This was Chekhov’s final story, published about a year before he died. Death hovers over the story: One of the characters is in poor health and ultimately dies of tuberculosis, the disease that felled Chekhov himself.
The story: Nadya is engaged to be married to a well-off local man, but as the wedding day approaches, she realizes that she is merely settling for a familiar life, just as her mother has (not entirely happily) done. Sasha, a sickly young man who had been unofficially adopted by the family, is staying with them, and manages to persuade Nadya to throw it all over and move to the big city.
Neither Sasha nor Nadya have any real, concrete ambitions. Sasha has a degree in architecture, but he doesn’t work as an architect. Nadya bridles at the idea of living out her life in her small town, but she doesn’t have an alternative vision of bright city lights, or even a career. She just wants away.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick tock…. Time literally ticks away in this story, tapped out by the watchman doing his rounds.
Nadya must grasp for something, or be buried by the passing days and years.
She does not know what lies ahead of her (and neither do we) but she rushes forward with hope and even joy, even though it means leaving her family and familiar life behind, perhaps never to be seen again.
In some ways my favorite character in this short novella is Nadya’s mother, Nina. “You and your grandmother torment me,” she tells Nadya, and then cries, “I want to live! … Let me be free! I am still young, I want to live, and you have made me an old woman between you!”
This scene (a bit overheated as I’ve presented it in shorthand here, I admit) really got to me – the sense of the past and the future squeezing away the present.
Like other late-period Chekhov stories, (“The New Villa,” for instance, or “A Doctor’s Visit”), “Betrothed” is shadowed by Russia’s industrialization and its cruel history of mistreatment of peasants and serfs. At one point the doomed Sasha agrees with Nadya that life in the country is pleasant enough, but then points to the kitchen, where the servants sleep on the floor on filthy rags amongst bugs and beetles: “It is just as it was twenty years ago, no change at all.”
With the benefit of hindsight, one can see the 20th century barreling toward these characters. Nadya steps forward to meet it, whatever it may bring.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Another powerful story about a young woman struggling to find her place in the world is “At Home.” But in that story, the weight of tradition and the bonds of family are even more difficult to shake off.
A Chekhov Circus 