This is one of the most accomplished and satisfying of Chekhov’s stories, a portrait of a pinched, gouty man, Ionitch, whose pride prevents him from having anything but a pinched, gouty life.
Dmitri Ionitch Startsev, a doctor new in town, is welcomed into the home of the local gentry, the slightly absurd Turkin family. The Turkins are given to raucous parties and showing off. They play charades, put on amateur performances, write stories (badly), play musical instruments (also not very well) and generally have a grand old time. Even their servants are in on the fun, doing impressions and making jokes.
It’s all very silly and, yes, it’s small-town stuff, but Ionitch isn’t a snob. He enjoys it. He even uses a joking little phrase coined by Turkin: “Not badsome.” (This strikes me as a very nimble bit of translation by Garnett, BTW.)
Intrigued by the family, Ionitch finds himself smitten with the Turkins’ daughter, Elizaveta, or Kitten, and tries to win her attention, but she has her eyes on bigger fish – the kind that swim in the big city, where she is going to study piano, despite having little apparent talent for music. She is not interested in a small-town doctor like Ionitch. “I want to be an artist,” she says. “I want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on living in this town, to go on living this empty useless life.”
Kitten has her comeuppance. Four years later she returns to town, wiser and more realistic. She tries to strike up a relationship with Ionitch; in fact, the passage of time has matured her, and she now perceives him as he might have seen himself four years prior, as an admirable man, a man who helps the suffering.
But Ionitch, who has grown fat and wheezy, is prideful. Still stinging from her rejection of him years earlier, he wants nothing to do with her. He will take her insulting behavior to the grave. You have the sense that he’ll live a sad and pathetic life, eating and drinking himself to death in the end, all alone, never enjoying the company of the somewhat silly but kindly Turkin family, not to mention the possible love of Kitten.
Like Chekhov’s best stories, “Ionitch” manages to lay out a detailed portrait of not just one one but several people and the world they inhabit, all in a very few pages. Very satisfying.
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Chekhov wrote a good half dozen stories in which someone hesitates to accept another person’s love, and in that moment, all is lost. “A Lady’s Story,” like “Ionitch,” echoes the theme of love unseized, and also like “Ionitch” is among the very best of Chekhov’s works.
A Chekhov Circus 