This is a film adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov written in the 1880's. While film allows the director to leave the confines of a theater this adaptation still feels very much as a play. The language spoken is Russian with poor quality captions so it is hard for this reviewer to determine exactly how close it is to the original but it seems very much so. The film is almost 3 hours long with much dialog and little action but many characters and cluttered. It will probably appeal to very few American viewers other than myself and I only consider the film mediocre.
The attempt in this play, according to some literature professors, is to present Nikolai Ivanov, a Russian from the upper strata, as a Russian Hamlet severely afflicted by inner conflicts. He funds his estate from his present wife's dowery and loans from her parents but is virtually broke. His present wife is Anna a quietly suffering woman who converted from Judaism to Orthodox in order to marry Ivanov. A young doctor Eugene Lvov personifies Ivanov's superego but in a practical sense has diagnosed Anna as having tuberculosis and needing rest in Crimea. Ivanov feels very bad about not having the money to take her there but also needs her to die so he can marry Sasha and get his hands on her dowery. There are many other characters but if you watch this film these are the only important ones.
It is interesting to compare this film with the film Vanity Fair (2004) which also depicts 19th-century life, here told by William Makepeace Thackeray. Both films begin and end with a puppet show in lieu of a narrator and have the similar large cast, clutter and long runtime. The difference is that in Vanity fair the protagonist is a woman (appropriately played by Reese Witherspoon) who lives off her husbands, plural, money.
