If I were to witness a murder, I figure I’d be like that woman in the Swedish drama “The Breakthrough” who sees the perpetrator straight on but, later, cannot recall a single facial feature.

So Saunders’ point about the previous story, about Turgenev’s physical descriptions in “The Singers”, didn’t occur to me independently, but after he explained that he finds the characters “kind of Picassoesque” and hard to visualise, I got curious.

Reading other short stories later in March, I watched for other descriptions that might be more complete, not “mostly face-and-body part listings”. This one, from Dorothy Edwards’ “A Country House” stood out:

“At this point I ought to describe his appearance. He was tall, about forty years old. He had blue eyes, and grey hair brushed straight up. His hair might have been simply fair, not grey. I cannot remember that now. He had almost a military appearance, only he was shy, reserved, and rather prim. His voice was at least an octave deeper than is natural in a speaking voice. He smiled as though he was amused at everyone else’s amusement, only this was not contemptuous.”

Chekov’s description from “The Darling” is somewhere between Turgenev and Edwards:

“She was a quiet, kind, soft-hearted girl, with meek, gentle eyes, and she enjoyed very good health. At the sight of her full pink cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark birthmark on it, and the kind artless smile that came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men said to themselves, ‘Yes, not half bad,’ and smiled too….”

But Olenka’s description in Chekov’s hands does not serve the same purpose as Turgenev’s descriptions of the singers and listeners in the previous story (which provide clues to how they perceive their environment, so that readers can more accurately interpret the events and characters in the story, as Saunders explains).

We don’t really need to imagine her clearly, any more than she is concerned with the appearance of the sequential and all-consuming relationships which preoccupy her throughout the story.

The TICHN in “The Darling” are related to the pattern that Chekov establishes quickly and repeats, with significant variants, four times. There is another chart but, this time, recording the similarities and differences in the attachments that Olenka forms in these thirteen pages; it’s twice the length of the chart for Turgenev and stuffed with tiny, teeny print. (TICHN is Saunders’ acronym: Things I Can’t Help Noticing.)

I didn’t make a chart, but I did repeat Saunders’ initial exercise about expectation and curiosity after the first page of “The Darling” and, then, after the theatre producer dies. My guess? That Olenka’s life would have taken quite a different direction after she mourned her initial loss. For one thing, I guessed that her dedication to the theatre was authentic, not simply an outgrowth of her having thrown herself into this relationship so completely. (I wonder: if I had read more of Chekov, would I have leaned in another direction. That oppressive heat exists right at the beginning, perhaps weighing down Olenka from the start.)

Once I got to her new love in Saunders’ commentary, so soon after her first love has died, I chuckled because Saunders expresses exactly what I was thinking: “The story is now about to present her with someone new to love. And we wonder: How can she love him (when she loved Kukin so much)? And: How can she love him (he who is not Kukin)?” But these I did not record: a reminder of how quickly we shift our expectations as we read.

At that point I was still hopeful for Olenka, thinking those questions could be answered in such a way that happiness was yet an option. But after she loses her second love, my hope receded. It took me back to that sense of disappointment at the end of Turgenev where the narrator witnesses the evening’s carousing, the thrill of the singers’ performances lost.

Another comment that Saunders made about “The Singers” also resonates for me with this new story, too: “A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.” Chekov does offer just enough new information with each (increasingly excessive?) cycle in the pattern that we remain curious about “The Darling”, open to virtue(s), invested in how things will turn out for Olenka.

The way Saunders describes his attachment to Olenka that develops as events unfold reminded me of the warmth at the end of “In the Cart” (“The Schoolmistress”):  I’ve known her in so many modes: a happy young newlywed and a lonely old lady; a rosy, beloved darling and an overlooked, neglected piece of furniture, nearly a local joke; a nurturing wife and an overbearing false mother.”

We do want Olenka to be happy. (Because if, as Peter Orner posits, we each see ourselves as the schoolmistress, then I suppose each of us worries about the Olenka in us too?)

But, in the end, there’s reason to doubt, with this ending that recalls the Turgenev ending: a struggle shifting the tone. Then we had two boys’ voices echoing across a chasm and now we have a young boy calling out in his sleep (and an interesting difference which Saunders notes, comparing this translation with CG’s, which suggests the young boy’s dream-state utterances are directly in response to a dreamed-Olenka).

“So: a chance for us, again, to think about how stories end. What allows them to end? When they bypass a place where they might have ended, what must they then go on to accomplish?” Saunders writes.

I want to think that Olenka could have her beautiful-memory-reflected-in-a-passing-train-window moment. But I wonder whether, instead, the happy ending here might be the young boy’s, as he locates some resistance in the recesses of his young mind and heart. Whether he will recognise the hypocrisy in his continuing to accept the dates and caramels that Olenka offers, when he does not wish to be seen in the company of his strange “Auntie”.

And I wonder how Olenka’s dream-self might change, in an eighth or ninth iteration of this pattern. But, then, who is watching Olenka when she is sleeping (which is the question that seems to preclude a happy ending for her). And if nobody is looking, who could describe what she looks like when she’s asleep.

So far, with all three of these stories, I am peculiarly interested in their endings. In what, as Saunders terms it, “they then go on to accomplish”. I can why Saunders (and Bill and Bron) are rereading these stories.

Links to the earlier stories are on the project page and the next four stories are listed below.

Anton Chekhov “In the Cart” 1897 (February) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Ivan Turgenev “The Singers” 1852 (March) Trans. David Magarshack
Anton Chekhov “The Darling” 1899 (April) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Master and Man” 1895 (May) Trans. Louise Mude and Aylmer Maude
Nikolai Gogol “The Nose” 1836 (June) Trans. Mary Struve
Anton Chekhov “Gooseberries” 1898 (July) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Alyosha the Pot” 1905 (August) Trans. Clarence Brown