31 pages • 1 hour read
The Darling
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Symbols & Motifs
Olga’s House and Courtyard
In addition to being settings, Olga’s house and courtyard function as a symbol for her ongoing isolation. She rarely leaves the property, meeting two of the three men she falls in love with because they are lodgers. The courtyard also functions as a motif for her changing emotional state. When she is in love, the yard is associated with her happiness: It is where she becomes infatuated with both Kukin and Smirnin, listening to the former’s complaints and enjoying tea with the latter while he reads aloud from the newspaper.
During Olga’s period of Isolation and Despair, this same courtyard becomes “overgrown with weeds and prickly nettles” (10). The house simultaneously falls into disrepair, making the property appear abandoned. This symbolizes that her soul is now “empty.” As soon as Olga is once more flooded with love at Smirnin and Sasha’s appearance, the first thing she does is begin repairs. Her emotional renovation is echoed by the physical renovation of the house. For the third time, the courtyard is the focus of her emotions; it is where she “strode about […] giving orders. The former smile lit up on her face” (11). As with Kukin and Smirnin, she meets her final love object, Sasha, in the yard, where he runs around, “his merry, joyful laughter” ringing out (11).
The Knocking
The loud knocking that awakens Olga late at night is a motif that appears twice, near the beginning and then at the very end of the story. It is a gothic trope intruding on an otherwise realistic story, and it triggers Olga’s Isolation and Despair. In both instances, the “boom! boom! boom!” (4) breaking through her peaceful sleep symbolizes the breakdown of her current happy state of Love and Dependence. The first knocking is a messenger delivering news that her husband, Kukin, has died, which plunges her for the first time into a depressive state.
By the time the second knocking occurs on the final page, Olga has gone through several periods happiness, alternating with stretches of hopelessness. However, she is at last happy again, in a way that seems more stable than ever before. Smirnin has decided to “settle here for good” (11) with her final love object, Sasha, who is a child and therefore, unlike her husbands, someone she can keep close. Without the final knocking, the story would read like a fairy tale, ending happily ever after. Yet the knocking breaks this illusion. It symbolizes Olga’s anxieties that her Love and Dependence can collapse at any moment. Although it turns out not to be Sasha’s mother, it nonetheless foreshadows the day when Sasha will grow up. The gate on which the knocking occurs is the same passage he will use when he leaves home.
Health and Physical Appearance
Like Olga’s house and courtyard, health and physical appearance is a motif that symbolizes shifting emotional states throughout the story. The themes entry on Isolation and Despair analyzes how this motif relates to Olga and Kukin, while this entry shows how Chekhov applies it elsewhere.
The most words devoted to health in the story are those in which Olga repeats Smirnin’s veterinary opinions. Since both Kukin and Pustovalov died from illnesses, the hopeful implication is that Smirnin, a medical professional, will better take care of his own health and thus prove a more enduring love object for Olga. It is one of the story’s many ironies that Smirnin soon leaves, and by the time he returns years later (having indeed outlived Pustovalov and Kukin), he is no longer romantically interested in Olga.
However, his health does allow him years later to bring Sasha, the story’s final love object, into Olga’s life. For the third time, following Kukin and Olga, weight is a symbol of emotional state. Sasha is “plump, with bright blue eyes and dimples on his cheeks” (11). This sentence structure is similar to one that describes Olga during her “good life” married to Kukin: “Olga gained weight and was all radiant with contentment” (3). The mention of weight followed by a descriptor of happiness emphasizes the correlation between good physical and mental health.
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By Anton Chekhov
