a narrow study of neurosis or perversity but much more a dramatic picture of the harm people do with their types and stereotypes.

In Chekhov’s dramaturgy, however, fragments of melodramatic procedure remained, the most blatant being Nikolay’s suicide (in an early version Chekhov had him drop dead of a heart attack after Lvov’s public tirade!). Almost as egregiously melodramatic is Anna’s discovery of Nikolay and Sasha in one another’s arms.