I was forewarned that Chekhov thought women were incapable of thinking for themselves and the only opinions they had were those of the men they loved. This short story depicts that. Olenka, the main character, goes through her father, two husbands, a love for a married man, and the male child of that last man. She could run a field theater and whole-heartedly had the same opinions as her first husband. That part was comical, because I could imagine how through her first love she found her second love: theater management. Or perhaps she learned the trade and learned to love her new life, being useful, and other things people often love about their new, adult life. Then there's the lumber miller and the lumber mill. She goes through the same process. The veterinary surgeon that refuses her to talk about veterinary work. The surgeon's son who can't stand Olenka doting on him.

What happens when she has no males to work with and care for? Each time she becomes depressed. The author passes this as her simply having no opinions, but I say there's room for her to be truly depressed. She has no family beyond the men I've mentioned. Chekhov couldn't broken the theme and made the surgeon's son a daughter instead and the story for Olenka would've been the same. She's someone who needs someone to care for. The female socialites in town don't give her fulfillment. Perhaps this is part of Chekhov's point in a sense. Even if not all women need men, many need some sort of familial responsibility. This seems like women need men to men like Chekhov because men of his era and culture had a life revolving on everything outside of family, and the culture of looking down on women made family life seem diminutive to men. ( )

The third story that George Saunders explores in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is The Darling, by Anton Chekhov.

The Darling is the kind of story that would get a male writer ‘cancelled’ today. It’s about a woman without a mind of her own.

However, let’s not be hasty. This woman, who parrots the opinions of the males in her life because she doesn’t have any opinions of her own, is smart enough to be an indispensable part of two husbands’ businesses, in very different fields. When Olenka marries Kukin, who runs a theatre called The Tivoli, she presided over the box office, looked after things in the summer garden, kept accounts and paid salaries; and her rosy cheeks, the radiance of her sweet artless smile showed now in the box office window, now in the wings of the theatre, now at the buffet. When she marries the timber merchant Pustovalov, he works in the lumberyard until dinnertime, then he went out on business and was replaced by Olenka, who stayed in the office till evening, making out bills and seeing that orders were shipped. (She masters the vocabulary of lumber too: beam, log, batten, plank, box board, lath, scantling, slab.)

Clearly this adaptable, versatile, hard-working woman is wasted in her third relationship, which is with a married vet.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/06/16/the-darling-by-anton-chekhov-translated-by-a... ( )

Typical character-based piece that rambles a bit and ends very suddenly. ( )