Chekhov's Story "The Darling"

Anton Chekhov is an author and playwright more sinned against by his advocates than by his critics. His well-known complaint to Constantin Stanislavski illustrates the conundrum: Chekhov wrote to the famed director that his first full-length play, The Seagull, was a comedy - but Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theater production made it into a tragedy. Stanislavski's world-class productions of Chekhov's full-length plays elevated the short-story miniaturist to the international level of attention, but the interpretations that did so ran counter to the playwright's intent. So, too, have the words of praise heaped upon Chekhov's short stories: he is treated with great respect, his tales dissected with microscopic care, their compact narratives evaluated for all the heavy subtext they can bear. All too often, the critical laurels showered upon Chekhov's short stories is misdirected overkill, smothering the originality of the author's sense of humanistic humor under layers of psychological sturm und drang. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the slim, beautifully told story of "The Darling."

"The Darling" is a straightforward tale of a woman who is only fulfilled when she is in love and with someone. "With" is the operative word: the heroine, Olenka, goes through two husbands (both die), lives with a married man for six years, and finally finds greatest fulfillment - "(o)f her former attachments not one had been so deep" (Chekhov 53) - as stand-in mother for someone else'

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marriage. Renato Poggioli lays a new time frame on the story, insisting that "(t)ime passes, and she becomes...old" (125) - apparently missing the irony in Chekhov's description of time's passage. "How rapidly time passes!" writes the storyteller (Chekhov 51), yet Olenka's pet, Briska, remains a kitten (Chekhov 51). Indeed, though "Olenka herself had grown plain and elderly" in appearance (Chekhov 51), there can be at most only three years passage between the time her third love departs and the time he returns, bringing along Olenka's fourth love, his son, Sasha. Critics are continually laying over "The Darling" such assumptions - usually to fit the needs of their theses. About language, for example: one can ask any native Russian-speaker and the answer is always the same - Chekhov writes naturalistic dialogues, precise reflections of the way Russians speak. Critic Barbara Heldt in her essay "Woman Is Everywhere Passive" must make elaborate interpretations on the usage of names anyway: "Chekhov's use of diminutive endings...'Dushecka'...'Olenka'... Vanichka, Vasichka and Volodichka" (53) - all to reach her previously-decided point that "Olenka's affection trivializes her loved ones" (53). Such bulldozing literary interpr

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