Summary of “Clara Milich”
After spending some time on the bench with thoughts of a mysterious stranger, he suddenly felt someone come and stand behind him. Klara Milich was embarrassed, apologizing for her courage, but she wanted so much to tell him.
Aratoff suddenly felt vexed: on himself, at her, on an absurd appointment and on this explanation among the public. Irritation dictated a dry and strained rebuke: “Merciful Empress”, “I’m even amazing,” “I can be useful,” “I’m ready to listen to you.”
Clara was frightened, embarrassed and saddened: “I was deceived into you…” Suddenly her face flushed with an evil and defiant expression: “How is our date stupid! How stupid, and you…” She laughed and quickly disappeared.
Two or three months passed. And then one day he read in the “Moscow Gazette” the message of suicide in Kazan gifted actress and favorite of the public Clara Milich. The reason,
That night Aratoff dreamed that he was walking along the bare steppe. Suddenly a thin cloud appeared in front of him, becoming a woman in white robes. Her eyes were closed, her face white, and her arms hung motionless. Without bending in the back, she lay down on a stone, like a grave, and Aratoff, with folded arms on his chest, lay down beside her. But she got up and went, and he could not even move. She turned around, her eyes were alive, and her face came to life again. She beckoned to him. It was Clara: “If you want to know who I am, go there!”
In the morning he announced to Platoshe that he was going to Kazan. There, from conversations with the widow Milovidova and Anna Clara’s sister, Aratoff learned that Katya had been stubborn, self-willed and self-righteous since childhood. Father despised for drunkenness and mediocrity. All of it was fire, passion and contradiction. She said: “I do not want this kind of as I want, but I do not need others!” – “Well, and if you meet?” – “Meeting… I’ll take.”