19th Century as a Single Perfect Anecdote

Chekhov's The Story Of An Anonymous Man

There is one Chekhov story I keep coming back to over and over; The Story Of An Anonymous Man (Рассказ неизвестного человека), published in 1893. It strikes a chord with me because it captures the difference between the books people read and the lives they actually lead. Chekhov understood the nineteenth century Western literary canon well and used it to expose the failures of his characters. By referencing Ivan Turgenev and Honoré de Balzac, he shows the hollow nature of nineteenth century Russian bourgeois aspirations.

The story follows a married woman, Zinaida Fyodorovna, who leaves her husband to live with her lover, Orlov, in a pursuit of romantic and spiritual freedom. She believes she is entering a life of grand meaning, yet she is met with Orlov’s cold indifference and the stifling atmosphere of his Petersburg bachelor apartment. The narrator, a revolutionary posing as a footman to spy on Orlov’s father, watches as her idealistic dreams collapse into a romantic tragedy.

Chekhov rarely relied on overt literary references, so when he chooses to do so, we must examine the purpose these specific allusions serve. In this story, the choices of Turgenev and Balzac provide a framework for the characters’ self-deception and eventual unraveling.

Orlov as a Turgenev Antihero

Orlov, the lover, is introduced as a man defined by his rigid, almost aestheticized routines. He is a creature of comfort and habit, spending his mornings in a dressing gown and drinking coffee while he reads through several newspapers with incredible speed. His reading is indiscriminate; he consumes information not out of an engagement with the world or a search for truth, but as a performance of intellectualism. This rapid, superficial consumption allows him to maintain a detached, ironic distance from the reality of the events he reads about. This carefully curated lifestyle is the backdrop against which he conducts his affair with Zinaida Fyodorovna, viewing her presence as a disruption to the order of his bachelor existence.

When his friends (really card playing buddies) start questioning the presence of Zinaida in his life, Orlov bursts into a tirade against Ivan Turgenev, accusing the author of setting ridiculous romantic expectations that modern men must now pay a price for. Orlov is specifically reacting to the male model found in Turgenev’s Rudin. The character of Dmitry Rudin was the quintessential “Superfluous Man”—an eloquent, highly educated intellectual who spoke passionately about ideals, liberty, and self-sacrifice, but was ultimately incapable of taking decisive action in his personal life. While Rudin was a failure in the practical sense, Turgenev still framed him as a tragic, noble figure of high spiritual caliber.

Orlov resents this literary legacy because it has created a cultural template where even a man’s failures are expected to be “grand” and “soulful.” He feels that Zinaida, by leaving her husband for him, has cast him in a Turgenevian drama he never auditioned for. He is expected to be the brilliant, tortured intellectual who eventually sacrifices himself for a cause or a great love.

Zinaida Fyodorovna As Eugène De Rastignac

While Orlov uses literature as a shield for his cynicism, Zinaida Fyodorovna uses it as a script for her liberation. She is introduced as a woman of intense, almost desperate idealism, fleeing the stifling boredom of her marriage for what she imagines will be a life of profound significance. However, as her relationship with Orlov disintegrates and the reality of her social ostracism sets in, her reliance on literary parallels becomes more acute and more tragic.

The domestic experiment collapses as Orlov’s indifference shifts to active avoidance. He finds the apartment unbearable now due to its domesticity, viewing his own home as a prison he must escape. Orlov simply disappears, hiding at a friend’s house to avoid her tear-eyed confrontations. That same day, Stepan decides to come clean and break her delusions. He finally tells her the brutal truth: she is a laughing stock to Orlov and his friends. In her despair, she turns to Stepan, who has abandoned his revolutionary mission to care for her.

Zinaida asks Stepan:

Have you read Balzac? At the end of his novel ‘Père Goriot’ the hero looks down upon Paris from the top of a hill and threatens the town: ‘Now we shall settle our account,’ and after this he begins a new life. So when I look out of the train window at Petersburg for the last time, I shall say, ‘Now we shall settle our account!’

Chekhov brings in Père Goriot to show us that Zinaida has learned almost nothing from the tragedy she has endured. Even in the middle of a desperate retreat, she is still clutching her romantic illusions, attempting to cast their flight as a grand literary conquest rather than a failure.

Rastignac’s challenge to Paris was the beginning of a cold-blooded social ascent; he was a youth who had finally learned to use the world’s cynicism to his advantage. Zinaida, however, is no Rastignac, and her bigger tragedy is yet to come.

The Musical Accompaniment of Stepan’s Letter

The narrator, Stepan, is a nobleman who has disguised himself as a footman to spy on Orlov’s father. Although he originally came to the household to conduct a revolutionary assassination, he now finds himself instead in the middle of an operatic romantic tragedy. From his position as a servant, he watches as the high-flown literary archetypes of the Russian elite fail to withstand the weight of actual human suffering.

As Stepan is writing his final, ruthless letter to Orlov, he hears Zinaida in a different room playing Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan.” Zinaida just heard it played by one of Orlov’s sympathetic friends, who gave her the advice of joining the monastery.

As Stepan writes the critical letter exposing his own deceit—and the even grander deceit Orlov has committed against love, women, and life itself—the music serves as an ironic accompaniment to Stepan’s gentle nature. It highlights a man who, despite his revolutionary pretensions, is fundamentally incapable of anything violent enough to affect real change.

Conclusion

Pushkin name dropped Byron to establish a romantic pedigree; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrote half their text in French to impress their readers with their mastery of French grammar and their proximity to European high culture. Chekhov, however, stripped away that pretension.

I often think of Chekhov as that uncle or cousin who is amazing at telling anecdotes. Their skill is so elevated that even the worst, most vulgar or mundane jokes still have such perfect comic timing that you are left smiling for days and weeks to come.

This is what this story represents to me; Chekhov took all the philosophy, culture, and progressiveness of the nineteenth century and packaged it in the most perfectly constructed, perfectly timed anecdote.