Chekhov's last story - and why it's not qute a feminist manifesto

The Fiancee, Anton Chekhov's last story?, definitely the last story in the Pevear-Volokhonsky collection of Chekhov stories, could be his most pro-feminist story, an antidote to The Darling, but things are never so black and white with Chekhov. First of all, this story from about 1904 (?) coinciding with the composition of his four great plays, and it seems in itself that it could be a sketch for a play: The eponymous fiancee lives in the provinces (of course, like most Chekhov characters), is engaged to a blowhard and lives with her crude but wealthy grandmother and her educated but oblivious mother - they have an occasional summer visitor, a distant cousin, Sasha, who once had great promise as an artist but now works in a printing shop in Moscow and is considered, and considers himself, a failure - he's a loner, a ill with some kind of heart of lungs problem - in other words, a real Chekhov type, seems to have stepped right out of one of the plays. His role in the story to persuade the Fiancee that she's about to miss out on life, that she should walk away from the intended marriage and travel and find herself. And she does so - leaving the fiancee, creating a bit of a scandal (no one really thinks she went away with Sasha for romantic reasons - though it's never stated, it seems he's probably a gay man) - alienating her mother and grandmother. So she's something like Chekhov's version of Hedda Gabbler - and this could be a feminist manifesto, except that the F. requires a male intermediary to convince her to walk out on the marriage: whereas The Darling showed a woman who appeared dependent but was in fact independent, the Fiancee shows a woman who appears independent but in fact dependent - on a man. I suspect this might have been a reason Chekhov did not treat this material in dramatic form - the action of the story was too much imposed on the Fiancee from without (by Sasha) rather than coming from within her own character, as part of her development. Still, it's a beautiful story with a haunting ending, as the F. returns to her mother's home and ultimately packs to leave forever, or so she thought - as Chekhov slyly remarks. Pevear stresses in his into to this collection that Chekhov is rarely overtly political - one of his many great strengths as a writer - but The Fiancee is an exception, in part - notably the very powerful scene when Sasha points out to the Fiancee that her supposedly educated mother allows servants to sleep on rotting bedding on the kitchen floor - a stunning indictment of class power and privileges, that moves the Fiancee and should move anyone (even a Republican).