‘Ariadne’ is a story about other people’s stories. It’s about Shamokhin, who corners the narrator aboard a Crimean steamer and proceeds to tell the tale of a love affair (“When Germans or Englishmen meet, they talk about the price of wool, the crops, or their personal affairs,” he says, by way of prelude, “but for some reason when Russians come together they only discuss women or sublime truths, but women most of all.”) Shamokhin, with his “little round beard” and embittered misogyny, is an intriguingly recognisable figure in the ‘Cat Person’ era, but I love ‘Ariadne’ for more than its sexual politics; I love how how the story unfolds at one remove or more, coming across, in fact, less as a story than as a study (of Russians, of men, and indeed of stories); I love the narrator’s poised indifference, his splendidly bored detachment. “The day after this meeting I left Yalta,” he ends, with a shrug, “and how Shamokhin’s love affair ended I don’t know.”
First published 1895, collected in Lady With Lapdog And Other Stories, Penguin, 1986
A Personal Anthology 