The Darling

Love and dependence are intimately intertwined throughout “The Darling.” This was also true in the 19th century, a time when men were expected to provide and make decisions for women, while women were expected to care for children. Chekhov published the story at the end of this period, but love and dependence is reflected broadly in Russian and European literature of that era. The two kinds of love the story examines—romantic and maternal—both had deep social implications. Mothers were expected to stay home for their children, which meant giving up their (already limited) prospects of a career and sacrificing their own independence. Similarly, romantic love was subordinate to economic considerations in which love was founded on a stable marriage; the husband earned income through work or property, while the wife stayed home. Under Russian law, a husband would also inherit his wife’s property the moment they married, removing any independent source of income she might have had. In both forms of love, the woman’s interests were subordinate because she became dependent on her husband.

“The Darling” doesn’t directly address the socio-economic aspects of love and dependence, referring to them obliquely while concentrating on the psychological aspects of how these two ideas relate. The story does, however, hint at these ideas in a counterintuitive way. Olga is in an unusually independent position for a woman of the era. Without brothers or a husband, she is the one to inherit her father’s property, giving her a sufficient rental income so she doesn’t have to work or marry out of financial need. While she has the means to live an independent life, her personality is exactly the opposite: She “could not live without” (2) loving someone. The way she loves is to adopt completely all her loved ones’ views and interests, vacating her own personality.

While subordination arose out of material necessity for many women, Olga’s is primarily psychological. The psychoanalyst Eric Fromm describes this as “masochistic” love: “The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him; who is his life and his oxygen, as it were” (Fromm, Eric. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper, 1956). When Olga adopts Kukin’s enthusiasm for theater, and then Pustovalov’s disdain for the very same, these are not sincere positions. Instead, she does so because of the security, the childlike reassurance she feels by agreeing with her husband in all things.

The shock she experiences when Smirnin chafes against her mimicry—she looks at him “in amazement and alarm” and “with tears in her eyes”—shows how deeply she needs the feeling of protection dependent love gives her (9). Her need is so deeply imbedded that years of solitude do nothing to reduce it; as soon as Smirnin returns with his son, Olga latches onto Sasha, restarting the cycle exactly where she left off.