The Beauty

Ivan Bunin's story, titled "The Beauty", is a brief but devastating study of domestic cruelty and indifference. An aging, widowed court official marries a young woman of striking beauty and sharp, controlling intelligence. This new "Beauty" quickly despises and effectively isolates her husband's seven-year-old son from his previous marriage. Out of fear, the father ignores the boy, who retreats into silence and becomes a non-entity in his own home. The stepmother completes his alienation by ordering his bed moved from the couch to the floor, where he sleeps on a mattress kept inside his deceased mother's large chest. The narrative ends by focusing on the child's solitary, silent routine: setting up his meager bed each night and dutifully putting it back into his mother's "trunk" every morning.