Staff-Capt. Ryabovich of the N-Artillery Brigade would have understood the power of that kiss. After experiencing an unexpected embrace from an upper-class stranger in a darkened room, and unable to identify the woman who kissed him and then fled, Ryabovich spends days romanticizing the moment, carrying the memory with him like a boutonniere of the heart that only he can see, smell, and touch.
‘The Kiss’
When an artillery brigade on the march encamps in a village, a local aristocrat, Gen. von Rabbek, welcomes 19 officers into his home to join a party of relatives, visitors, and neighbors already in session. The officers join in the festivities, dancing, drinking, and playing billiards.
All except Ryabovich.
Extremely self-conscious and highly self-critical, he watches the others as if from a bleacher, removed from the chatter and conviviality. While trying to find his way back to the party after watching a game of billiards, he becomes lost in the large house and enters a darkened room. Hidden by the shadows, a woman whispers “At last!” and slips her arms around his neck, kisses him, shrieks when she realizes her mistake, and disappears before Ryabovich can react. When he rejoins the others, Ryabovich studies the young women and tries to guess which one of them has set his heart racing, but to no avail.
Back in his quarters, he can think of nothing but her: “His neck ... still seemed anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops.” On the march the next day, “He pictured her and his happiness as he pleased, and put no rein on his imagination.” That night, when he shares his story with two comrades, Lobytko and Merzlyakov, he feels that this telling has flattened his adventure, and “vowed never to confide again.”
At the end of the summer, the troops encamp again near von Rabbek’s house, but it seems a second invitation will not be forthcoming. Standing beside a nearby river, Ryabovich thinks “How unintelligent everything is!” In that moment of epiphany, he decides that the world is “an inscrutable, aimless mystification” and that “his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless.”
The Man
Chekhov’s introduction of Staff-Capt. Ryabovich to readers is abrupt and direct. He is “a short, round-shouldered, spectacled officer, whiskered like a lynx. While his brother officers looked serious or smiled constrainedly, his face, his lynx whiskers, and his spectacles seemed to explain: ‘I am the most timid, modest, and undistinguished officer in the whole brigade.’”
Ryabovich fulfills that self-assessment during the first part of the von Rabbeks’ party. He scarcely speaks to anyone, and “amazed at the daring of men who in sight of a crowd could take unknown women by the waist,” he, of course, never dares to ask any of these women for a dance.
Then the accidental kiss occurs. Momentarily gone are his previous shyness and self-lacerations. “He felt that he must dance, talk, run into the garden, laugh unrestrainedly,” and for just a few minutes his inhibitions vanish. When Madame von Rabbek passes near him, his wide, gracious smile causes her to pause and engage him in conversation.
Outside Influences
Nature conspires with circumstances to make this kiss special. The time is late May, and inside the house the open windows make the air fragrant “of roses, of lilac, and of the young leaves of the poplar.” To Ryabovich, a bit tipsy on cognac, “it seemed to him that the smell of roses, of poplars, and lilac came not from the garden, but from the ladies’ faces and dresses.” Just a little later, in the dark room in which the kiss takes place, “the windows were wide open, and there was a smell of poplars, lilac and roses.”
On their return to camp that evening, the officers pass a bush where a nightingale is singing. They shake the bush, but the bird remains in place and continues its melodies, much to the admiration of the officers.
On Ryabovich’s return trip to the village, it is the last day of August, and “there was no sound of the brave nightingale, and no scent of poplar and fresh grass.” The romantic urges that budded in spring in Ryabovich’s heart are giving way to fall, and soon to winter.
Explorations
On my first reading of “The Kiss,” I found Ryabovich a comic figure, almost unbelievable for loading so much freight onto a few seconds of mistaken affection. His disillusionment in the end, when he essentially declares life meaningless, seems intended as both a valid and a universal experience.
A second and a third reading changed my mind.
Ryabovich’s sudden insight—that life is meaningless—is in fact the subjective justification for a failure of the imagination in a man we already know as weak. To declare that life is without meaning is, in this case, an overblown interpretation. After receiving the kiss, Ryabovich could just as easily have interpreted it as a great gift, an invitation to open himself to possibility.
The kiss that had brought on hopeless infatuation had as well the power to rescue him from his self-made, negative image: to make him more of a man, grow in confidence, become healthier and more self-assured. We see this possibility in his brief conversation with Madame von Rabbek at the party when, for once, his shyness and self-loathing are absent, banished by a kiss.
Moreover, “The Kiss” should remind us that prototypes of Ryabovich live among us today here in America—lonely men who yearn for affection, but who believe, like Ryabovich, that their physical appearance or their personality renders that sort of love an impossibility. Instead of falling, as Ryabovich does, into despair, we should hope they take the leap toward life and the possible engagement with life that the kiss has offered them.
So, while some may find “The Kiss” a story about the hopelessness of the human condition, for me it speaks more of missed chances, of the dangers of turning a blind eye to possibility, and of the love and affection so many of us need and desire.
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
However long a man like Ryabovich has to live, he has already made friends with death.
