A somewhat similar constellation of characters appears in another story from Chekhov's last period, "A Visit with Friends," which also depicts an upper-class group of three women and two men. There is an older sister, a beautiful and intelligent woman, who allows her own and her younger sister's property to be squandered by her husband, a fraud, a poseur and a wastrel, adored and pampered by all the women in the story. The visiting bachelor lawyer, from whose vantage point the story is told, wonders at this woman's uncritical devotion to her husband and her two little daughters and at her total absorption in her homemaking:
... he found it strange that this healthy, young, by no means stupid woman, who was in fact such a powerful and complex organism, should expend all of her energy, all of her life forces on such primitive, petty work as the building of this particular nest, which in any case had already been built.
"Perhaps this is how it should be," he thought, "but it is neither interesting nor intelligent."
The younger sister spends all her time yearning for the kind of domestic arrangements in which her older sister is caught. She longs for a marriage proposal from the visiting lawyer, not, Chekhov carefully makes clear, because she loves him or feels close to him, but because his proposal would enable her to fulfill what she has been brought up to believe is her biological destiny. An alternative to the situation of these two sisters is represented by their friend, a woman doctor who is independent and self- supporting, but crushed by loneliness and poverty. At the end of the story, the lawyer, bored by the matrimonial moonings of the younger sister, dreams of another kind of woman, the kind who could tell him "something fascinating and new, not related to either love or happiness, or else if she should speak of love, that it would be a call for a new way of life, lofty and rational, on the brink of which we might be living, the advent of which we might perhaps sense now and then."
The heroine of "Ariadne" has been brought up on the notion that the aim of a girl's life is to please men and to appeal to their sexual appetites. She grows into a calculating, cold-blooded predator, unable to enjoy any human relationship or even sex, preoccupied solely with the material advantages her victims can provide. But, because of the naked selfishness and pettiness of her approach to life, Ariadne fails to make it as a big-time femme fatale. At the end of the story she seems to be headed for marriage with a dull, aged lecher. In an outburst of moral preaching, unique in the mature Chekhov, the author allows one of Ariadne's male victims to blame it all on the education that women get in Western societies:
"Yes, sir, it is all the fault of our education, my good man. In the cities the entire upbringing and education of a woman comes down essentially to converting her into a human animal, that is, to have her please the male and to teach her how to conquer this male. Yes, sir," Shamokhin sighed. "What is needed is to have the girls brought up and educated together with the boys, to have both of them together at all times. A woman should be brought up to realize when she is wrong, just as a man is, because otherwise she is sure that she is always right. Convince a little girl from the cradle on that a man is not primarily a suitor, a prospective bridegroom, but a fellow human being equal to her in every way. Get her accustomed to think logically, to generalize, and stop assuring her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she may remain indifferent to the sciences, the arts, to cultural tasks in general. A young boy who is an apprentice shoemaker or housepainter also has a smaller-sized brain than an adult man, but he nevertheless takes part in the general struggle for survival, he works, he suffers. And we'd better drop this manner of blaming everything on physiology, pregnancy and childbirth, because first of all, a woman does not give birth every month, secondly not all women give birth, and thirdly a normal peasant woman works in the fields right up to the day before she gives birth, and is not harmed in any way. Also, we should achieve the most complete equality imaginable in our daily life. If a man offers the lady a chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped,—why, let her repay him in kind. I would not object if a girl of good family were to help me put on my overcoat or bring me a glass of water."
The inability of even educated and well-to-do women to attain personal freedom and independence without a man's help is a major theme of Chekhov's, recurring constantly in his work. It is present, in a muted and subdued form, in Three Sisters, but it is given a much more overt and eloquent treatment in such stories as "Lights," "A Woman's Kingdom" and "Anna on the Neck." In "The Darling," we are shown a woman who by choice gives up all her individual qualities and derives whatever existence or dimensions she may possess from the males in her life. Chekhov intended her as a humorous creation, but Lev Tolstoy saw in her the embodiment of some of his own most cherished notions about what a woman should be. In a very significant little critical article on "The Darling," Tolstoy argued that Chekhov accomplished the very opposite of what he had intended in this story, depicting, instead of the laughable creature he had in mind, a beautiful, saintly and totally fulfilled woman.
An instance of a woman genuinely liberating herself from the compulsory biological and social roles which society and her family relentlessly impose on her and achieving an independent existence as an inwardly free individual is described in the very last story Chekhov wrote, "The Bride" (also known in English as "The Betrothed"). This story has become the traditional prize exhibit of orthodox Soviet critics, who are out to prove that at the end of his life Chekhov was moving toward espousing the cause of violent revolution. Although the text of the story does not state the exact future path that the heroine of "The Bride," Nadya, will follow, it is invariably assumed by the commentators in Soviet editions of Chekhov that in Nadya he has portrayed an upper-class girl who is about to become a revolutionary. This is the reasoning that underlies the commentary to "The Bride" in the twelve-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov's complete works, which states that this story is the most important thing Chekhov ever wrote. It must also explain why a recent American translator of "The Bride" renders the key phrase "to change the course of your life" (pere- vernut' zhizn') as "to revolutionize your life" every time it occurs in the story.
But to reduce "The Bride" to the cliches and platitudes that are compulsory in Soviet criticism is to deprive a unique and remarkable story of its particular and profound meaning. As was the case with Misail Poloznev in Chekhov's "My Life" (in some ways Misail is Nadya's male counterpart), Nadya's first step toward her personal liberation is taken when she begins to question the values of her family—her mother and her grandmother in this case. Her distant cousin Sasha, a consumptive young revolutionary, adds fuel to her resolve to escape by preaching the imminence of a social revolution which will instantly change men into demigods and cover the face of the earth with beautiful buildings and fountains. A further degree of freedom is achieved by Nadya when she rejects the comfortable marriage into which her entire culture is pushing her. When she escapes to St. Petersburg, her liberation from the small town where she was raised is complete. At this point the Soviet commentators prefer to stop; but in the text itself Chekhov takes his heroine still further in her quest for inner freedom. After living independently in St. Petersburg for a year, Nadya lias another encounter with the revolutionary Sasha. She is still attached to him and grateful for his help in her escape, but she has by now traveled beyond the stage of sloganeering, where he still remains: ". . . and now there was about Sasha, about his smile, about his entire figure something outmoded, old-fashioned, something that had had its day and had perhaps already gone to its grave." A revolution based on the promise of material affluence and on humanity reduced to a standardized common denominator rather than on freedom of thought and universal equality now holds as little attraction for Nadya as it did for Chekhov himself. "The Bride" is certainly as subversive of Soviet society today as it was of the society of Chekhov's day; hence the orthodox Leninist glosses in the Soviet commentaries and hence the hypnotic reiteration of the word