This is a cruel portrait of an ineffectual (and possibly mortally ill) man, Nikolay Yevgrafitch. His petulant, grasping wife is running around with other men and indeed is hoping to steer Yevgrafitch to a sanitarium in Southern France, where she hopes to meet with one of her paramours.
His wife, Olga, is monstrously selfish. She’s a liar, a whiner, and a cheat. Faced with evidence that she has been unfaithful, she admits to an affair – and then acts as if this admission is somehow admirable: “You see, I hide nothing from you. My whole soul lies open before you.”
Poor old Nikolay offers her freedom: She has his permission to divorce him. But Olga is so monstrous, she doesn’t want a divorce. She just wants Nikolay to support her, to arrange for a passport so she can visit her boyfriend in France.
Olga is too simplistically awful for this story to be a true success, but it’s a pretty searing portrait of a selfish woman.
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Infidelity could make up an entire volume of Chekhov’s stories. The tales are sometimes harsh, as in this one, or rather pathetic, as in another Volume One story, “The Two Volodyas.” But not all marriage problems are strictly sexual; sometimes a wife and a husband just don’t want to spend much time together. “Not Wanted” features a wife just as obliviously unkind to her husband as Olga is in “The Helpmate,” but without the absolute cruelty.
A Chekhov Circus 