Now your mind is not so blank.

How has the state of your mind changed?

If we were sitting together in a classroom, which I wish we were, you could tell me. Instead, I’ll ask you to sit quietly a bit and compare those two states of mind: the blank, receptive state your mind was in before you started to read and the one it’s in now.

Taking your time, answer these questions:

Whatever you answered, that’s what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something.

What is it about, for you, so far?

What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

So: What do you care about in this story, so far?

It’s Marya.

Now: What is the flavor of that caring? How, and where, were you made to care about her?

---

In the first line, we learn that some unidentified “they” are driving out of some town, early in the morning.

“The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying in the fields…”

I’ve bolded the two appearances of the word “but” above (and yes, I phrase it that way to avoid saying, “I bolded the two buts above”) to underscore that we’re looking at two iterations of the same pattern: “The conditions of happiness are present, but happiness is not.” It’s sunny, but there’s still snow on the ground. Winter has ended, but this offers nothing new or interesting to…and we wait to hear who it is, taking no solace in the end of this long Russian winter.

Even before there’s a person in the story, there’s an implied tension between two elements of the narrative voice, one telling us that things are lovely (the sky is “marvelous” and “immeasurably deep”) and another resisting the general loveliness. (It would be, already, a different-feeling story, had it started: “The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, and although there was still snow in the ditches and the woods, it just didn’t matter: winter, evil, dark, long, had, at long last, ended.”)

Halfway through the second paragraph, we find that the resisting element within the narrative voice belongs to one Marya Vasilyevna, who, failing to be moved by springtime, appears in the cart at the sound of her name.

Of all the people in the world he might have put in this cart, Chekhov has chosen an unhappy woman resisting the charms of springtime. This could have been a story about a happy woman (newly engaged, say, or just given a clean bill of health, or a woman just naturally happy), but Chekhov elected to make Marya unhappy.

Then he made her unhappy in a particular flavor, for particular reasons: she’s been teaching school for thirteen years; has done this trip to town “countless times” and is sick of it; feels she’s been living in “these parts” for a hundred years; knows every stone and tree on the way. Worst of all, she can imagine no other future for herself.

This could have been a story about a person unhappy because she’s been scorned in love, or because she’s just received a fatal diagnosis, or because she’s been unhappy since the moment she was born. But Chekhov chose to make Marya a person unhappy because of the monotony of her life.

Out of the mist of every-story-that-could-possibly-be, a particular woman has started to emerge.

---

We might say that the three paragraphs we’ve just read were in service of increased specification.

Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification. The writer asks, “Which particular person is this, anyway?” and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward.

As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call “plot” increases. (Although that’s a word I don’t like much—let’s replace it with “meaningful action.”)

As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases.

If a story begins, “Once there was a boy who was afraid of water,” we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, “I have never once in my life been afraid,” we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in. If a character lives in perpetual fear of being embarrassed, we have some idea of what might need to happen to him. Likewise with someone who loves only money, or confesses that he has never really believed in friendship, or who claims to be so tired of her life that she can’t imagine another.

When there was nothing in the story (before you started reading it) there was nothing that wanted to happen.

Now that Marya is here, unhappy, the story has become restless.

The story has said of her, “She is unhappy and can’t imagine any other life for herself.”

And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like “Well, we’ll see about that.”

Paused here for what I expect you are finding an unreasonable amount of time, at the end of the first page of an eleven-page story, we’re at an interesting place. * The story is under way. The first page has radically narrowed the concerns of the story; the rest of the story must now address (use, exploit) those concerns and not any others.

If you were the writer, what would you do next?

As a reader, what else would you like to know?

So, I ended my last section by asking what else you wanted to know.

What I wanted to know was: How did Marya get here, in this crummy life?

Chekhov answers in the first paragraph of this page: she’s here because she has to be. She grew up in Moscow, in a big apartment, with her family. But then her parents died, she fell out of touch with her only sibling, and now she’s alone in the world.

A person could have “gotten here” by being born out here, in the sticks, or by being an idealistic young woman dedicated to rural improvement who broke off her engagement with her conventional, citified fiancé and fled to the countryside. But here’s how Marya got here: her parents died and financial necessity compelled her.

And all she has left of her family is that sad photograph, in which her mother is just hair and eyebrows.

So Marya’s life is not just monotonous but lonely.

---

When we talk about fiction, we tend to use terms like “theme,” “plot,” “character development,” and “structure.” I’ve never, as a writer, found these very useful. (“Your theme’s no good” gives me nothing to work with, and neither does “You might want to make your plot better.”) These terms are placeholders, and if they intimidate us and block us up, as they tend to do, we might want to put them aside and try to find a more useful way to think about whatever it is they’re placeholding for.

Here, Chekhov gives us an opportunity to reconsider the scary term “structure.”

We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.

Me, at the end of the first page: “Poor Marya. I already sort of care about her. How did she get here?”

Story, in the first paragraph of its second page: “Well, she had some bad luck.”

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

(See?

Structure’s easy.

Ha, ha, ha.)

---

We’ve known, from the first line of the story (“ They drove out of the town at half past eight in the morning”) that someone else is there in the cart with Marya. Halfway down the page we learn that this is “old Semyon” and wait for Semyon to exhibit some characteristics. (“Who are you, Semyon, and what are you doing in this story?”) If his answer is “I’m here to drive the cart,” that’s not good enough. A million peasants could drive this cart. We’re waiting to find out why Chekhov chose this specific peasant to do it.

So far, the story has declared itself to be about, approximately: a woman unhappy with the monotony of her life, a life forced on her by necessity. Semyon, by suddenly appearing, has become, whether he likes it or not, an element of that story and, therefore, doesn’t get to just drive the cart while gazing out at the scenery. He has to do something for this particular story, the one with (bored, unhappy) Marya in it.

So, what do we learn about Semyon?

Not much, not yet. He’s old, he’s driving (she’s seated behind him, we realize). He tells her some news: the mayor of Moscow has been assassinated. Marya’s response (“Who told you that?”) feels remonstrative and impatient (she doubts him). Semyon heard it read aloud, from a newspaper, in a teahouse. (This implies that he can’t read.) And although Marya is skeptical, Semyon is actually correct: Nikolay Alekseyev, the mayor of Moscow, was, in fact, shot, in his office, by a deranged person, in 1893.

