US Premiere of new version by Tom Stoppard! A sort of comic Hamlet, Ivanov is overcome with inertia and self-disgust. his wife is dying and he feels nothing. He is drowning in debt and despair, and he does nothing. Is it him? Is it Russia? Ivanov was the twenty-seven-year-old Chekhov's shot at dispatching the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature, and in surrounding him with a brilliantly drawn set of provincial types he created some of the finest comedy he ever wrote.