A young teacher, Nikitin, woos Masha, the youngest daughter of a local landowner, and wins her hand. Having won her, Nikitin takes pride in his good fortune. Indeed he doesn’t see it as good fortune at all, but rather as a just reward for his good sense in pursuing his wife.
But Masha pierces his self-satisfaction, noting that, in visiting her family’s house, he was essentially duty-bound to marry her—he was not in fact the author of his own fortune at all. The story ends with him feeling hemmed in, disgusted by his life.
All I can say is, “eh?”
It’s too bad. The first chapter of this two-chapter story is great. The descriptions of Masha’s family estate, of Nikitin’s feverish dreams of marrying her, and of Nikitin’s dyspeptic apartment-mate, Ippolititch… these are all really fine.
The second chapter, however, feels rushed, almost tacked on. We see scenes of Nikitin’s happy married life; we learn that Masha’s sister has a disappointment in love. And then, suddenly, after Masha suggests that Nikitin had no choice but to marry her–that’s what a gentleman does after courting a young lady–he sours on her, his marriage, and his entire life.
A charitable read of this story would be to say that the final lines of the story are not the same thing as the final day of Nikitin’s life or his marriage. He’ll live on; the marriage will live on. Indeed, it seems likely that when he wakes in the morning, he’ll return to the sunny and affectionate young man he was before. His brief episode of self-loathing was just a mood. Ah, Chekhov, how brilliant to end it this way, to force us to consider the whole length of life and not merely the moment that ends the story…
But no, I don’t think Chekhov deserves that charitable reading. This is just a story that he sewed up on a sour note, for some reason. It doesn’t make sense in the flow of the tale; in fact there isn’t really a tale to be told.
This one is a bust, despite its promising first half.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
“The Teacher of Literature” is a frustrating story, starting out with such promise and then sinking, inexplicably, into bitterness. A somewhat natural counterpart is the story titled “Love,” which traces a man’s courtship of a maddeningly unlikely young woman.
A Chekhov Circus 