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
I love this idea of “TICHN” because I feel that way when I read too. I pick up on things that seem so utterly useless to point out, but then, why are they included at all if they mean nothing? Is this the writer playing with us, or are we looking for things that aren’t even there?
I think if the writer’s priority is to entertain, they’re probably going to be more focused on pacing and character than on word selection or allusions. I just finished reading a novel where the author chose specific words to echo the violence that lurks in the story, that sparked my list-keeping instinct after just 20 pages, but I know you read a lot of books that include crimes and bodies, whose authors aren’t thinking that that sounds like a good time. hehe Our snow is almost gone: how are things there?
I’ve been holding off reading your response until I wrote mine (which I have just finished and scheduled for Monday).
Firstly, your comment ‘we each see ourselves as the schoolmistress, then I suppose each of us worries about the Olenka in us too.’ This was something I have been thinking about but more in the light of longterm relationships (Mr Books and I have just clocked 20 yrs) and how over time the ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ become so entwined and how much each influences the other in little ways and big, so that at times you forget who it was that first had this opinion or that. Olenka’s adoption of her husband’s ideas are less subtle and more abrupt than this and there does not appear to be the two-way street that occurs in most equal relationships. That is, her husbands do not appear to incorporate her ideas…simply because she doesn’t have any of her own.
Secondly, the ending.
I read the ending as Sashenka fighting off the bullies at school in his dream, not Olenka, and therefore saw the story as just ending, with no clear resolution, a bit messy like in real life.
Thirdly, I enjoyed how you linked the two Chekhov’s stories together with this line ‘I want to think that Olenka could have her beautiful-memory-reflected-in-a-passing-train-window moment.’ We see her at the beginning with her father before he died, but now for the first time I am wondering about her mother. If we had a flashback moment to her childhood, what would we see?
I will go have a look!
It was Peter Orner’s idea that we see ourselves in her but given that we each felt an emotional connection to her train-window memory, it seems possible if not likely. It’s interesting to contemplate what a story written from the perspective of each of these four characters would be like. I wonder if the theatre producer would even have noticed her sitting on the porch, or if he was simply caught up in his complaints and concerns. It feels to us like they don’t adopt any parts of her views/priorities, but maybe that’s because she’s not thinking about that either, only thinking about how much she wants to adopt/absorb their views/priorities as her own?
The idea of the story ending with an event that actually only matters to the boy seems out of step with Chekov’s having kept focus on Olenka all the way through, through the other three relationships; Chekov’s language is so clear and direct, that it seems more likely a comment on her relationship with the boy (and possibly an extension of the way that each of her beloveds moves away from her more decisively)? But maybe you explain your thinking more in your post.
Your question also raises the question of why we don’t see her father even more prominently in the story, her only relative, and whether he could be the fifth to leave her in total (but similar to the first two, not of his choice). I wonder if, in the third Chekov story, we might see if it’s more common for him to focus on the present than the past.
When we discussed Turgenev’s The Singers last month it was noted that Turgenev’s fellows were bemused by his stories, which were nearly all description. Chekhov here is writing 40 years after Turgenev and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been influenced by Turgenev. But of course I don’t read enough Russian Lit. to know,
You were surprised Olenka lost her interest in the theatre after Kukin’s death. I was surprised she didn’t inherit it.
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