31 pages • 1 hour read
Anton ChekhovThe Darling
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1899A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Repetition
Repetition is used both as a structuring device and within the narrative itself. Every time Olga becomes dependent on a new love object, she repeats what they say to her. Structurally, “The Darling” is a story in which different iterations of the same scenario repeat: 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; they end up dying or leaving; and the pattern begins again. This cycle repeats three times all the way through, before the story ends at the point where Olga has practically adopted Sasha and his opinions. Though Olga is happy at the end of the story, this structural repetition establishes an expectation for the reader: that Olga will once again be abandoned. By mapping her relationships along almost identical lines, Chekhov shows that Olga’s behavior is too deeply ingrained to change. She will never assert her Agency and Individual Identity.
Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is when the reader’s understanding of a situation differs in some fundamental way from how a character understands it, often because the writer has given the reader information that is unknown to the character. The purpose of dramatic irony in “The Darling” is to show that Olga is trapped in a cycle between Love and Dependence and Isolation and Despair, despite the fact that she has the means to break out of this limited existence and achieve self-determination.
Chekhov gives Olga the material advantages that most women in 19th-century Russia lacked, which was a major reason they submitted themselves to unequal marriages. She owns property, the rent from which guarantees that she doesn’t need to work or marry. If she wanted to, she could become a modern, independent woman. The irony is that she marries then works for her husbands all the same, within every relationship fulfilling the 19th-century stereotype of the docile, obedient woman. Olga continues to depend totally on each new love object and is shocked every time they die or leave, despite the pattern of her previous relationships.
Both uses of this device imply a critique of Olga’s mindset—she has the same facts as the reader about her material circumstances and relationship patterns, but fails to take any action to change her situation. Her passivity is thus psychological, and this is what the dramatic irony reveals.
Ambiguous Ending
Chekhov’s stories are characterized by their ambiguous endings. “The Darling” is typical of his style in that it lacks a climax and thus a sense of finality. It feels as if the story could continue for several more pages, creating a high degree of verisimilitude, since life also lacks the traditional climactic structure of most fiction. The final page ends with Olga caught between Love and Dependence and Isolation and Despair. Sasha is still under her care, but she is anxious that she will lose him. This is symbolized by the knocking motif, which shows that her anxiety is just below the surface, ready to be activated by the slightest disturbance. By ending the story near the start of Olga’s relationship with Sasha, Chekhov leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Olga will remain trapped, or if she will find a way to assert her Agency and Individual Identity and find happiness on her own.
Free Indirect Style
Free indirect style is when a character’s thoughts or feelings are slipped into the third-person narration without tags like “he thought” or “she felt.” It can range from full sentences to short phrases and even single words.
Describing Pustovalov and Olga returning from church, Chekhov writes: “a nice smell came from both of them and her silk dress rustled pleasantly” (6). “Nice” and “pleasantly” are examples of free indirect style: they are the happy couple’s feelings intruding into Chekhov’s otherwise neutral, carefully objective voice. They bring the reader closer to the marriage’s intimacy.
Chekhov employs free indirect style to highlight the emotions of important scenes. During Olga’s long despair, in the middle of a narrative paragraph, the tone shifts:
And how terrible it was to have no opinions! You see, for instance, that a bottle is standing there [...] but why the bottle […] what sense [it] make[s], you cannot say and even for a thousand roubles you could not say anything (9).
The tone suddenly turns casual, indicating the ideas come directly from Olga’s thoughts. As earlier with her happiness, this allows the reader to experience her despair much more intimately than if Chekhov had described it exclusively from afar.
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