Marya’s reaction? She goes back to thinking of her school.

We don’t know what to make of any of this yet, but our minds quietly file it under “Semyon, Stuff About,” and “Marya, Stuff About.” Our expectation, given the extreme frugality of the form, is that the stuff in those files will prove meaningful later.

---

In the penultimate paragraph of this page, Marya’s thoughts about her students and the upcoming exams are interrupted when the cart is “overtaken by a landowner named Hanov in a carriage with four horses, the very man who had acted as examiner in her school the previous year.”

Let’s pause here a second. How did your mind “receive” Hanov into the story?

I recall here a phrase from old movies: “What do you take me for?”

What did you take Hanov for? What did you think he was here in the story to do?

There should be a name for this moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation. A man stands in an elevator, muttering under his breath about how much he hates his job. The door opens, someone gets in. Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.)

Having understood Marya as “she who is unhappy with the monotony of her life,” we’re already waiting for some altering presence to arrive.

And here comes Hanov.

This is the big event of the page, and notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.

---

The main way fiction writing is taught at Syracuse (and at most MFA programs) is by way of the workshop model. Six students come together once a week, having read work by two of their number, and we all discuss that work in a technical way. We’ve each read the stories at least twice and line-edited them and provided some pages of commentary.

Then the fun begins.

Before we launch into our in-class critique, I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had some idea of its intended function.) The “Hollywood version” is meant to answer the question “What story does this story appear to want to be?”

This is done in the way artillery fire is directed, at least in my imagination: an initial shot, followed by a series of adjustments for precision.

An unhappy woman is going somewhere in a cart.

A schoolteacher, Marya Vasilyevna, unhappy because she’s been teaching too long, is on her way home from a trip to town.

A schoolteacher, Marya Vasilyevna, unhappy because she’s been teaching too long, bored with the monotony of her life, alone in the world, teaching only out of necessity, is on the way home from a trip into town.

Marya, a bored, lonely schoolteacher, runs into a man named Hanov.

Actually, she runs into a wealthy man named Hanov (he’s “a landowner” after all, and has those four horses).

Notice that, in spite of the fact that we are literary sophisticates, engaged in a deep reading of a Chekhov masterpiece, we feel the sudden appearance of Hanov to be a potential nineteenth-century Russian meet-cute:

A lonely schoolteacher runs into a wealthy landowner, who, we feel, might transform her depressing life.

Put a little more crassly:

Lonely woman encounters possible lover.

Where might the story go from here?

Scan your mind, make a list.

Which of your ideas feel too obvious? That is to say: Which, if Chekhov enacts them, will disappoint you by responding too slavishly to your expectations? (Hanov, on the next page, drops to one knee and proposes.) Which, too random, won’t be responding to your expectations at all? (A spaceship comes down and abducts Semyon.)

Chekhov’s challenge is to use these expectations he’s created but not too neatly.

No pressure.

Although we might feel a little guilty for, just now, expecting this to be a love story, reading the first paragraph of this page, we see that Marya’s thinking along the same lines. Hanov (she observes) has a worn face and a lifeless expression and is beginning to age but is still “attractive to women.” He lives alone, is wasting his life (he does nothing but play chess and drink). Last year, when he came to her school, his papers smelled of wine. Surely this must have irritated and horrified her? Well, no, actually: his papers smelled of “ scent and wine,” and Marya had found him “very attractive” and, sitting next to him, had felt “embarrassed,” which we read as “embarrassed by the feelings she was having because of his proximity.”

---

Let’s look at the last sentence in that first paragraph for a little insight into how Chekhov makes characters. We learn that Marya “was used to seeing cold, hardheaded examiners at the school.” This sets us up to expect that Hanov will be the opposite (warm and softhearted, say). We carry that assumption of warmth and softheartedness into the next bit of text, where it’s affirmed (he was “exceedingly polite and considerate”) but also complicated. If Hanov is warm and softhearted, he’s also clueless and disorganized and incapable of an adult level of discrimination (he doesn’t remember “a single prayer,” gives only the highest marks).

So a broad character (a handsome rich man) is cross-painted with contradictory information (he is, yes, handsome and rich, but he’s also a bumbler, and we feel his alcoholism to be a function of his bumbling, a form of inattention or denial). The person that emerges is complex and three-dimensional. We wonder about him, rather than having him neatly in our pocket, and we’re not sure if we want Marya interested in him or not.

Hanov announces the purpose of this trip in a way that completes this portrait of an amiable doofus: he’s taking this long drive through the mud to visit a friend, but he has no idea whether that friend is even home.

---

The carts turn off the highway. In a lesser story, Marya’s thoughts would be only of Hanov. But Chekhov remembers the Marya he’s made. She’s lived here a long time. She knows Hanov and he knows her. She’s already, we suspect, thought about Hanov as a possible savior before. So, her mind returns easily and naturally to the school, and we might now recall that this is just what it did after Semyon’s assassination anecdote, earlier. She’s twice now retreated from the world to thoughts of the school (and we’re that much more sensitized to future occurrences). Why does she do this? What does this tell us about her that we might need to know?

We put this aside for now. But notice that, even as we do, we’re again enacting an expectation of efficiency—if it turns out that this tendency of hers isn’t somehow used later, we will feel it (slightly) as wasteful.

Yes: it’s a harsh form, the short story.

Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows.

Marya continues to think of the school and its corrupt administration, and the fact that there is no one for her to turn to—

And then thinks, with no transition, self-interrupting: “He is really handsome.” So, even though she’s dismissed Hanov, she’s been watching him (his broad, wealthy back swaying there, just ahead, in that expensive fur coat) and, we might say, pretending to think about the school while really thinking of him, or trying not to think of him.

That self-interruption is a beautiful thing. It says: the mind can be two places at once. (Many trains are running simultaneously in there, consciousness aware of only one at a time.)

