Give a brief sketch of the character of Lomov in the play The Proposal'.
Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov is a long time neighbour of Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov in the play The Proposal' written by Anton Chekhov. He is a 35-year-old bachelor. The playwright further describes him as a large and hearty, but a very suspicious landowner. He is a stock character. He is a hypochondriac who is obsessed with his imaginary illness and spends sleepless nights. It is through him that Chekhov satirises the attitude of the Russian upper-middle-class society towards marriage. Lomov chooses "a quiet and regular life" instead of searching for ideal or real love. Hence he decides to marry Natalya. Later he gets involved in continual arguments with her. His hesitation and nervousness in uttering the marriage proposal is funny and hilarious. Lomov's illness is a representation of the diseased society. It indicates individual frailty as well as social degeneration.
Sketch the character of Natalya.
In the play 'The Proposal written by Anton Chekhov, Natalya Stepanovna is the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the wealthy landowner Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov. We learn from Lomov's soliloquy that she is an excellent housekeeper, not bad-looking and well-educated, even before she appears. When finally she does, this anti-romantic heroine destroys all the expectations of romance in the situation that is supposed to be romantic. She is dressed in an apron and négligeé and talks about shelling peas and stacking hay to a man who has come with a marriage proposal. She shows no traces of the "love-sick cat" attitude that her father has led us to expect. This spirited lady mocks and argues with Lomov unabashed but gets extremely excited and restless to call him back when she comes to know about his proposal of marriage. In her extreme eagerness to get married, she accepts the proposal never uttered by Lomov and kisses the undisposed and confused Lomov at her father's command but starts to argue immediately after. Thus, Chekhov uses her as a tool to satirize the process of courtship and marriage.