Exhaustion (Dr. Bertensen will confirm this) finds expression not only in complaining or the sensation of boredom. The life of an over-tired man cannot be represented like this: [Transcriber’s note: The line graph in the print version depicts a wavy horizontal “line” with minimal variation in the vertical direction. The ASCII diagram below gives a rough approximation.] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It is very unequal. Over-tired people never lose the capacity for becoming extremely excited, but cannot keep it up for long, and each excitement is followed by still greater apathy.... Graphically, it could be represented like this: [Transcriber’s note: The line graph in the print version depicts a series of wavy horizontal segments punctuated by sharp “dips,” each horizontal segment a little lower than the one before. The ASCII illustration below gives a rough approximation.] ~~~~~~ \ ~~~~~~ \ / \ ~~~~~~ \/ \ / \ ~~~~~~ \ / \/ \/ The fall, as you see, is not continuous but broken. Sasha declares her love and Ivanov cries out in ecstasy, “A new life!”--and next morning he believes in this new life as little as he does in spooks (the monologue in Act III.); his wife insults him, and, fearfully worked up and beside himself with anger, he flings a cruel insult at her. He is called a scoundrel. This is either fatal to his tottering brain, or stimulates him to a fresh paroxysm and he pronounces sentence on himself. Not to tire you out altogether I pass now to Dr. Lvov. He is the type of an honest, straightforward, hotheaded, but narrow and uncompromising man. Clever people say of such men: “He is stupid but his heart is in the right place.” Anything like width of outlook or unreflecting feeling is foreign to Lvov. He is the embodiment of a programme, a walking tendency. He looks through a narrow frame at every person and event, he judges everything according to preconceived notions. Those who shout, “Make way for honest labour!” are an object of worship to him; those who do not shout it are scoundrels and exploiters. There is no middle. He has been brought up on Mihailov’s [Translator’s Note: The author of second-rate works inculcating civic virtue with a revolutionary bias.] novels; at the theatre he has seen on the stage “new men,” i.e., the exploiters and sons of our age, painted by the modern playwrights. He has stored it all up, and so much so, that when he reads “Rudin” he is sure to be asking himself, “Is Rudin a scoundrel or not?” Literature and the stage have so educated him that he approaches every character in real life and in fiction with this question.... It is not enough for him that all men are sinners. He wants saints and villains!