“A Misfortune” is nearly as sublime, just as unresolved, as that late wonderful much more famous story.
So is love a misfortune? Is it a misfortune that we fall in love with someone who is already in a relationship? Is it a misfortune that even though we are in a relationship, we are still vulnerable to falling in love with someone else? Why are we so vulnerable?
Those are not necessarily Chekhov’s questions.
There are, however, other questions in this story that he and his characters seem to pose:
1) Why should love make us ashamed of ourselves?
2) Why does love make us lie to ourselves?
3) If the love has been declared and accepted, why wait?
“A Misfortune” is not a new Anna Karenina but a variation upon it; Chekhov later joked to Suvorin: “To make a fortune, to escape the abyss of petty worries and fears, I have only one choice, an immoral one, to marry into wealth or to say that I wrote Anna Karenina.”4
A married woman and mother is played up to by “a friend.”
She pretends she does not like or accept her friend’s attention.
It’s obvious, on the other hand, that no matter what she says, she enjoys, luxuriates in, and cultivates his attention.
The “she” in “A Misfortune,” Sofya Petrovna Lubyantsev, as a cultured twenty-five-year-old in 1886, would have read Anna Karenina as a teenager. She would have known, too, that such affairs happen, and that they are full of risks. However, she has an image of herself that she means to maintain: She’s “proper.” That means she would not participate in such a love affair.
Unlike Anna Karenina, we readers are seeing the situation as a comedy. Sofya and Ilyin don’t think their situation is funny, but we do. We know that they will have an affair at least. They do not know this.
The story takes place in a dacha community outside St. Petersburg or Moscow. It begins:
Sofya Petrovna, the wife of Lubyantsev the notary, a handsome young woman of five-and-twenty, was walking slowly along a track that had been cleared in the wood, with Ilyin, a lawyer who was spending the summer in the neighborhood. It was five o’clock in the evening. Feathery-white masses of cloud stood overhead; patches of bright blue sky peeped out between them. The clouds stood motionless, as though they had caught in the tops of the tall old pine-trees. It was still and sultry.
Farther on, the track was crossed by a low railway embankment on which a sentinel with a gun was for some reason pacing up and down. Just beyond the embankment there was a large white church with six domes and a rusty roof.5
Why these place-details? Chekhov is so efficient at introducing characters and placing them in a particular environment at a particular time. He paints the picture the characters feel themselves in. We are observers within the scene and the attention or point of view is one that is right beside Sofya or perhaps her own. She may well see herself the way we do: young, attractive, conscious of a potentially awkward situation that she overconfidently believes herself capable of remedying.
“I did not expect to meet you here,” said Sofya Petrovna, looking at the ground and prodding at the last year’s leaves with the tip of her parasol, “and now I am glad we have met. I want to speak to you seriously and once for all. I beg you, Ivan Mikhalovich, if you really love and respect me, please make an end of this pursuit of me! You follow me about like a shadow, you are continually looking at me not in a nice way, wooing me,6 writing me strange letters, and… and I don’t know where it’s all going to end! Why, what can come of it?”
Ilyin said nothing. Sofya Petrovna walked on a few steps and continued:
“And this complete transformation in you all came about in the course of two or three weeks, after five years’ friendship. I don’t know you, Ivan Mikhalovich!”
(And all at once, in the midst of revising this book, I realize that Sofya Petrovna is the embodiment of Maria Kiseleva. Their motherly, wifely condescension and propriety line up neatly. Chekhov, I believe, imagined the prim thirty-nine-year-old Kiseleva in an awkward position she may have faced a dozen years before.) Sofya is telling Ilyin a story that he knows better than she. She has thought this through and has been marveling at it to herself. She truly does not understand his transformation. She also doesn’t understand, as we outsiders do, that she is most certainly taking pleasure in the experience.
Though the story is primarily from her point of view, we learn to analyze her words (and her hesitations, indicated by Chekhov’s ellipses) and her behavior from how Ilyin responds to them.
Sofya Petrovna stole a glance at her companion. Screwing up his eyes, he was looking intently at the fluffy clouds. His face looked angry, ill-humored, and preoccupied, like that of a man in pain forced to listen to nonsense.
“I wonder you don’t see it yourself,” Madame Lubyantsev went on, shrugging her shoulders. “You ought to realize that it’s not a very nice part you are playing. I am married; I love and respect my husband…. I have a daughter…. Can you think all that means nothing? Besides, as an old friend you know my attitude to family life and my views as to the sanctity of marriage.”
Ilyin cleared his throat angrily and heaved a sigh.
“Sanctity of marriage…” he muttered. “Oh, Lord!”
Ilyin is no Don Juan (and neither was Chekhov). She too is reading his behavior and, because he’s no Don Juan, there is no explanation for it. Why now? He’s known her for years. It doesn’t make sense. She declares:
“Yes, yes…. I love my husband, I respect him; and in any case I value the peace of my home. I would rather let myself be killed than be a cause of unhappiness to Andrey and his daughter…. And I beg you, Ivan Mikhalovich, for God’s sake, leave me in peace! Let us be as good, true friends as we used to be, and give up these sighs and groans, which really don’t suit you. It’s settled and over! Not a word more about it. Let us talk of something else.”
We recognize her behavior; we know she is saying the right things, the things she should say as a decent woman of her time. She is trying to be understanding and sympathetic. These things happen, and it’s just too bad for him. She thinks of herself as generous and kind.
Sofya Petrovna again stole a glance at Ilyin’s face. Ilyin was looking up; he was pale, and was angrily biting his quivering lips. She could not understand why he was angry and why he was indignant, but his pallor touched her.
She is experienced enough to know that he in fact wants to seduce her, but his behavior is not conforming, it seems, to suaveness. He is a wreck. She is seeing and Chekhov is showing us what love looks like. It’s not happy or blissful. It’s misery. What a misfortune!
“Don’t be angry; let us be friends,” she said affectionately. “Agreed? Here’s my hand.”
Ilyin took her plump little hand in both of his, squeezed it, and slowly raised it to his lips.
“I am not a schoolboy,” he muttered. “I am not in the least tempted by friendship with the woman I love.”
“Enough, enough! It’s settled and done with. We have reached the seat; let us sit down.”
Sofya Petrovna’s soul was filled with a sweet sense of relief: the most difficult and delicate thing had been said, the painful question was settled and done with. Now she could breathe freely and look Ilyin straight in the face.
Why won’t he behave himself and come to reason? How can he not allow for right and wrong as the overriding principle? But she, to her own satisfaction, and to the world’s approval (anyone could have watched this scene and excused her of vacillation or from any wrongdoing), has relaxed, and Chekhov swings his sensory camera out away from her; he has something of his own to note:
She looked at him, and the egoistic feeling of the superiority of the woman over the man who loves her, agreeably flattered her. It pleased her to see this huge, strong man, with his manly, angry face and his big black beard—clever, cultivated, and, people said, talented—sit down obediently beside her and bow his head dejectedly. For two or three minutes they sat without speaking.