Product Description
Product Description
Only a year ago, the landowner Nikolai Ivanov was full of energy and optimism, in love with his wife and working hard. Now, for no reason he can understand, 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? And is the possibility of happiness with the young woman who loves him just a cruel illusion? Ivanov was the 27-year-old Chekhov's shot at despatching the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature, and in surrounding him with a brilliantly drawn set of provincial types he created some of the best comedy he was ever to write.
About the Author
Tom Stoppard was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His early years were spent in Singapore, India and, from 1946, England, after his mother married an officer in the British Army. Leaving school at seventeen, Stoppard worked as a reporter in Bristol, before moving to London to work as a theatre critic and feature writer. During this period he began to write plays for radio and for the stage and published his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.$$$His first major success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was produced in London in 1967 at the Old Vic after critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival. Subsequent plays include Enter a Free Man, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Andre Previn), After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love. His radio plays include If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State. Work for television includes Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle. His film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman) and Enigma.$$$In August 2002 the Royal National Theatre in London premiered Stoppard's trilogy - Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - three sequential self-contained plays that comprise The Coast of Utopia.