In one of the newly-translated stories, Ariadne, he shows us a woman from the point of view of a disgusted lover.  It is a sensitive man’s picture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful.  “This thirst for personal success ... makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold—­to me, to nature, and to music.”  Tchehov extends towards her so little charity that he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had “a neck like goose-skin and a big Adam’s apple,” and who, as he talked, “breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled beef.”  As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her charm: 

She would sleep every day till two or three o’clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed.  At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples or oranges.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as the lover’s rather than as Tchehov’s.  Tchehov sets down the judgment, however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring and vulgar in sexual vanity.  Ariadne’s desire to please is never permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond’s is.  Her will to fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov’s critical mind: 

She waked up every morning with the one thought of “pleasing.”  It was the aim and object of her life.  If I told her that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering.  She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy.  The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in tournaments....  She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world.  Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting me.

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait: 

     Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant
     or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to
     read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

As one reads Ariadne, one feels that those who say the artist is not a judge are in error.  What he must avoid becoming is a prosecuting—­perhaps even a defending—­counsel.