A Poetic Prose

“I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstasy, nor enjoyment...but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream.” Like this perplexing quotation, in which beauty is the source of sadness rather than celebration, Anton Chekhov’s short story, “The Beauties,” develops a poetic view on everyday life when he notices two gorgeous women. Radislav Lapushin analyzes Chekhov’s artistic language and its effects in his scholarly book, “Dew on the Grass”: The Poetics of Inbetweeness in Chekhov. According to Lapushin, Chekhov uses symbolism of nature, conflicting dual worlds, emotional confrontations, and beauty’s magical effects to create some of the most poetic prose ever written and to provide a new perspective on love.
        

Chekhov achieves his poetic flow through repeating symbolism of dust and clouds. Lapushin observes that the dust and wind of the story serve as a “biblical connotation of primordial natural elements.” Thus, dust starts and ends all life, and the wind from the book of Ecclesiastes is associated with an everlasting redundancy. In addition, there are “the clouds of golden chaff,” which are raised up from the wind made by the beautiful Armenian girl, therefore surrounding her and connected to her beauty. “Clouds of smoke” also appear in the story for the purpose of shifting the setting from one of nature in the Armenian village to one of industry in the train station. Furthermore, the wind serves as a similar transformative symbol, in that it can either blow “clouds of dust” or blow away “all the impressions of the day with their dust and dreariness.” Yet, an important note should be made that wind has the power to destroy the beauty of a woman by being able to “scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a flower” (Lapushin 129-131). With a use of the wind and dust as symbols, Chekhov creates a circular movement of setting shifts, creation, and demolition.          

          These said symbols of wind and dust help to ease the shift in setting from a rural village to a modernized train station. This shift did not happen instantly; however, the narrator, in between the two worlds, grows from a schoolboy to a university student. Lapushin interprets this as not only the scenery changing, but the weather turns from dry heat to a “damp” evening. Also different are the types of beauties. The first is more classical in nature, compared to “images of swiftness and motion.” While the second is a “butterfly” beauty, standing in one position, but simultaneously moving her body continuously. However, these separate worlds remain connected through adverbial descriptions. In the first section, the horses run “reluctantly, as if with effort,” and passengers in the second section moved “sluggishly and reluctantly” back to their train cars (Lapushin 133-134). Consequently, the two different worlds are separated by several distinct differences, but they also correlated through repeated adverbs.
         

          Another correlation between the two worlds is the sadness brought upon by the attractive women. The image of the train conductor exemplifies the causal relationship between beauty and anguish as the result of a lost past. Lapushin offers that with the conductor’s confrontation of the beautiful woman at the train station also comes an encounter with his ideal self. Due to this esteemed meeting, his “ordinary” face becomes one “of tenderness and of the deepest sadness.” In addition, the conductor seems to almost be having “an instant spiritual resurrection” through Chekhov’s use of the verbs “see,” “repent,” and “feel.” Moreover, Chekhov chooses to end the passage with the phrase “as far away as heaven,” denoting a meaningful, even religious, experience undergone by the conductor (Lapushin 140-1). The conductor’s abrupt contact with his ideal “I” causes the narrator to be “sticking out my head and looking back” towards the end of the story, when the train is leaving the girl on the platform. This act by the narrator demonstrates his desperate attempt at “trying to hold together a crumbling world” (Lapushin 144).

 

           The source of the beauty that affects the narrator and the conductor so is continually questioned throughout the short story, whether it be natural or magical. Lapushin considers the Armenian girl’s father to be a repeated image of a demonic sorcerer in Gogol’s novella “A Terrible Revenge.” Similar characteristics include a hunch, a deformed nose, and a general mark of monstrosity. Yet, the father seems more humorous than demonic in his depiction. Furthermore, the Armenian girl’s features are described as “bewitching.” Therefore, the grandfather’s reaction to the first girl is described as if a spell was being cast. The narrator also loses control of his senses and talks of a “peculiar air, proud and happy, ” and feels a sadness “undefined, vague as a dream.” In addition, the second girl is described as having a “whole secret and magic of her beauty” (Lapushin 136-7). Through the allusion to Gogol, a whole new interpretation of Chekhov’s words can be made to one concerning magic, which illuminates his deceptively poetic abilities.

Anton Chekhov continues to be studied by both young and mature readers alike because of his accomplished prose. On the surface, “The Beauties” seems to be about a male narrator glorifying the beauty of two women. Yet, if one digs deeper into the passage, one will find symbols in a cycle, unexpected allusions, and themes consisting of dual worlds and lost pasts. Through these tools, the story becomes more relateable to the audience on a deeper level than just young love. By reading Chekhov, readers truly experience the epitome of poetic writing and an unparalleled example of prose. And from this accomplished writing, comes a broader implication of the effects of beauty, which are not always simply observed, but felt with real conviction.

 

Works Cited

Lapushin, Radislav. "Dew on the Grass": The Poetics of Inbetweeness in Chekhov. New

         York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2010. 126-144. Print.