36
IN DUSHECHKA, THE DARLING, Chekhov tells the story of Olga Semyonovna, a loving and gentle soul, a person who — Anton Pavlovich tells us — lives to love. The short story is set in a provincial city, and begins with Olga Semyonovna — known as Dushechka, darling, or little soul — listening attentively to the angry ramblings of Kukin, a local businessman who manages an attraction park and theatre. Kukin is whining about how the public’s bad taste and the bad weather are ruining his business. Dushechka, deeply touched by Kukin’s despair, falls for him. Soon after, they get married.
Dushechka starts helping her husband at the theatre. Now, at every social occasion, she talks at length about the theatre business, shamelessly adopting her husband’s opinions as her own. Soon, her life becomes one with that of her husband and, in her role as devoted wife, Dushechka finds purpose, perhaps even happiness.
One night, while Kukin is in Moscow on a business trip, someone knocks at the gates of Dushechka’s house. A telegram. With trembling hands, Dushechka opens the telegram and reads with astonishment that her husband has died. She is shocked but also confused, because, in a very Chekhovian detail, the telegram contains bizarre spelling mistakes. Dushechka is in pain.
Not for long though. Just three months later, while returning from church, Dushechka bumps into Pustovalov, a wood merchant, who offers her some words of consolation, death being the will of God and all that. We can see Pustovalov is hitting on the widow. Now Dushechka, always the sensitive soul, can’t stop thinking about Pustovalov. She can no longer sleep. She is in love. So they go and get married.
Dushechka is happy again, able to devote her life to her new husband. She now talks endlessly about types of wood, the price of logs and all things related to her husband’s business. Unlike her first husband Kukin, Pustovalov is a homely guy who doesn’t really like going out. When some friends suggest they go out to the theatre, Dushechka — who, as Kukin’s wife, had been the most ardent theatre devotee — now says, ‘What’s good about theatre anyway? We never go to the theatre, we are working people.’
Dushechka is a new woman because she is with a new man.
She lives happily for six years until one day in winter, after drinking hot tea, Pustovalov goes out without a hat, catches a nasty cold and, after four months of illness, dies.
Poor Dushechka. She retreats into isolation, with only the company of her cat. There is also the local veterinarian, who’s separating from his wife and comes to visit Dushechka often. Although Chekhov doesn’t really go into the details, he seems to hint that Dushechka and the vet are more than friends. We know this partly because Dushechka now bores people talking about animal diseases.
One day, to her despair, the veterinarian is posted far away and once more she is left on her own. With nobody to love, Dushechka falls into a depression. She grows old and grumpy. She no longer has any opinions. She doesn’t know what to talk about or what to think. Her heart, Chekhov tells us, is ‘as empty as her courtyard’.
The years go by and Dushechka’s house grows shabby. She is now an old woman, who spends her summers sitting on the porch and her winters looking through the window at the snow.
Then, one day, the vet, now an older man, shows up in town with his wife, with whom he had reconciled. Dushechka lets them stay at her place, and somehow ends up taking care of their nine-year-old boy. In the child, Dushechka finds someone to love, a new purpose in life. Now she cares about the school curriculum and other child-related issues. With something to whine about and occupy her days, Dushechka is happy again.
As interesting as Chekhov’s story is Tolstoy’s interpretation, which gives us an original take on the mystery of Olga’s soul. In a review of Dushechka, Lev Nikolaevich says that Chekhov, intending to mock the unsophisticated woman, had accidentally created an endearing character. Tolstoy goes on to accuse Chekhov of being harsh on Dushechka, by judging her intellect and not her soul. Olga’s soul, according to Tolstoy, embodies the capacity of Russian women to love unconditionally, a virtue unknown to men. It is through this unconditional love, he suggests, that women achieve happiness.
37
YEARS LATER, I CAN SEE that the moment at the Revolution Museum, as I stood absorbed by the silent call of a woman in a poster, had the makings of a spiritual awakening — like the instant Raskolnikov finally realises he needs to confess his crime and move on with his life and his punishment.
If my life in Moscow had been a Dostoyevsky novel, Polina’s tears at my apartment would have carried the seeds of my epiphany, and the dark feeling that accompanied me during the days that followed would have — perhaps at that very moment in the Revolution Museum — emerged at the surface of my conscience as clear regret.
But back then I didn’t know. I couldn’t know, really, distracted as I was by the city. Despite the odd doubt about the purpose of my life — despite the fatigue, the sleepless hours in bed, the morning headaches — come the weekend, I would put on a well-ironed shirt, drink shots of vodka and go out with the brothers to nightclubs. And in this way we spent our weeks, our months, and never did I stop to think that all of this could, one day, come to an end.
By late spring, Yulya Karma had stopped visiting me on a regular basis. We still saw each other for tea, but only every two or three weeks. It was nicer this way, because our bodies had time to get unaccustomed to each other, and we clashed with more zeal. One day, Yulya Karma told me she had decided to leave her boyfriend and proposed, in the same businesslike manner as when she’d first offered to be my lover, that she be my girlfriend. ‘I think we are very compatible,’ she said, ‘we would be very good together, as a real couple.’ I told her it wouldn’t really work because, even though I was quite fond of her, I would never be able to fully trust her. I think she understood. And it was a pity, I thought, because I liked her and she had a touch of pragmatism that made her different from the other girls; so practical and focused, Yulya Karma, and she could have made a good girlfriend, were it not for her natural talent for deceit.
Colin said, in the end, we were all searching for the perfect girl, the Export Quality Dyev, as he put it — the perfect woman to take home with us the day we had to leave Moscow.
Maybe he was right. Perhaps all the going out was, after all, just a protracted search for someone we could keep. A futile search, I now understand, because, ever since Katya had left me in Amsterdam, I couldn’t bring myself to define what I was looking for and, had I encountered it, I would not have known. What I craved was a particular thrill, a wave of euphoria, a resonance in my soul, which was becoming harder to feel with each new girl I met.
I lost contact with Ira. A couple of times we’d agreed to meet for coffee at the university but, for different reasons, I’d had to cancel at the last minute. We’d talked on the phone, and she told me she was considering leaving her American lover and getting back with Sergey. We agreed to go out for dinner to catch up, but I kept postponing, never finding the right time, until the plan faded away. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Ira, and at times I missed her company, but I found it hard to fit her into my life. We were out of sync, Ira and I. She lived at a slower pace, with her modest salary, going to Project OGI with her old friends, torn between Sergey and her one lover.
Stepanov’s car dealership, which he had set up in just a couple of months, was booming. He imported luxury vehicles from Finland, where he bought them for almost half their Moscow market price. He managed to avoid customs duties by profiting from a mix of bizarre legislative loopholes and good old Russian bribery. The cars were exhibited in a spacious salon in Prospekt Mira, which Stepanov had named Miller & Stevenson Luxury Vehicles, suggesting foreign ownership. To emphasise the non-Russian nature of the business — which, according to Stepanov, allowed for the cars to be marked up at least ten per cent above their price in Russian-owned dealerships — I was asked to show up often, particularly when serious buyers were expected. Oligarchs, flooded with enormous amounts of cash at the time, couldn’t get enough of the cars, and, by June, Stepanov was selling about a dozen luxury vehicles a month.