During a
railway journey across Russia, Anton Chekhov, age twenty-seven, writes to his
family in April 1887:
“A young
woman (or a lady, who knows?) in a white blouse was sitting at the end window
of the second floor [of a train station], languorous and beautiful. I looked at
her, she looked at me . . . I put on my pince-nez, she put on hers . . . Oh
miraculous vision! My heart leapt and I continued on my way.” (trans. Rosamund
Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Anton
Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 2004)
A familiar
experience: spying for moments a beautiful woman from afar, and never seeing
her again. Flaubert rendered it in Frédéric Moreau. I remember sitting in a bus
on West 25th Street in Cleveland while the driver waited for the light to
change. It was the summer of 1970, and I watched a woman walk by on the
sidewalk. She was beautiful, not unlike a thousand other women, and I recall
the sight of her in embarrassing detail. Even cynics indulge in private
romanticism.
A year
after writing the letter to his family, Chekhov published “The Beauties” (trans. Constance Garnett), a
two-part story that recounts two experiences similar to his vision in the train
station. In the first part, the narrator, a boy in high school, is riding with
his grandfather in a horse-drawn wagon to Rostov-on-the-Don. The day is hot and
dusty. They stop at an Armenian village to feed the horses, drink tea and rest.
They are waited on by the innkeeper’s beautiful daughter:
“I felt
this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment
that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a
sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for
myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and
I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and
essential to life which we should never find again.”
Without
exchanging words, the boy and his grandfather leave the inn and the girl, never
to see her again. Before their departure, Chekhov describes the sensation with
clinical precision:
“And the
oftener she fluttered by me with her beauty, the more acute became my sadness. I
felt sorry both for her and for myself and for the Little Russian, who
mournfully watched her every time she ran through the cloud of chaff to the
carts. Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the
girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her; or
whether I vaguely felt that her rare beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and,
like everything on earth, of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness
was that peculiar feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real
beauty, God only knows.”
The second
part of the story is set in a train station, similar to the one Chekhov
describes in the letter to his family. This time, the young woman is bewitching
without being a classic beauty. Except for her hair, “all the other features
were either irregular or very ordinary.” The narrator is smitten, rather, by
“the combination of the subtle grace of her movements with her youth, her
freshness, the purity of her soul that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with
the weakness we love so much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young
trees.” He sees her for the last time as his train pulls away. Chekhov makes
wistfulness almost acceptable. He reminds me of the closing lines of an
appropriately titled Nabokov story, “A Russian Beauty” (A Russian Beauty and Other Stories,
1973), first published in Russian in 1934:
“That’s
all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel, but it is not known to me. In
such cases, instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the words of
the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies forever? The arrow
that has hit its mark.”
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