…as though we four had lost something essential to life which we should never find again

Chekov’s The Beauties (1888) tells the story of a young boy traveling with his grandfather one hot day from Bolshoe Kryepkoe to Rostov-on-the-Don, when they stop to feed the horses at the house of an old Armenian friend. The Armenian’s daughter, Masha, serves them tea, and Chekov recounts the unsettling power of her beauty:

I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstasy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.

“as though we four” is a picture of this simple scene, in triadic and sometimes cross-related harmony, born from a love of Rachmaninoff Preludes and Schubert Sonatas.