"The Darling"

“The Darling” by Anton Chekhov is a short story about a woman named Olga “Olenka” Semyonovna who “was constantly in love with someone and could not live otherwise” (Chekhov 558). Although on the surface it might seem like this short story is simply about a girl who moves from husband to husband as each one leaves her in different ways, I think that there is much more meaning to it than that.

The main thing that stood out to me about this short story was the fact that whenever Olenka found a new husband to attach on to, she took up all of the traits and the opinions that they had. This effectively meant that she had no opinions for herself, which is why she was left so sad and empty each time her husband left. While the story does seem to show how happy she is when she has someone to love and to form opinions from, it also seems to warn about the dangers of someone not having the capacity to have their own thoughts and opinions. This comes from the fact that Chekhov writes about how she is wilting away when she has nobody to love.

The point that Chekhov is trying to make is that it is better for one to have their own opinions so that even when they have no one to love and to share ideas and opinions with, they still have independence in their own heads. I personally think that this is similar to the idea of Emerson’s philosophy of self reliance because they both promote the importance of being an individual. This story also strongly reminded me about the story of Echo in Greek mythology. This is yet another reason why this story shows influences of writers like Emerson and Thoreau.

One thing that I would like to point out, on the other hand, is that there is little chance that Emerson or Thoreau had any influence on this work because Chekhov was Russian.

Chekhov, Anton. "The Darling" Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. 558-565. Print.