Note the little burst of pleasure we feel as we recognize ourselves in Marya. (Ever had a light, persistent, unrequited, indefensible semi-crush?) He’s not for her, she knows it, she never seriously considered him anyway, and yet her mind keeps being lured back to him, like a dog to the alley behind a good-smelling restaurant.

---

Notice how impatient your reading mind is or, we might say, how alert it is. It knows where we are: Marya, lonely and unhappy, has encountered a potential antidote in Hanov. Like an obsessed detective, the reading mind interprets every new-arriving bit of text purely in this context, not interested in much else.

And yet here, in the third paragraph, it seems that, whether we want one or not, we’re going to get a description of the road.

Why does a story even need these types of descriptions? Why did Chekhov decide to pull us out of the central action and describe the world outside the cart? One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason (for the story to make use of)—even a brief description of a road.

So, as we enter this description, we’re asking, somewhere in the back of our reading mind: How is this description of a road going to turn out to be essential, i.e., not wasteful?

---

Earlier, we asked if there might exist certain “laws” in fiction. Are there things that our reading mind just responds to? Physical descriptions seem to be one such thing. Who knows why? We like hearing our world described. And we like hearing it described specifically. (“Two men in green sweaters were playing catch beside a wrecked car” is better than “I drove through this area that was sort of bland and didn’t notice much.”) A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick. If I am trying to put you in a certain (invented) house, I might invoke “a large white cat, stretching itself out to what seemed like twice its normal length” on a couch in that house. If you see the cat, the house becomes real.

But that’s only part of the move. That cat, having been placed in that particular story, is now, also, a metaphorical cat, in relation to all of the other dozens (hundreds) of metaphorical elements floating around in the story.

And that cat now has to do some story-specific work. Or, we might say, it’s going to be doing some story-specific work, whether it chooses to or not, by its very presence in the story; the question is what work it’s going to be asked to do and how well it will do it.

Here, the road’s “growing worse.” A particular authorial choice; it would be a different story if the road were getting wider and drier and opened into a meadow awash with new flowers. What does it “mean,” that the road is growing worse? Why did Chekhov choose to make the road worse? That’s a good question, one that might be best answered by you, dear reader, via this method: hold the two models up in your mind (road growing worse vs. road growing better) and feel the ways in which “worsening road” is better. Or feel the way that the two choices are different. We can try to articulate the reasons why a worsening road is a better choice than an improving road, or vice versa—but for now let’s just note that Chekhov did two things in this paragraph: he remembered where he’d put us (in a cart passing through some woods in early spring), then described conditions there with specificity (“The ruts were deep, and water flowed and gurgled in them”).

So, this is both a realistic description (it’s spring, snow melts, roads get muddy) and a little poem that adjusts our understanding of the story.

Roughly speaking, we understand this description to indicate: “a steadily degrading situation.” The road is “growing worse and worse.” They are driving “into the woods.” There’s “no turning off.” There’s a cost to this trip (those twigs in the face).

This falls on us differently (with more foreboding, say) than a description in which they drove “out of the woods and into the bright sunshine” to find that “the road widened welcomingly” and “low-hanging flowers brushed against her cheeks softly as the cart gently rolled past a joyful peasant wedding.”

Both of these descriptions would fulfill a sort of preparatory function—we would feel Chekhov using the description to set us up for whatever is to come.

What’s strange is this: had Chekhov decided to send them past that joyful peasant wedding, this would have changed the rest of the story. Or: the rest of the story would have had to change, to take that more positive description into account and render it cogent to the larger, evolving entity.

A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.

---

Hanov has money. He could live anywhere. But here he is, right where Marya is: on a muddy provincial road, one that he, at least, could repair, only it would never occur to him to do so. “But he merely laughed, and apparently it was all the same to him, and he asked nothing better of life.” Why is he so passive? If she had power, she’d do something with it. She completes this turn against him at the end of the page, remembering the stupid globes he gives to the school, a gift that allows him to think of himself, incorrectly, as an enlightened, useful person.

Let’s ask our three questions again, and I’ll give you my approximate answers:

Here, an announcement: to avert the possibility of you abandoning my book this early in the game due to annoyance, we’ll now start reading two pages at a time.

The cart nearly tips. We find out that Marya has made some purchases in town. (These purchases are now an element of the story. What use, we wonder, will be made of them?) Hanov repeats the dumb joke he made on the previous page, Semyon turns on him (“But who tells you to go driving in such weather,” he says, in a “surly” voice), and Hanov’s gentle response to this insult from someone beneath him in status (Semyon is a peasant, Hanov a wealthy landowner) tracks satisfyingly with what Marya has told us about Hanov: he’s a pushover, spineless, an easy grader.

Marya thinks she smells liquor in the woods. She pities Hanov, who is “going to pieces without rhyme or reason,” and thinks that, if she were his wife or sister, she’d devote “her whole life” to his rescue. But that’s impossible. “Fundamentally, life was so arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank.”

Then, as if he’s just heard Marya ruling out their marriage, Hanov rides right out of the story.

Marya barely seems to notice, confirming our sense that she doesn’t really consider him a romantic possibility. (She doesn’t think, “Oh no, he’s gone, I failed to interest him!”) Her mind returns to the school (she thinks of “her pupils, of the examination, of the janitor, of the School Board”). This is now the third time she’s done this—withdrawn from the real world into worry about the school. It’s a habit with her (her default rumination, a measure of how she’s been trained and reduced by this life of toil).

One of the accomplishments of this story is Chekhov’s representation of the way a lonely mind works. Marya’s just musing here, doing the sort of light fantasizing we do when we imagine winning the lottery or becoming a senator or telling off someone who hurt our feelings back in high school. Although the story sets us up to feel that Marya might (might) be open to Hanov, it also gives us plenty of reasons to understand this as both impossible and not to be desired. He’s a drunk, an idler, past the age for reformation. He doesn’t seem interested in Marya, or in anybody—he’s likely had plenty of chances to marry before but never has. And Marya is, actually, kind of prideful; even as she’s assessing him, we feel her thinking that, if they did get together, he’d prove a handful and a disappointment.

And yet…

Chekhov has her do something lovely: she hears “the sound of the receding carriage” and suddenly wants to think of “beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness that would never be….”

