But then Anna tries to imagine Pimenov in her world, and immediately the attraction is lost. Moreover, the advice she gets from different quarters is contradictory: some recommend a husband from the nobility, others recommend a worker, while others recommend debauchery. Anna’s problem is that she has too much – too much money, too much femininity to lavish on a potential partner, too many choices.

Philanthropy is an important secondary theme in the story. As Anna recalls, the Russian merchants prefer to give their money to the indigent rather than their own workers. While this idea is not explained directly, the perspicacious reader might suspect that it is because they relish the servile expressions of gratitude that such charity evokes. To salve her own conscience, Anna decides to give the fifteen hundred roubles that have fallen into her lap to an out-of-work bureaucrat, Chalikov, chosen at random. The picture of misery evoked by Chekhov in his depiction of the Chalikov household is subtly nuanced and unsentimental, and is realized from the perspective of Anna herself. Anna is too honest with herself to accept the insincere expressions of gratitude and self-abasement that her generosity evokes. Disgusted by Chalikov’s self-abasement, she quickly renounces her idea of giving all the money to him: however much he receives, he will simply drink it. Chalikov wallows in self-pity and finds solace in vodka and in beating his wife and children. No charity will change that. Eventually the fifteen hundred roubles end up in the hands of the lawyer Lysevich, who will squander them. The Chalikov episode is suggestive of Chekhov’s view of the hopelessness of out-and-out charity, its inability to change circumstances. At the same time, the portrait of Chalikov’s shiftlessness and self-pity serves as a background for the contrasting image of Pimenov – the intelligent and industrious factory-worker, who has both her father’s and her picture on his table and who, for his pains, will receive nothing. Chekhov’s indictment of human attitudes is, as usual, understated and merciless.

Chekhov’s art at its best constitutes an intense condensation of motifs and themes into a poetic whole. ‘The Student’ is perhaps the finest example of this, and indeed this was the opinion of the author himself. Among the typically Chekhovian images that we find in this work are the hunter, the sound of the birds (i.e. the hunter’s prey…), the sudden springtime frost and the light of the fire. However, we find in it a new theme too, and one that was to light the way to certain key works of Russian literature in the century to come. It is the notion of the interconnectedness of history – the continuous chain of events that links the past to the present. The events from the Gospel that the theology student Ivan Velikopolsky recounts to the two widows acquire an unsuspected immediacy and relevance, to the point that the two widows, mother and daughter, react – the mother Vasilisa by smiling and bursting into tears, and the daughter by turning red. The English reader is tempted to compare the situation to Eliot’s ‘even now, in sordid particulars, / The eternal design may appear’. More relevant for Russian literature is the immediacy with which the retelling of the Gospel speaks to a suffering people; this was to become the leitmotif of two central works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

As in other works we have discussed, in this story too there is an epiphany. Velikopolsky has left his father, a parish priest, coughing at home (evidently suffering from tuberculosis); his barefoot mother is cleaning the samovar, while their twenty-two-year-old son goes shooting, hardly the most sacred Good Friday activity for a theology student from a religious family. Velikopolsky is hungry, since his family is observing the fast; his keenly felt hunger (golod) echoes the sudden drop in temperature (kholod). The student is reminded of two constants in the life of the Russian people. At the same time the two widows he encounters have just eaten and are warm because of the fire, yet there is a sense that their religious sentiments are more deeply and directly felt than his, even if they observe the outward trappings of religion less. It is through their reaction to his recounting the story from the Gospel that the student is suddenly overtaken by an intense feeling of joy: ‘… and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning’. Much of Chekhov’s search seems to be precisely for a definition of happiness; here, for a moment, it is captured – and indeed one gets the strong conviction from Chekhov’s works that for him happiness can only be momentary.