In the following essay, Lynd mentions "The Darling" as an example of Chekhov's ability to portray unpleasant situations in sympathetic fashion.

. . .There has, I think, never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as we find in the short stories of Chekhov. His world is populous with the average man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people into books. They have written plays as long as Hamlet, and novels as long as Don Quixote, about ordinary people. They have piled such a heap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him out of existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has a sense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the big subject to literature. Henry James complained reasonably enough of the littleness of the subject in Madame...