She thinks, again, of being his wife (not his sister this time).

She’s already ruled out this possibility, just a few paragraphs earlier. But here it comes again. (“His wife?”) The float that is her heart keeps bobbing back up. And it’s sad—her mind returns to Hanov not because he’s a great guy or her soulmate but because (1) there’s nobody else around (that is, in her world) and (2) her loneliness is so extreme.

She’s lonely, he’s nearby. He’s nearby, and though he’s not lonely, exactly, it seems he could use some help.

But if you’ve ever tried to act as a matchmaker, you know that even two extremely lonely people continue to have standards. We can’t presume to speak for them. In this case, Marya and Hanov have already spoken for themselves. Their situation is not: two people ripe for love suddenly meet for the first time. It’s: two people, not exactly ripe for love (who, if they were going to become involved, would have done so years ago), meet again.

Nobody’s expecting anything to happen and, in fact, it would be kind of weird if it did.

In the long paragraph on this page , she addresses her own question (“His wife?”) with a dismal recounting of her actual life: the snow, the mud, the discomfort, her tiny room, her headaches, her heartburn, her constant need to beg for funds; this degrading life that has “aged and coarsened her.” Though she is obsequious, “no one likes her,” the poor dear.

For most of its length, the paragraph seems to be saying, “How ridiculous, to think that this wealthy man would marry such a drudge as I.” Then, in its last line (“In her position how terrible it would be if she were to fall in love!”), it says something worse: yes, she’s beneath him, but also, her life, as difficult as it is, has no room in it for love, even if he were interested.

Which, apparently, he isn’t.

---

Einstein once said: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” *

The story has just written itself out of the plane of its original conception, by removing Hanov as a possible antidote for Marya’s loneliness.

What now?

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use. There’s vestigial evidence in Marya’s thoughts that she wouldn’t be averse to an overture from Hanov. She considers him handsome and attractive and has an urge to save him from himself. Although the story has been telling us all along that a relationship isn’t likely (it won’t happen today because it’s never happened before) we’ve still been rooting for it to happen—we’ve been rooting for Marya.

We want what she wants: for her not to be so lonely. The energy of the story is being stored in our hope that she’ll find some relief.

Chekhov, in these first five pages, built a door and indicated that he wanted us to go through it. Over that door is a sign: “Hanov Might Assuage Marya’s Loneliness.” Every time we’ve felt Marya’s loneliness, we’ve glanced hopefully over at that door. Now that door has been shut and locked.

Or, actually, it’s vanished.

Chekhov has, with Hanov’s exit, denied himself the obvious, expected source of resolution. Who knows how Chekhov arrived at this decision, practically speaking, but we can observe what he did: he got rid of Hanov. Now there’s no danger that the story will take that easy route.

This is an important storytelling move we might call “ritual banality avoidance.” If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that. )

We might think of it this way: Chekhov already “has” the benefit of our expectation of a romantic development between Marya and Hanov. We’ve already pre-imagined that development. So he doesn’t have to go there. He can go past it, to whatever the next and presumably more sophisticated solution turns out to be (he can force his own hand, so to speak), just by taking Hanov out of the story. (If there were a big bowl of candy in your kitchen and that was all you were eating, one way of forcing yourself to eat something better would be to throw the candy away.)

When I try to explain this notion to my students, I invoke these bracelets we used to make back in the late 1960s, when I was in grade school (“love beads,” we sweet little ChicagoLand hippies-in-training called them). You put a bead on, then pushed it all the way back to the knot in the string. This cleared the way for new beads.

Just so in a story: we should always be pushing the new bead to the knot. If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.”

Consider a story that, in its last lines, reveals that the narrator has been paralyzed all along (and just happened to neglect to mention it).

Consider a story in which, late in the game, the narrator is revealed to be not, after all, a person walking through the Lincoln Park Zoo but a tiger within it (!) (but all clues that this was the case had been carefully concealed, to maximize the reveal; the other animals kept calling our tiger “Mel,” and talking to him about the White Sox and so on).

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

Marya’s dilemma is still in effect. She’s still lonely and bored. By removing the first-order solution (Hanov), Chekhov has made his story more ambitious. In its early pages it said, “Once there was a lonely person.” It might have gone on to say, “And isn’t it wonderful? That lonely person met another lonely person and now neither is lonely.” By declining to go there, the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?”

This is where, to me, the story starts to feel big. It’s saying: loneliness is real and consequential and there is no easy way out of it for some of us who are in it and sometimes there’s no way out at all.

We care about Marya, we expected Hanov to help her, and suddenly he’s gone.

Now what?

On this page , the process of characterization through specification continues.

Marya becomes, again, a slightly more specific Marya. (The story form reminds us that a human being is never static or stable. The form demands that the writer honor this. If a character keeps doing or saying the same thing, keeps occupying the same position, we will feel this as static, a repeated beat—a failure of development.) Here, we learn that Marya is not a person called to teach. She was forced into it by financial necessity. It has “always” seemed to her that the examinations were what mattered (not the children, not enlightenment). We note the continually increasing particularity of this person Chekhov is making, the extent to which she has just departed from a first-order, clichéd, overworked, idealistic teacher. She is not, never has been, a teacher for the love of it. This is part of what has worn her down, this absence of love for her work. She started out not full of hope but disliking the work: understanding it as beneath her, something at which it was possible to fail, rather than as something she might do out of love.

Chekhov is averse to making pure saints or pure sinners. We saw this with Hanov (rich, handsome bumbler and drunk) and we see it now with Marya (struggling noble schoolteacher who has constructed her own cage through joyless complicity in her situation). This complicates things; our first-order inclination to want to understand a character as “good” or “bad” gets challenged. The result is an uptick in our attentiveness; subtly rebuffed by the story, we get, we might say, a new respect for its truthfulness. Here we’d just about settled into a simple view of Marya as a completely innocent, blameless victim of a harsh system. But then the story says, “Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?” (Which is another way of saying: “Let’s not forget that Marya is a human being, and complicated, and susceptible to error.”)

