The Darling

“The Darling” traces Olga’s Love and Dependence, which prevent her from asserting her Agency and Individual Identity, locking her into a cycle of profound happiness and despair. Trapped by her own deep-rooted reliance on others for her sense of self, Olga fails to change by the end of the story.

To convey the cyclical nature of Olga’s relationships, Chekhov uses a distinct structure, which acclaimed contemporary writer George Saunders calls a “pattern story” (Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Bloomsbury, 2021). The pattern is as follows: Olga is lonely; she feels a deep need for love and affection; she latches onto the nearest available love object; they marry or move in together; she adopts that person’s concerns and way of life, repeating their opinions verbatim; the love object dies or disappears; Olga falls into despair, alone once again; and then the cycle starts over.

By using this structural repetition, Chekhov emphasizes how deeply Olga’s Love and Dependence runs and how they result in every relationship being a mirror image of the others. Through her marriages to Kukin and Pustovalov, her relationship with Smirnin, and finally her mothering of Sasha, she calls all of them “my little dove,” just as they and the townspeople know her as “darling.” These repeated nicknames embody the deep stasis of Olga’s situation, despite the surface differences of her contrasting opinions and interests. When she is married to Kukin, for example, she believes theater is “the most important and necessary thing in the world” (3), but with Pustovalov, lumber is “the most important and necessary thing in life” (6). With Smirnin, it is veterinary science, and with Sasha, it is education. Chekhov’s third-person narrative keeps the audience at a distance from Olga, never depicting a single moment when she reflects on these contradictions. As such, she appears almost childlike in her naivety.

This lack of interiority is unusual for a central conflict based around Agency and Individual Identity, which typically occurs in the protagonist’s inner world. “The Darling” pitches it instead as a conflict between Olga’s deep-rooted habits and the reader’s desire to see her free. Especially in the 21st century, after the rise of feminism, readers tend to value assertiveness, independence, and individuality. In the 1890s, by contrast, critics debated whether Olga’s passivity was praiseworthy or condemnable. Leo Tolstoy considered her an ideal of womanhood, whereas Maxim Gorky disparaged her as a “meek slave” (Gorky, Maxim; Kuprin, Alexander; and Bunin, Ivan. Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. trans. Koteliansky, Samuel Solomonovich and Woolf, Leonard. Huebsch, 1921). Chekhov maintains a scrupulously ambivalent tone throughout, so that both readings are possible. Even among his work, “The Darling” is open to an especially wide range of interpretations.

Instead of interiority, the story establishes its characters primarily through physical description, dialogue, and modifiers that relay personality. As with the nicknames, many of these words and phrases repeat. For example, Olga is a “quiet, good-natured, pitiful young lady with meek, soft eyes and very healthy” (2). Health is a recurring motif, and her healthy appearance often fails when she loses a love interest she has been depending on for happiness. Likewise, Pustovalov always speaks “gravely” (5), and Kukin always complains. These details create the sense that they archetypes rather than round characters with profound psychological depths, implying that Olga is not the only one trapped. Pustovalov and Kukin are similarly stuck in their ways: Kukin is “neurotic,” always obsessing over money regardless of how his business is faring, and Pustovalov is sober, religious, and dull, with no interests outside of lumber.

The slight shifts in the story’s pattern follow the introduction of Smirnin. He and Sasha are more independent than Olga and her two husbands. This is mirrored by the fact that, unlike Kukin and Pustovalov, Chekhov does not use repetition to characterize Smirnin and Sasha. As a result, the contrast between their independence and Olga’s dependence is sharper than with the men who precede them. This choice allows Chekhov to establish the possibility that Olga might finally change with Smirnin.

However, this expectation is shattered by the story’s greatest shift, which follows Smirnin’s departure to Siberia. Chekhov signifies this through two major stylistic changes. Firstly, the point of view becomes distant: Olga’s decaying house is described from afar and serves as an extended metaphor for her deepening Isolation and Despair. Secondly, the style becomes more intimate: The longest passage of free-indirect style is the only moment that Olga’s thoughts are represented verbatim on the page: a “bottle […] standing there,” rain, “a peasant […] driving a cart” (9). These sights are right in front of her, yet she cannot form any opinions about them. The irony is that Olga is later able to quickly fix up the house and express opinions on complex subjects, but this is only because she has a love interest to depend on and think for her. When nothing is associated in her with love, she is blocked from developing original thoughts and opinions.

In this way, Olga functions as a character whose emotions completely govern her reason and thus prevent her from thinking rationally. This is shown by the motif of knocking. When she hears this sound at the end of the story, her instant reaction is to think Sasha is about to be taken away, just as the previous knocking years earlier brought news that Kukin had died. Her hyperbole—“no one in the whole world is unhappier than she” (14)—depicts the overwhelming despair she feels at the prospect of losing Sasha. The moment she realizes the knocking is just Smirnin coming home late, “she feels light again” (14) and lies down to sleep. This could have been Olga’s moment to reflect on her dependence, to ask herself why she is so easily disturbed by a simple noise. Unlike Kukin, Pustovalov, and Smirnin—who left unexpectedly—Sasha will inevitably grow up and leave one day. Instead of preparing herself for this separation, she ignores the future and drifts back into her present dependent happiness.

Since Sasha is only nine, Olga has time to change before he leaves. Chekhov ends his pattern story before another full cycle is complete, leaving the reader to decide if this will happen. This open-endedness is characteristic of his short fiction, an innovation that became popular in Modernist short stories in the early 20th century, which superseded Realism, the genre in which Chekhov wrote.