“The Darling” traces Olga’s Love and Dependence, which prevent her from asserting her Agency and Individual Identity, locking her into a cycle of profound happiness and despair. Trapped by her own deep-rooted reliance on others for her sense of self, Olga fails to change by the end of the story.

To convey the cyclical nature of Olga’s relationships, Chekhov uses a distinct structure, which acclaimed contemporary writer George Saunders calls a “pattern story” (Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Bloomsbury, 2021). The pattern is as follows: Olga is lonely; she feels a deep need for love and affection; she latches onto the nearest available love object; they marry or move in together; she adopts that person’s concerns and way of life, repeating their opinions verbatim; the love object dies or disappears; Olga falls into despair, alone once again; and then the cycle starts over.

By using this structural repetition, Chekhov emphasizes how deeply Olga’s Love and Dependence runs and how they result in every relationship being a mirror image of the others. Through her marriages to Kukin and Pustovalov, her relationship with Smirnin, and finally her mothering of Sasha, she calls all of them “my little dove,” just as they and the townspeople know her as “darling.