Hers is still a sad situation, but now we understand that she contributed to it, by not having the wherewithal to rise to the occasion of the work. I revise her slightly in my mind: she’s limited, a bit less capable.

On the other hand, what kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and be so reduced by it? To have to collect funds and teach in a drafty room and get no support from the community? How could anyone love that life? (I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”)

Just imagine the many Maryas who have existed, all over the world, their best selves sacrificed to exigency, whose grace suffered under the pressure of being poorly suited to the toil required of them to make a living. (Maybe, like me, you’ve been one of them yourself.)

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As we’ve been saying, the story form is ruthlessly efficient. Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

Honoring this principle—let’s call it the Ruthless Efficiency Principle (REP)—as our cart enters a town (Nizhneye Gorodishche), we find ourselves asking, “What is the purpose of this town?” And because it is a town in a story, the only possible answer is: “This town is here to do some work the story needs it to do.” So what we should actually ask is: “What is the purpose of this town? Why this town, and not another?”

Watch your mind as you read this paragraph toward the end of page 7, to see what Chekhov wants us to notice:

They reached Nizhneye Gorodishche. Near the teahouse, on the dung-strewn, snowy ground, there stood wagons loaded with great bottles of oil of vitriol. There were a great many people in the teahouse, all drivers, and it smelled of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskins. The place was noisy with loud talk and the banging of the door which was provided with a pulley. In the shop next door someone was playing an accordion steadily.

Now, this is a good description—that door pulley makes it come especially alive for me—but it’s also a pointed description. As we follow Marya inside, Chekhov wants to convey something to us. As we read, scanning for implication, we find ourselves collecting “negative” words, like “dung-strewn,” “vitriol,” “smelled,” “noisy,” “loud,” and “banging.” Adding in the party sounds and the perpetual droning accordion, we conclude that Chekhov wants to communicate: this is a rough place.

Consider this differently flavored version:

Near the teahouse, on the white, snowy ground, stood wagons loaded with generous containers of oranges and apples, shipped from exotic, faraway places. There were a great many people in the teahouse, all drivers, and it smelled of tea and something baking in a tremendous oven at one end of the room. The place was noisy with happy talk, and the constant joyful opening and closing of the door made for a festive, welcoming feeling. In the shop next door, someone was playing a lighthearted dance tune on an accordion.

Such a town could exist, has existed somewhere, but Chekhov didn’t need that one.

So: a lonely woman, discontented with her life, which she feels is beneath her, walks into a rough place, a place into which, in the life she was meant to have had, she would never have set foot.

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The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.

We will henceforth refer to this as “the Cornfeld Principle.”

In a mediocre story, nothing much will happen inside the teahouse. The teahouse is there to allow the writer to supply local color, to tell us what such a place is like. Or something might happen in there, but it won’t mean much. Some plates will fall and get broken, a ray of sunlight will come randomly through the window to no purpose, just because rays of sunlight do that in the real world, a dog will run in and run out, because the writer recently saw a real dog do that in a real teahouse. All of this may be “entertaining in its own right” (lively, funny, described in vivid language, etc.) but is not “advancing the story in a non-trivial way.”

When a story is “advanced in a non-trivial way,” we get the local color and something else. The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another. The story becomes a more particular version of itself; it refines the question it’s been asking all along.

So, what happens here?

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A “pockmarked peasant” swears. (This falls into the category of local color.) Then Semyon reacts to the swearing by calling the peasant’s attention to Marya’s presence. (“Don’t you see the young lady?”)

In workshop, we talk a lot about “raising the stakes” of a story. Semyon just did this. There was a bare wire labeled “Marya” and a bare wire labeled “Peasants in a Teahouse” and electricity was coursing through each but they were laid out parallel to one another, several feet apart.

Semyon, by reacting to the swearing, just crossed them. Marya and those gathered peasants had nothing to do with one another, were not in relation. Now they do, and are.

Someone “jeers” at Semyon’s characterization of Marya: “The young lady!” (Meaning both: “You call her young ?” and “You call her a lady ?”)

Suddenly the room is full of tension. Marya has been insulted twice: indirectly, by the initial swearing, and directly, by the jeer. We feel the potential for this room of peasants to turn on this “elite” schoolteacher. Who’s there to defend her?

The tension gets defused by that sweet little pockmarked peasant, whom I always imagine looking like Sleepy of the Seven Dwarfs (doffing his hat, in my mind, as he apologizes). Marya accepts his apology. “How do you do?” she says stiffly, afraid, maybe, that this will escalate further.

So: a close call, one that underscores Marya’s tenuous position among the rabble. Had that swearing peasant been a different swearing peasant, it could have been worse. (It will be worse, in about twenty years, when the Russian Revolution breaks out and some of these same peasants march up the road and seize Hanov’s estate.)

What is Marya’s reaction? She drinks her tea “with pleasure.” She could have done so “with shaking hands” or “near tears.” But no. Maybe, it occurs to us, this isn’t such an unusual experience for her. (We took it harder than she did.) She’s likely been in this teahouse many times before, on other trips to and from town. Maybe this low-level taunting has happened before?

Our understanding of Marya has been refined again. This is not the story of a woman only just now falling in the world. It is the story of someone who fell some time ago and is so used to her fallen state that she’s no longer particularly outraged about it. She fell, is still falling, may fall further still. She’s nearly a peasant herself.

Has the scene fulfilled the Cornfeld Principle? I think it has. Though she has previously presented herself, through her inner monologues, as a woman fallen into a life among the rabble, we maybe didn’t really believe her. Now we do. In those monologues (as in, I suppose, all of our inner monologues) she retained control, by subtly judging Semyon and Hanov, and through the very act of intelligent reflection. But now we’ve seen how precarious her position really is. In fact, it’s worse than she knows. She’s become blind to how far she’s fallen—but now we know.

Imagine a person walking along a street thinking it might be time to buy a new suit. This one he’s wearing is pretty great, and people are always complimenting it, but what the heck, he should treat himself. On his way to the store, he passes some teenagers, who make a joke about how old-fashioned and crappy his suit is.

We feel pity for him, but we also suddenly see his suit.

