Any story with the subtitle “My Friend’s Story” seems bound to be slightly awkward, and this is indeed one of Chekhov’s lumpier tales. The terror of the title refers not to war or ghosts or pain or death. Rather, it is existential angst: “What chiefly frightens me,” says the narrator’s friend, “is the common routine of life from which none of us can escape.”
The friend, Silin, is married to a beautiful if downcast woman, Marya, whose fierce, acerbic comments reminded me of a Laurie Colwin character, or maybe Eeyore. She observes that he (the narrator) is bored when her husband is not around. “Here he comes now,” she says flatly. “Rejoice.”
Marya herself is bored much of the time and rather comically (albeit unintentionally) sour. When the narrator says it’s a nice day, she responds: “It makes absolutely no difference to me.”
And then (still more shades of Colwin) the narrator and his friend’s wife fall into bed together, but unlike a Colwin narrative, in which infidelity is generally treated as a misdemeanor, the effect of their indiscretion is huge. “Terror” resolves itself in a sort of whirlpool of confusion and sadness.
I’m not sure why this story didn’t hit home for me. I suppose I found the moony, self-absorbed Silin not terribly interesting. His “philosophical” musings reminded me of an earnest, shallow, high school student. He waxes poetic about his love for his wife, Marya, but there is no sense of him actually loving her–that is, when the narrator sleeps with Marya, we might be expected to care, somehow–to be appalled, or to wonder if, aha!, they may fall in love, or to feel some deep sympathy for Silin.
But no. So much of the story entails Marya’s boredom and her perception that other people are bored, in the end the reader can’t help but be briefly surprised by the way things have turned out, and then subside back into his own boredom.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Marya’s frustration with married life echoes that of the protagonist of “The Two Volodyas,” Sofia Lvova. Both women find themselves feeling stuck with problematic husbands… although the two husbands could not be more different from one another.
A Chekhov Circus 