The Darling

“Olenka gained weight and was all radiant with contentment, while Kukin grew skinnier and yellower and complained about terrible losses, though business was not bad all winter.”

The juxtaposition between Olga gaining weight and looking “radiant” and Kukin becoming “skinnier and yellower” emphasizes the difference between their characters. For Olga to be happy, she needs someone to love, and who that person is—whether wealthy or not—doesn’t matter, whereas Kukin is beset by worries about money, regardless of his business’s performance.

“But on the eve of Holy Monday, late at night, there suddenly came a sinister knocking at the gate; someone banged on the wicket as on a barrel: boom! boom! boom!”

These lines represent a swerve in the narrative tone from realistic to gothic, foreshadowing the story’s ending. Gothic fiction deals with fear, and the messenger’s news that Kukin is dead fulfills Olga’s deepest fear of all: a return to the Isolation and Despair she experiences when she is alone, without a love object from whom to derive her life’s meaning.

“At night, when she slept, she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, of long, endless lines of carts carrying lumber somewhere far out of town; she dreamed of a whole regiment of ten-yard-long, ten-inch-thick logs marching upended against the lumberyard, of beams, posts, and slabs striking together, making the ringing sound of dry wood, all falling and rising up again, piling upon each other.”

This dream sequence shows the depth to which Olga has absorbed Pustovalov’s personality. Not just repeating his words when conscious, her subconscious mind is also filled with images of lumber. The passage stresses its numerousness—“whole mountains” and a “whole regiment”—as though there isn’t space left in Olga’s imagination for anything else.

“‘Vasechka and I have no time for going to theaters,’ she replied gravely. ‘We’re working people, we can’t be bothered with trifles. What’s the good of these theaters?’”

This dialogue develops further the fundamental irony of Olga’s Love and Dependence. Having established that Pustovalov’s opinions and interests penetrate both her conscious and unconscious mind, Chekhov shows how fully each new love object replaces the previous one. With Kukin she told acquaintances that “the most important and necessary thing in the world was the theater.” However, because Pustovalov has no interest in it, she wholeheartedly dismisses what, just three months earlier, she was so passionate about.

“It was clear that she could not live without an attachment even for one year, and had found her new happiness in her own wing. Another woman would have been condemned for it, but no one could think ill of Olenka, and everything was so clear in her life.”

This gives the reader a wider sense of the setting and Olga’s place in it. The conservative townspeople who nicknamed her “darling” are so affectionate toward her that they forgive her lapse from submissive feminine stereotypes—not waiting for a year to elapse before falling in love with Smirnin.

“She lost weight and lost her looks, and those who met her in the street no longer looked at her as before and no longer smiled at her; obviously, the best years were already past, left behind, and now some new life was beginning, unknown, of which it was better not to think.”

Olga’s popularity in the town depended on her feminine behavior and appearance. Yet, as a widower with withering looks and without prospects for a new husband, she is perceived as an embarrassment, marking the story’s turning point.

“In summer she sits on her porch, and as usual in her soul it is empty, and tedious, and smells of wormwood, and in winter she sits at the window and looks at the snow.”

In this sentence, the story’s tense shifts from past to present. It repeats words and ideas from the preceding paragraph—“emptiness” and “bitter as […] wormwood” (10)—in order to show how Olga’s Isolation and Despair bridges from the period immediately after Smirnin left all the way to her old age, without her moving on or asserting her Agency and Individual Identity.

“There is a breath of spring, the ringing of the cathedral bells is borne on the wind, and suddenly a flood of memories from the past comes, her heart is sweetly wrung, and abundant tears flow from her eyes, but this lasts only a minute, and then again there is emptiness, and she does not know why she is alive.”

Other than her need for love and her despair without it, these lines depict the one moment in which Olga is described as experiencing an emotion or thought independent of the thoughts and emotions of others. Instead of dealing with the present reality, however, she gravitates to the past, showing the strength of her despair and the weakness of her sense of self.

“Olenka talked with him, gave him tea, and the heart in her breast suddenly warmed and was wrung sweetly, as if this boy were her own son.”

Olga’s reaction is described using the same language—“wrung sweetly”—as for the emotions she felt when thinking about her past in the previous quote. This shows the sameness of all Olga’s various love objects. Each of them produces identical feelings in her because she loves them for an identical reason, not for who each one is individually.

“My little dove, my handsome one… My little child, you came out so smart, so fair!”

This is a more extensive example of the technique used in the previous quote. Chekhov associates Olga’s different love objects with the same nickname: She calls all of them “little dove,” which appears five times in the story. Once more, this emphasizes that she loves each one for the same reason; instead of coming up with distinctive nicknames to suit Kukin, Pustovalov, Smirnin, and Sasha—all of whom are very different from one another—Olga sees them all as her “little dove.”

“When they turn down the lane where his school is, he gets embarrassed that this tall, stout woman is following after him; he turns around and says: ‘Go home, auntie, I can get there myself now.’”

Sasha is the only one of Olga’s love objects to reject her outright. When Smirnin gets annoyed with her, they quickly embrace, whereas Sasha doesn’t return her love, continuing to see her almost as a stranger, “this tall, stout woman.” This foreshadows the future projected beyond the end of the story: that he will grow up and leave Olga, thus isolating her once more.

“Ah, how she loves him! Of all her former attachments, none was so deep, never before had her soul submitted so selflessly, so disinterestedly, and with such delight as now, when the maternal feeling burned in her more and more.”

Given how similar all Olga’s relationships are, it is ambiguous whether the story is telling the truth when it says “none was so deep” as her love for Sasha. What complicates this is the fact that the sentence follows a piece of free indirect style—“Ah, how she loves him!”—and could be read as a continuation of Olga’s thought, rather than the third-person narrator’s.

“Then, going to sleep, she dreams of the far-off, misty future when Sasha has finished his studies, has become a doctor or an engineer, has his own big house, horses, a carriage, gets married, has children….”

Reinforcing the lumber dream sequence, this emphasizes the idea that Olga’s subconscious is also given over totally to Sasha. These lines are especially ironic coming at this point in the story, given the foreshadowing before and on the last page, which hints that Sasha resents her and will leave once he’s old enough. While the dream may come true, the implication is that Olga may not be a part of his life anymore and thus will never see it.