Having seen the difference between Marya’s internally narrated version of herself and her actual position in the world, I find myself feeling more tenderness for her, and more protective of her. This more complicated, endangered Marya is the one I take with me to the end of the story.

Which is now (take heart) three pages away.

A word here about variation.

Back in the cart, Semyon again begins to gossip, this time about some “wicked doings” in the town they’ve just left. Earlier, Semyon was correct in a bit of gossip he was passing along (about the assassination of the mayor of Moscow) and Marya didn’t believe him/wasn’t interested. Here, it seems, he’s in correct, and she is interested, and corrects him. It might have been the case that, both times, Semyon was passing along incorrect gossip and Marya was interested and corrected him. Again, Chekhov’s instinct seems to be toward variation, against stasis. One of his gifts is an ability to naturally impose variety on a situation that a lesser writer would leave static.

Because of the variation in his presentation, we’re able to read Semyon two ways at once: as a nineteenth-century Russian version of a conspiracy theorist, always willing to believe the worst of anyone in power, and as someone who, though he lives in the same low milieu as Marya, has managed to maintain a lively (although erratically precise) interest in the things going on around him.

Marya, on the other hand, isn’t interested in “world events,” only in what is local and might affect her already tenuous status in the community. (And after that experience in the teahouse, we don’t blame her.) This also explains the tendency we’ve observed for her mind to always be turning back to the school. It’s a self-protective, border-assessing move. She’s obsessing about the one thing over which she might actually still have some control.

Notice, too, that we’re reading Semyon and Marya against one another. They’re like two dolls in a box, fallen into different postures. He’s interested in the world; she’s not. He speculates; she doesn’t. They both distrust the system (although for different reasons). He’s a peasant; she nearly is. And so on.

And, actually, there are three dolls in there: Marya, Semyon, and Hanov. Without even meaning to, we’re continually scanning the three for similarities and differences. We group Marya and Semyon together because they’re from the same town and are in the same cart; Marya and Hanov together because they’re younger and of a higher social class than Semyon and are a possible (although apparently not all that possible) couple; Semyon and Hanov together because both of them represent “people less intelligent than Marya, with whom she must cope.” But each person is also solitary in his or her own way: Marya the only woman, Semyon the only peasant, Hanov the only landowner.

A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. Imagine these things on a table: a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, a ceramic statue of a duck. If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who’s finally had enough.

That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.

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Well, at least from here , the trip will be easy. They’re literally out of the woods, all level ground ahead. Chekhov gives us a simple, useful-for-visualization-purposes map of the landscape to come: “All they had to do was to cross the river and then the railway line.”

There’s a bridge nearby but Semyon has a plan. He’ll ford the river, which is “not so deep,” saving them some time. Hanov reappears in the story, hypercautiously (prudently?) headed for the bridge. Note that Marya doesn’t give Hanov a thought (no reawakening of hope, no quickening heartbeat). This confirms our idea that her ruminations about Hanov have been idle, not really serious.

From the timing, Semyon concludes that Hanov, the “blockhead,” didn’t, after all, find his friend at home. So, Hanov’s whole trip has been a waste.

They reach the river.

Before we let Semyon urge the horse forward, let’s ask: Why did Chekhov go to the trouble of creating this river? He could have just run the cart straight into town, across a stretch of dry road. It must be the case that something useful to his purpose is going to happen during the crossing. (A linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.”)

“In summer [the river] was a shallow stream…but now…it was a river forty feet wide.” So: it will be a challenge to cross. And yet, wheel marks indicate that someone has recently crossed it. This moment feels like a test of competence between Semyon and Hanov. Which version of reality is correct: (A) “Semyon, a smug peasant, dismissing the more intelligent gentry, tries to cross an unfordable river with disastrous results” or (B) “Semyon, a man of the people, to save time, reasonably does what others like him have recently done, unlike that clueless gentleman Hanov, who wastes his time playing it safe for no reason”?

Marya has no say in the matter, and is going to have to just sit there bearing the brunt of whatever happens, even though she’s the main character and the smartest, most self-aware person in the story.

It’s touch-and-go at first. Water comes rushing into the cart. They make it across and Semyon (conspiracy theorist to the end) blames…the local government (the “Zemstvo”). It’s “an affliction” to live here. (“It’s not me, it’s this town !”) Meanwhile Hanov continues, we imagine, to plod toward the bridge.

Who wins? Well, Semyon, sort of, but Marya’s shoes are full of water, her dress is wet, and worst of all, the sugar and flour (her “purchases”), on which she’s presumably just spent a good portion of her paycheck, are ruined.

“Oh, Semyon, Semyon!” she says. “What a fellow you are, really!”

This is such a sad moment: the one humble pleasure she sought (if we can consider acquiring basic staples for one’s tiny room “a pleasure”), even that, she can’t have.

Hanov has wasted a day on a trip with no tangible result.

So has Marya.

Above, we asked why Chekhov went to the trouble of putting this river into the story. He did it, apparently, to ruin Marya’s purchases.

And why did he need to do that?

We carry that question forward.

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As a young writer I once got a rejection that was full of praise but concluded with this: “It’s fast and funny and wild…but we aren’t sure it’s a story. ” That was, you know…maddening. (I felt: If it’s fast and funny and wild, isn’t that enough, you dopes?) But I understand now. A short story is not just a series of events, one following after another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes…enough.

When I was a kid, Lipton had a TV commercial with the catchphrase “Is it soup yet?”

We’re always asking, of a work we’re reading (even if it’s one of our own): “Is it story yet?”

That’s the moment we’re seeking as we write. We’re revising and revising until we write the text up, so to speak, and it produces that “now it’s a story” feeling.

One good way to investigate what causes that feeling: experimentally truncate a good story before the point where its creator actually ended it. Just cut it off and observe your reaction to that imposed ending. The resulting feeling will tell us something about what’s missing. Or, conversely, about what the remaining text does supply, once we read it, that completes the transformation from “narrative” to “story.”

So, how about we end the story right here, at the end of the section we’ve just read, like so:

“Oh Semyon, Semyon! What a fellow you are, really!”

the end.

