person
Ivan Vasilyevich Lomov
Lomov
also: Иван Васильевич Ломов, Ломов, Иван Васильевич
A healthy, well-fed but chronically hypochondriacal neighboring landowner who calls on Chubukov to propose marriage to his daughter Natalya Stepanovna; his proposal visit is repeatedly derailed by shouting matches (first over the ownership of the Ox Meadows, then over whose hunting dog is better), each dispute triggering a fresh attack of heart palpitations, numbed legs, and fainting, in the one-act farce "The Proposal" (1888).
Reading notes
- The Proposal §6 a healthy, well-fed, but very hypochondriacal landowner
Lomov's opening description sets up the play's central comic engine: a physically robust man who is nonetheless convinced he is perpetually on the verge of collapse. His recurring symptoms -- heart palpitations, a numbed leg, a twitching eyelid, sparks before the eyes -- appear and intensify in near-exact lockstep with the rising heat of each argument, making his hypochondria a barometer of the farce's escalating absurdity rather than a real medical concern.
- The Proposal §43 I'm already 35 -- a critical age
Lomov's litany of practical, unromantic reasons to marry (age, the need for a "regular, orderly life," his catalogue of ailments) is delivered to himself, alone on stage, before he has even asked -- establishing that the proposal is a rational decision for him rather than an act of feeling, which is part of why the play never allows him to actually voice it without interruption.
- The Proposal §122 Your whole family was litigious! Every one of them!
Chubukov's jab about the Lomov family being habitually litigious is the hinge that turns a land dispute into a personal one: from this point through loc. 134, the argument abandons all pretense of being about the Meadows and becomes a rapid-fire exchange of family insults.
- The Proposal §124 in your Lomov family every one of them was insane!
Chubukov's blanket claim that the entire Lomov line was mentally ill is answered by Lomov's own escalating counter-list (a drunkard grandfather, an aunt who eloped with an architect) at loc. 126, and then trumped by Lomov's single-line reply about Chubukov's mother at loc. 127 -- the fastest and cruelest exchange in the play, deliberately disproportionate to its trigger (a dispute over five desyatinas of meadow worth perhaps three hundred rubles).
- The Proposal §260 (Faints.)
Lomov's fainting fit -- taken by Natalya and Chubukov as a genuine medical emergency ("He's dead!") -- is the play's climactic sight gag, converting a purely verbal farce into physical comedy; that his supposed collapse and even apparent death are resolved a few lines later by simply reviving him with water underlines that nothing in the play, including its brush with mortality, is meant to be taken seriously.