The lecturer

The unnamed, henpecked husband of a music-school proprietress, sent onstage by his domineering wife to deliver a charity "popular lecture" on the harms of tobacco; his rambling digressions into his miserable domestic life -- and one raw outburst of despair -- overwhelm the ostensible subject before he catches himself and delivers a perfunctory closing line. (In Chekhov's later revisions of the piece this character is named Ivan Ivanovich Nyukhin; the 1886 original text translated here leaves him unnamed.)