Go back to the beginning and scan through the story, ending it there. How does that strike you? What does the story, ended that way, seem to be “saying”? What is it lacking? (What bowling pins are still in the air?)

The feeling I get is: “No, not a story yet.”

Let’s see if we can figure out why.

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Earlier, we suggested that the simplest statement of the story’s idea of itself was:

Lonely woman encounters possible lover.

We’ve moved past that now, to something like:

Lonely woman encounters possible lover, who might assuage her loneliness but doesn’t, and she (and we) realize that this was an empty hope anyway, and then she’s borderline humiliated in a teahouse, and the ostensible purpose for her trip (her purchases) is negated.

the end.

Truncated like this, the story feels anecdotal and harsh: a series of bad things happen to a nice lady we like and then she goes back home in worse shape than when she left. (This describes millions of days that have been lived in the real world, but it isn’t “a story. ”)

In workshop we sometimes say that what makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever. (That’s a bit Draconian, but let’s go with it as a starting place.) So, we tell a certain story, starting at one time and ending at another, in order to frame that moment of change. (We don’t tell the story of the week before those three ghosts show up to haunt Scrooge, or Romeo’s tenth-birthday party, or that period in Luke Skywalker’s life when not all that much was going on.)

Why did Chekhov choose to narrate this day in Marya’s life? To ask it another way: What has changed, today, for Marya? Is she a different person from the woman we met on the first page? It doesn’t seem like it. Has anything new happened to her? I don’t think so. She’s met Hanov many times before and, as mentioned, we suspect she’s had romantic and hopeful thoughts about him before, but things are going nowhere with him and she knows this very well. She was insulted in the teahouse but took it in stride, and although this reaction changed our view of her, and therefore felt like an escalation, it didn’t change her view of herself. (We know this because of the way she drank her post-insult tea “with pleasure” and returned immediately to thinking about the school.)

What we’re really asking is: What might happen (what needs to happen) over the remaining seven paragraphs to elevate this into a story ?

It’s kind of exciting to pause here and admit that, as things stand, it’s not a story. Not yet. And I’m going to claim, right now, that by the end, it’s going to be a great story.

So, there’s something essential to learn here about the form itself: whatever converts not yet a story into great story is going to happen any minute now, over this next (last) page.

The railway barrier is down (a train is about to pass). Across the tracks they see home, the village of Vyazovye. Chekhov describes specific buildings, including Marya’s enslaving workplace, “the school with the green roof,” at a specific moment of the day: sundown. What does the setting sun do to buildings? It lights them up. Which parts, specifically? The crosses and the station windows. (Note the difference between this and “The town lay before them, looking just like every other small Russian village.”)

Here comes the train. Chekhov remembers that he’s just said that the sun, going down, lights things up. So, the windows on the train get lit up too. The result: Marya can’t look directly at them. She looks, instead, at a first-class platform. And sees…her mother. (Note the tight causality in here, one thing causing the next.) Immediately, Chekhov corrects (has Marya correct) this misperception: “What a resemblance!” Is she reasonable in mistaking this woman for her mother? Yes. Chekhov proves it, via specificity. What is similar? The woman’s hair, her forehead, the way she holds her head.

This causes a rush of forgotten memories: “for the first time in those thirteen years,” she vividly imagines her early life in Moscow.

Hold this paragraph up against that earlier paragraph in which she recalled her childhood . In that description, there was no aquarium with its little fishes, no piano, no singing, no associated feeling of well-being. When she thought back to her childhood earlier (just a few hours ago), all she could honestly recall was “something vague and formless like a dream.” Now her mind is full of specifics. That vague version of her childhood has been corrected. These recalled details alter her view of herself. She was once someone else, someone with a home, someone who was loved, someone “young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people,” someone safe and cared for.

She is overwhelmed by “a feeling of joy and happiness.”

“Mama!” she calls, and starts to cry and “she did not know why.”

If we’ve been waiting for an end to her unhappiness, here it is. Relief has arrived in the form of a memory. She recalls who she once was. She is who she once was.

Will this new state of happiness abide? (Will it change her forever?)

We see why Chekhov has told us the story of this day, and not another. This didn’t happen to her yesterday or on any previous day over those thirteen nightmarish years.

Just today, for the first time.

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It might be useful to pause here and read those two paragraphs about her childhood in sequence. Look at the overlap (Moscow, an apartment) but also the additions in the second iteration: the aquarium, the piano, the love, the sense of belonging. That’s escalation. Had Chekhov given the same description both times, that would be stasis. (“I went to the store and it was hot in there and I saw Todd. Later, I went to the store and it was hot in there and I saw Todd.”) Having recalled those memories, Marya is literally not the same person she was just seconds before. And we feel this as an escalation; suddenly, the person she used to be (beloved, special, cared for) wakes up into this scary new reality. We feel the shock of it. (“I’m a near-peasant teacher in a crummy provincial school? What? Me? Marya? ”) but we also feel her joy at being restored to herself, to her real self.

I love this new, suddenly elated Marya. (I see how miserable she’s been all those years, and how brave.)

We’ve said that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.

Note the beautiful, dominoes-falling effect of the causation here: the early energy of our pity for Marya (which made us hope she would get some relief, which we mistakenly thought might come from Hanov) was deepened by this terrible day, a day that culminated in the ruining of her purchases, and the cumulative pain of the day caused her to mistake a stranger for her mother, which, in turn, caused her to remember who she used to be, which gave her the first instant of happiness we’ve seen her experience the whole time we’ve known her, poor thing, which is to say, since the beginning of the story.

She’s been rejuvenated, remade into that carefree, happy, hopeful young girl she used to be. She’s like a superhero whose powers have suddenly returned.

And here, I always feel that this harsh world she’s been living in is about to receive a correction.

I hope so, anyway.

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Hanov pulls up. Whatever time Semyon saved by fording the river has been erased by their need to wait for the train to pass, and it’s all a wash: Hanov is just as clever as Semyon and vice versa, i.e., not very. Nobody, in this Russia, is clever enough to defeat the generalized tedium—gentry and peasants equally inept, the Maryas of the world, who see things somewhat clearly, caught in the middle.

