The Darling

The Russian short story in the late 19th century was heavily concerned with social, ethical, and religious questions, evident in the works of authors such as Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s late stories, like “Master and Man” and “Three Hermits,” for instance, reject the hierarchical Christianity of the Russian Orthodox Church in favor of Tolstoy’s particular interpretation of Christian anarchism—a political theology articulated in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, which holds that God is the only legitimate authority over human lives. Chekhov, on the other hand, was criticized by his peers for not taking a strong stance in many of his stories, and “The Darling” is an example of this detached outlook. Part of what makes the story difficult to link to movements of the time, such as anti-poverty and feminist campaigns, is Chekhov’s style. He was highly innovative in using free-indirect style to layer the story with his characters’ opinions rather than his own, and since Olga never thinks about these larger problems, they go unmentioned. Though other characters leave the unnamed town, Olga never does; the story’s perspective sticks with her, limiting readers’ views to focus entirely on day-to-day provincial life.

The way the story ends was also innovative for the time, and is one of the defining features of Chekhov’s writing. Rather than ending his stories with definitive conclusions with didactic morals like many writers before him, Chekhov preferred to end his work on a note of uncertainty. Virginia Woolf, writing a decade or so after he had been translated into English, recorded the typical response of contemporary readers: “But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say…” (Woolf, Virginia. “The Russian Point of View.” The Lectures, Essays and Literary Criticism of Virginia Woolf. Read and Co. Great Essays, 2014).

By using this technique in “The Darling” and throughout his other work, Chekhov draws attention to the unfinished quality of everyday life. People’s lives don’t just stop at a moment of revelation or when they have finally attained happiness or fallen into tragedy: They go on. Combined with a free-indirect style that brings the reader close to the characters, Chekhov achieves a degree of naturalism that proved highly influential, serving as one of Chekhov’s major contributions to the short story form. These two innovations were adopted after Chekhov by writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, William Trevor, and, more recently, Tessa Hadley and Claire Keegan.