figure
Varya
also: Варя
A character in the still-unpublished story draft Suvorin sent Chekhov to edit in December 1891; in its most frightening scene she "smothers" the hero like a domovoi (house-spirit) and initiates him into the secrets of the afterlife, a passage Chekhov singles out as untouchable.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 13 December 1891. Moscow. §3 where Varya smothers the hero, like a house-spirit
Varya, a character in the still-unpublished story draft Suvorin has just sent Chekhov to edit, presumably the same manuscript whose epigraph and proofreading errors Chekhov goes on to discuss in section 4. Chekhov singles out the scene where she "smothers" (\textit{душит}) the hero like a \textit{domovoi} -- a Russian household spirit -- and initiates him into the secrets of the afterlife as the story's most effective, genuinely frightening passage, and warns Suvorin against cutting a word of it or of the horseback-riding scene that follows.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 17 December 1891. Moscow. §3 sees a skeleton lying beside her on the bed, and on
the floor -- Vitalin, dead
Chekhov's own proposed ending for the story: with the maidservant cut, he suggests Vitalin should still die, but by a different mechanism -- accidentally embracing a skeleton in the dark instead of Natasha, who then wakes to find both the skeleton and Vitalin's corpse beside her. It is left unstated in the letter whether Suvorin adopted this specific ending.