Seeing Hanov, Marya “imagined such happiness as had never been, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and an intimate” ( both of which she has earlier, in nearly identical language, rejected as impossible ).

“And it seemed to her that the sky, the windows, the trees, were glowing with her happiness” and also, oddly, with “her triumph.” What is her “triumph”? Well, she’s been restored to the girl she once was. Her parents haven’t died, she has “never been a schoolmistress.” No degradation has occurred. It was all “a long, strange, oppressive dream,” from which she has now awakened.

She is happy again, proud again, a full human being again, at last.

She’s happy, but still alone. (But is she still lonely?)

Here, a few lines from the end, can you imagine a version of the story in which this sudden confidence, this new sense of herself as someone worth loving, changes her so much that Hanov notices the difference, and sees her as if for the first time, and—

Well, I bet you can. I can. I do, every time I get here.

But no.

Semyon calls for her to “get in,” i.e., “get back into this cart that is your actual life.” Suddenly “it all vanished.” The story has already told us that a relationship between them is impossible, and it is, it still is. There’s not another mention of Hanov, only of his carriage: “The carriage with the four horses crossed the railway track.” There is that strange and somehow perfect detail of the guard taking off his cap to her. (“Welcome back, madam, to your loneliness.”)

And they’re home, and the story’s over.

How sad, how sad, how utterly truthful.

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Why couldn’t Hanov have been charmed?

Well, the best answer is that the story is more beautiful if he’s not. If he were charmed, this would imply that the only reason he hasn’t been charmed before is that Marya’s never been this happy before (never before this attractive). In other words, the story would be understood to be saying, “All Marya had to do to be loved was be more .” That’s a less interesting story, even a trivial one. Besides, it contradicts what’s already been made clear: these two aren’t meant for one another. No amount of happiness glow is going to bridge the gap between them, and it would feel false, and forced, if it did.

Does Hanov acknowledge this change in her? He doesn’t seem to. Either he misses that smile-and-nod or he notices but it inspires nothing in him—not a cheerful goodbye or a return nod-and-smile, much less a declaration of love. Is it possible that he doesn’t notice the change? Sure, and, if so, all of those “Hanov is a doofus” moments pay off. (This is a guy so oblivious, he doesn’t notice it when a woman has just shucked off thirteen years of misery.)

In any event, Marya doesn’t care. Her attention is not on Hanov, but on the sky, the windows, and the trees, which are glowing with her happiness, and on the “triumph” of her sudden restoration to her true self.

What has happened to her is profound, and has nothing to do with Hanov: something long-dead just flickered back alive in her.

And the light we imagine in her eyes at that moment is where all the energy the story has created is being held.

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We’ve said that a story frames a moment of change, saying, implicitly: “This is the day on which things changed forever.” A variant of that says, “This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.” Before the moment at the train tracks, “In the Cart” was a variant of that variant, saying, “This is the day on which it appeared that things might have changed forever, but then they didn’t, because they never could have, of course” (the story of a brief, deceptive welling up of hope). At the train tracks, the story becomes: “This is the day on which things did, in fact, change forever, but in a way we didn’t expect, that might be for better and might be for worse.”

If we feel we are nothing and have always been nothing, that’s one story. But if we feel that we are nothing and then, in one miraculous instant, remember that, once, we were something—is that a happier story or a sadder one?

Well, depends.

We wonder (the story has caused us to wonder): What will be the aftereffects of Marya’s momentary feeling of power and confidence? Has this experience “changed her forever”? Will she still feel that way tomorrow? Will the knowledge that she was once young and beloved stay alive in her and inflect the way she lives?

The penultimate paragraph disposes us to think not; the phrase “shivering and numb with cold” indicates a reversion to her previous state, especially read against the fact that, at her peak moment of happiness, things were “glowing,” a word we associate with warmth.

But one feature of a beautifully ended story is that we can imagine the lives of the characters continuing on beyond it. I can imagine this experience making Marya’s life better, existing as a secret place she sometimes returns to as she rushes around that dismal schoolhouse. I can also imagine it making her life worse: a recurring taunt, a reminder of how far she’s fallen.

And I can imagine the saddest outcome of all, consistent with her life so far: after a few more weeks (months, years) of this dulling life, she forgets about her moment of illumination at the train tracks entirely, the way she once forgot about that childhood aquarium.

What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that we’ve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (“Oh, that poor, lonely person”). We’d understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the story’s virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. She’s not a perfect person who is lonely. She’s an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.

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We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. (I haven’t, so far, given you any reason to distance yourself from me.) If the space between motorcycle and sidecar gets too great, when I corner, you fail to hear about it, and fall out of relationship with me and get bored or irritated and stop reading and go off to watch a movie. Then there’s no character development or plot or voice or politics or theme. There’s no anything.

Chekhov has kept us so close to Marya that we’ve essentially become her. He gave us no reason to put any emotional distance between ourselves and Marya and, on the contrary, has described the working of her mind so well that he seems at times to have been describing the workings of our minds. We are Marya and Marya is us, but us in a different life, one in which we are irremediably lonely.

Does the story solve the problem of loneliness? Suggest a solution? No. It seems to say that such loneliness has always been with us and always will be. As long as there’s love, there’ll be people who aren’t loved. As long as there’s wealth, there’ll be poverty. As long as there’s excitement, there’ll be dullness. The story’s conclusion, essentially, is: “Yes, that’s how it is in this world.”

But the true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way.

Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”

We really feel Marya’s loneliness now. We feel it as our own. We know, if we didn’t before, that loneliness beyond relief is possible, and is all around us, in people showing no outward signs of it, as they go into town, pick up their checks, head quietly home (or stand in line at the post office, or sit in a car at a stoplight, singing with the radio).

Over the course of these eleven pages, the blank mind with which you began has been filled with a new friend, Marya, who, if my experience is any indication, will stay with you forever. And next time you hear someone described as “lonely,” you may, because of your friendship with Marya, find yourself more inclined to think of that person tenderly, even though you haven’t met her yet. YZdZJZrpjyv3/pd96sTmw6k9f9NvRreDlBlJJbt+gdE5TFUwc7JB8lkW8FdlqPC5