ABOUT LOVE

   --Anton Chekhov

What kinds of love experiences are suggested by Alyohin in “About Love”?  

Alyohin basically speaks of three kinds of love experiences including his love for Anna, which forms the core of the story itself. The first kind of love he refers to is the one between Nikanor the cook and Pelageya, which is filled with violence and is less mutual. The woman loves the not-so-good-looking cook and wants to live with him ‘“just so”’ without marriage despite the cook’s contrary religious conviction. Further, the cook also swears at and beats her when drunk, yet, for a mysterious reason, the woman still seems to love him and does not leave. 

Another kind of love Alyohin speaks of is his own while he was still a student. He recalls how the girl he lived with always expected him to provide for her housekeeping and food. This kind seems to have been motivated by self-interest, and the financial security that Alyohin could provide. Yet, the third kind of love that Alyohin refers to (which is between him and Anna) goes beyond all conventions and all notions of what is honorable or dishonorable about love. This love, although not justifiable on the grounds of social conventions, lasts for a long time, remains unexpressed until it reaches a critical moment in life when it is explicitly reciprocated at the end and yet attains some spiritual height. Although unfulfilled, it is still not motivated by the need to meet the urge of a physical body, and therefore, perhaps the best of all kinds of love Alyohin speaks of. 

How does Alyohin define love?

Actually, Alyohin thinks the ways of love are uncertain and so is personal happiness that comes from being in love. He exemplifies how the beautiful Pelageya falls in love with a not-so-good-looking Nikonar who beats her up. He believes ‘“[love] is a great mystery”’ and everything said about it is not a solution but a statement of questions that remain unanswered. Given this uncertainty, and incapacity to answer the questions surrounding it, one has to look at every such instance of love in its own context or individuality and not generalise wholesale. Love, according to him, is an object to be “poeticized, embellished with roses,” not with “fatal questions.” Further, although he is uncertain about asking oneself, when in love, whether or not it is honorable or dishonorable, stupid or wise, or what its consequences would be, he thinks asking such questions is surely “a hindrance and a source of dissatisfaction and irritation.” He therefore concludes that when one loves, one must start reasoning about love “from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or [one] must not reason at all.”