"The Darling"

"The Darling" is a very weird story and didn't make much sense to me, but I'm going to try and write this blog on it.  It is apparently about this woman whose name is Olga and how she never settles down with a man for more than a year (Chekhov).  Whenever she would find a man he would die or something would happen to them (Chekhov).  Halfway through the story I started to wonder if I had read this story before.  I think that it is a very common one because I am almost certain that I have read this or a version of this before because I was able to guess everything that was going to happen next or at least that she was going to be with a guy that was going to die.  I found it really weird that she had a fixation on every guy she met and that she became obsessed with them and liked them so much.  Now that I am thinking more I am starting to wonder if maybe Olga killed all of her husbands because she got bored of them and wanted a new one.

I'm not completely sure how Emerson and Thoreau's writings compare to these of Chekhov, except for the tragedy that happens throughout the story.  If i'm not mistaken, both Thoreau and Emerson use tragedy in multiple stories of theirs.  I cant remember any specific examples, but both authors were accomplished writers and must have wrote about a tragic story sometime in their lifetime.  Chekhov did an amazing job with mixing tragedy with humor in this story by Olga's marriages sadly failing every time, but it was funny because it happened not once, not twice, but more than three times.  In the end, I enjoyed this story and liked reading it, but I don't really know how it relates to any writings of Emerson and Thoreau's writings in a legit and reasonable way.

Chekhov, Anton. "The Darling." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 557-565. Print.




Rayfield, Donald. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999 pp. 198–200. Quoted as "Chekhov's Passion for Life" in Harold Bloom, ed.Anton Chekhov, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2001. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web.  2 March 2012