An Anonymous Story
By Anton Chekhov
An Anonymous Story is a novella published in 1893 that has also been translated as The Story of a Nobody and The Story of an Unknown Man. The unknown man is the narrator, “Stefan”, a revolutionary who has taken an undercover position as a footman in the home of Orlov, an aristocratic playboy, in order to gain access to his father, a powerful bureaucrat. As luck would have it, Orlov has little to do with his father, but does manage to seduce a married woman, Zinaida, who falls in love with him, leaves her husband, and moves in. Orlov finds her affection an inconvenient constraint on his freedom, and soon disappears for weeks at a time, supposedly on “inspection tours in the provinces”, but actually staying with a friend. Stefan’s ideals are crushed by the flagrant hypocrisy on display and the general profligacy and purposelessness. His disillusion is mitigated by his compassion for Zinaida, which morphs into simple passion. He comes clean about Orlov’s activities as well as his own identity and deceit, and convinces her to flee with him to Europe. After several months abroad, he becomes acutely ill, and as she nurses him back to health she realizes he is in love with her, and is not simply an altruistic rescuer. She herself is unwell and pregnant with Orlov’s child. Things do not go well, and the outcome is unexpected, tragic, and complex. There are no heroes here, yet Chekhov makes no moral judgments, which results in a powerful irony that forces reader to resolve ambiguities on their own.
