This is an odd story: A statistician collecting information in a rural village is hosted by the local gentry. He becomes close to the little family, a father and his grown daughter. When his work is complete and he is about to return to Petersburg, the daughter confesses her love to him. But he cannot find any love for her in his heart, and, bumblingly, he turns her away.
“Ach, one can’t force oneself to love,” he assured himself, and at the same time he thought, “But shall I ever fall in love without? I am nearly thirty! I have never met anyone better than Vera and I never shall… Oh, this premature old age! Old age at thirty!
I for one am mystified by this paragraph and by the man, whose name is Ognev, generally. I can’t quite tell if Chekhov means to hold Ognev up for ridicule, or if he means for Ognev to be a figure of sympathy, a man so consumed by his work that he fails to live and love.
Ultimately, though, I have to wonder if “Verotchka” might not be a profile of a gay man. It’s difficult to read the story without seeing evidence everywhere. For instance, here is Ognev bidding an emotional farewell to the father of the house:
Ognev, limp with emotion, kissed the old man once more and began going down the steps. On the last step, he looked round and asked: “Shall we meet again some day?”
And here is what he says when the daughter, Vera, asks what he will do when he leaves the little village: “I am going now to my mother’s at Oryol; I shall be a fortnight with her, and then back to Petersburg and work.”
I know, I know, these kinds of statements and behaviors probably meant something very different in 1880s Russia than they do in current day America, but still, this story makes more sense as an encoded portrait of a squelched gay man.
That said, the theory is a bit of a stretch. For one thing, there is not even a breath about homosexuality in Chekhov’s letters. Chekhov was acquainted with Tchaikovsky, whose gay relationship with a poet was an open secret, but that is about the extent of his apparent knowledge of gay men. Chekhov himself was a sexual libertine and his letters are full of earthy remarks, so it seems at least slightly odd that it never came up.
The reason for the dead silence on the topic (in his stories, anyway) is, presumably, that homosexuality was outlawed in Russia at the time, and censors would have blocked any frank portrayal of gay life. Either that or Chekhov felt no interest in trying to write about it, which honestly doesn’t seem likely.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov frequently wrote about men whose lives were out of balance, with work sapping their ability to love. You can see this in “Terror,” and “The Black Monk,” but the best of the best is “About Love.”
A Chekhov Circus 