You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia, marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted […] But the trouble is that when we have been married […] for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again—disappointment, again—repulsion […] And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we've been so cruelly deceived in.
In this passage from Chekhov's Ariadne (1895, p. 33), a man describes the Russian desire for intimacy and love at the end of the nineteenth century. The short story retells a conversation between two men who do not share similar concepts of intimacy, love, sexuality, or marriage. For the narrator, these concepts simply follow the laws of nature—an ideology that repels the other character, Ivan Shamokhin, who poeticizes women and does not view men and women through the prism of pure biology. In the end, however, Ariadne—the object of Shamokhin's desire—prefers an abusive psychopath who uses her purely for sexual pleasure.
Chekhov's narrative of disappointment in the endless pursuit of an imaginary object of desire does not sound anachronistic, alien, or even hollow to our ears; many of us have heard patients report similar stories. Those who come to