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Chekhov’s expert use of understatement allows him to highlight a narrative instance and prompt readers to reach their own interpretations of its significance. In the Yalta hotel room scene, the distressed Anna tells Gurov that their adultery is “wrong” and that she deserves his contempt (572). Gurov’s response to Anna’s vulnerability and pathos in this moment is anticlimactic and deflating: “There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence” (572-73). The silence in this narrative instance emphasizes all the more the jarring contrast between Anna’s emotional state and Gurov’s reaction. This moment also alerts the readers to the crassness and insensitivity of Gurov, who is yet to be tutored by his love for Anna to feel and display more genuine care and compassion.
Free indirect discourse in Chekhov’s story often seamlessly merges the third-person omniscient narrator with Gurov and Anna’s limited perspectives. An early description of Gurov’s family life begins with a seemingly objective, journalistic list of facts: “He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual” (568). However, as the passage continues, the objective point of view quickly assumes the tone of Gurov’s secret disparagement of his wife: “She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home” (568). This instance exemplifies Chekhov’s intermittent reliance on a character perspective as he introduces an element of ambiguity into the story’s rendering of its central love relationship.
In the Yalta hotel room scene, the story alludes to the popular depictions of penitent Mary Magdalene in art: Anna’s head “dropped and faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she mused in a dejected attitude like ‘the woman who was a sinner’ in an old-fashioned picture” (572). Only a “solitary candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face” (573). Suggesting with quotation marks the sinful woman who anoints Jesus in Luke’s gospel as Mary Magdalene, Chekhov emphasizes the parallels between Anna’s touching lament of her sin and artistic portrayals of penitent Mary. In Renaissance paintings, Mary Magdalene’s often eroticized, candlelit beauty undermines the paintings’ alleged warning against sexual sin. Along these lines, Anna’s painting-worthy appearance fails to elicit any repentance in Gurov, who at this point feels bothered by Anna’s heightened emotions.
In endowing the natural world with human qualities, Chekhov’s story highlights how the characters’ inner worlds affect their experience of events in the story. Thus, as Gurov and Anna enjoy Yalta’s dark seascape after their first night together, the “monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting” them (574). The sea’s tranquility, even the tranquility of death, whisper comfort to the characters at this moment of intimacy. The narrator, however, also qualifies this attempt to personify and spiritualize nature. Nature’s appearance may suggest to individuals a kind of “eternal salvation,” but this natural gospel depends on nature’s “complete indifference to the life and death of each of us” (574). This corrective reflects Chekhov’s own skepticism of overarching philosophical or spiritual systems of thought.
Parallel similes in the story’s final scene capture both Chekhov’s hopeful affirmation of marriage and his stronger criticism of its distortions: “Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; […] as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages” (584). In this instance, the husband-and-wife simile suggests a milestone in Anna and Gurov’s relationship as they embody a marriage-like bond that is more integral to their true selves. This simile parallels its darker twin because, in their current marriages, Anna and Gurov are like a “pair of birds […] caught and forced to live in separate cages (584). Like the story, the earlier simile elevates marriage’s potential to grow into more genuine love. This potential, however, remains overshadowed by a socially acceptable but otherwise degenerate marital relationship. The naturalness of the earlier positive image only underscores the unnaturalness of the latter, and both similes reflect major parallel movements of Chekhov’s thought in the story.
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By Anton Chekhov