Like “Panic Fears,” this is a reflection, rather than a story. This time, rather than a consideration of experiences that frightened him, the narrator recalls two separate instances of being struck by great beauty – in particular the beauty of women.
The effect of such beauty is bittersweet, the narrator tells us, because we can’t really control or own beauty (most of us), but can merely observe it briefly before getting on with life.
So yeah. Kind of meh.
What’s slightly more interesting is to conjecture, if only for a fraction of a moment, about the possible real-world sources of beauty that Chekhov was recalling while composing this story in 1888.
The first of the beauties in the story is a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of a rich Armenian peasant seen briefly on a journey across the steppe. Although the details are not exactly congruent, it recalls an incident from when Chekhov was 16 and staying on a farm owned by friends of his family. According to biographer Donald Rayfield, “Here Anton rode stallions bareback and, as he confessed years later, spied on peasant girls bathing naked. He kissed one of them, without a word, by a well.”
The second beauty of this story is a young woman spotted in a railway station in the south–that is, perhaps someone glimpsed by Chekhov on a visit to Taganrog, his hometown. He made such a trip in 1887, and even returned to the farms where he had stayed as a boy–and where, on this trip, he had two lengthy layovers at railway stations… so perhaps it was there that he glimpsed the young woman recalled in this tale.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov, the man, was a randy goat. “Women who screw (or shag, as they say in Moscow), on any old sofa, are not so much crazy as like nymphomaniac cats,” he wrote to his editor, Alexey Suvorin. Chekhov did not like sex on couches. He admitted to having done it there only once. A bed was always preferable.
Considering how much trolling for sex he did, Chekhov rarely wrote stories that reveled in seduction or lovemaking. There is the melancholy “The Lady with a Dog,” but that is about love, not libertinism. “Agafya” is a story of infidelity, but one that will end in the lovers being whipped.
“An Enigmatic Nature,” an admittedly minor work, details the efforts of a determined Lothario to charm a beautiful woman’s clothes off of her… but she has other fish to fry.
A Chekhov Circus 