Reading Chekhov

Hanov turns off and Marya's obsessions again take over her thoughts. Her bare life, Chekhov notes, "was making her grow old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead… No one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances." The journey itself is as vexing as the life: Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow, then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants would not let them pass, in another, it was the priest's land and they could not cross it, in another, Ivan Ivonov had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch around it. They kept having to turn back. Eventually, they stop at a rough tavern; outside, wagons filled with large bottles of crude sulfuric acid stand on ground covered with snow and dung. The peasants drinking within show small respect for the schoolteacher. She is practically one of them. On the last leg of the journey the travelers have to cross a river. Semyon chooses to go through the water rather than over a bridge a few miles away. When they enter the river, the horse goes in up to his belly, and Marya's skirt and sleeve get soaked, and so do the sugar and flour she bought in town. On the other side, at a railway crossing, they find the barrier down. The schoolmistress gets out of the cart and stands shivering on the ground. The end of the story is less than a page away. Chekhov writes: [The village] was in sight now, and the school with its green roof, and the church with its crosses flashing in the evening sun; and the station windows flashed too, and a pink smoke rose from the engine… and it seemed to her that everything was trembling with cold. Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing, and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard the sound of the piano, her father's voice; she felt as she had been then, young, good-looting, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstasy, and called softly, beseechingly: "Mother!"

At this moment Hanov and his carriage arrive at the crossing, "and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was flowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it had been a long, tedious, strange dream and now she had awakened…"

The vision abruptly vanishes, like the sun going down in winter. Marya gets back into the cart and proceeds to the village and to her dismal life. The long, tedious, strange dream goes on.