These two brief sketches focus on wretched love affairs. In the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov, they appear side-by-side, and as a reader you can’t help but see them as a single piece of fiction, even though they stand completely separate, and were written months apart.
Of the two, “Anyuta” is the harsher, more painful tale of a woman’s suffering; “Polinka” feels more delicate and less disturbing–and even slightly mystifying.
In “Polinka,” the title character, a dressmaker’s daughter, visits a fabric shop where she is waited on by a salesman who happens to be her boyfriend. But he has spotted her out walking with a student and he is hurt and jealous. He tells her he will no longer see her, leaving Polinka in tears. That’s the entire (brief) story.
In “Anyuta,” a medical student is shacking up with a poor young seamstress — Anyuta. The two live in squalor that might be romantic were they in love, but for the student Anyuta is nothing more than a dalliance. Anyuta, while she knows this, is weak enough (and powerless enough) to stand for his bad behavior, even if it is clear that one day he will throw her over.
The grotesque power that the medical student has over the impoverished Anyuta (Chekhov is painfully explicit about her physical frailty and the discomfort she feels in the cold studio apartment) throws some light on “Polinka.”
Why is Polinka walking with a “student” when she is apparently in a relationship with a shop clerk? Why does she cry when the clerk snipes at her for seeing a student on the side? Why isn’t she haughty, or oblivious? She would seem to be the betrayer—she’s seeing someone on the side. Why isn’t the boy crying and the girl satisfied?
I think the answer lies in Russia’s social inequalities. The stories, taken together, reflect the privilege and power of “students,” even relatively impoverished students, in 19th century Russia, and the essential powerlessness of working women of the day.
Maybe Polinka willingly went out walking with a student because she was attracted to him; how exciting for her to draw the attention of an upper class boy! On the other hand, maybe she had no choice: If a young man of his class asked her to walk with him, she may not have been in a position to spurn him. The student has all the cards: she has none. If he courts her, she must be courted, even if it means hurting her (more class-appropriate) suitor, the fabric shop boy.
Similarly, Anyuta has no agency. She must strip when her medical student boyfriend orders her to take off her shirt so that he might use her body to memorize rib cage anatomy. She must trudge to a neighboring artist’s studio to act as a model, all on her boyfriend’s orders. She must come when he beckons and go when he orders her out. And she is pathetically grateful when he relents and allows her to stay on with him.
In short, both of these brief sketches seem to be expressions of what we today in America might call white male privilege.
As with so many other stories, these two, while not really taken from Chekhov’s life, are full of hints of the actual world he inhabited. Chekhov was a relatively impoverished young medical student (although he was making decent money as a writer even as he slogged through school, even to the point of supporting his family) who kept busy in the evening hours bedding down as many women as possible, including the women of Moscow’s red light district. His father, meanwhile, was working in a miserable fabric wholesale business that he detested but was unwilling to walk away from. (Fabric sellers come up more than once in Chekhov stories.)
READ THIS? READ THAT!
If it’s not already obvious, if you read “Anyuta,” you should read “Polinka.” Or vice versa. They add up to a troubling whole.
A Chekhov Circus 
One response to “No. 37 – (tie) Polinka/Anyuta”
Good points in the review, but the use of “white male privilege” in it is very offensive to those who’ve not been brainwashed in the modern university system. It’s both racist and sexist. Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave.
bobby