Ariadne (short story)
The first one, chronologically (and according to Yuri Sobolev who was the first to maintain this connection), was Ariadna Charets (who also shared the patronym Grigoryevna with the character), a daughter of the Taganrog City Gymnasium inspector Grigory Cherets.
Later scholars came to agree that while "Ariadna" provided the true portrait of a Taganrog beauty, "The Teacher of Literature" had to do more with the factual side of the early years of her marital life.
In a similar manner, with Chekhov absent, in Yalta, Mizinova (his then beau) fell for Ignaty Potapenko, a married man with a reputation of womanizer, who was admired by ladies and "knew well how to love them, too", according to Nemirovich-Danchenko.
This apparently was the reason why Chekhov (still fresh from the scandal caused by "The Grasshopper") had doubts about publishing the story in Russkaya Mysl and suggested that Viktor Goltsev (a close friend of both Mizinova and Potapenko) should decide himself whether it was suitable for the magazine.
[3] Meanwhile, after the publication of the story in Russkaya Mysl, in the circle of Chekhov's Moscow friends the rumours started to circulate that the real woman behind the Ariadna character was not Mizinova, but the actress Lydia Yavorskaya.
The journalist Nikolai Yezhov in his 28 December 1895 letter told Chekhov that he'd "found ridiculous such insinuations spread by the most insightful part of our readership", but in his 1909, Istorichesky Vestnik-published memoirs[8] he would make a lot of them, calling the author a man prone to "petty vindictiveness".
[3] Travelling from Odessa and Sevastopol, the narrator on board the steamboat meets a man called Ivan Shamokhin, who tells him a story of his love for a woman named Ariadna Kotlovich.
His attempts at escaping are all in vain: he is now totally under the spell of Ariadna... As seems to be prince Maktuev, "a wealthy man but an utterly insignificant person" whom she had once refused and (as it later turns out) has never been able to forgive herself for that.
Sick of her Russian rural environment and (what she perceives as) poverty, Ariadne runs off to Europe with Lubkov, a married man whose only claim to virtue seems to be his vivaciousness.
Elena Shavrova[note 1] in her December 1895 letter suggested that "Ariadne" may well become a common name, "for it truly and realistically summarizes a true woman character" (la vraie femme aux hommes).
Tatyana L. Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy's daughter, wrote on 30 March 1899: "I am always amazed when I see a male writer who understand so deeply the woman's nature...
Y. Govorukha-Otrok in Moskovskiye Vedomosti compared Ariadna negatively to Turgenev's Torrents of Spring, saw it as superficial and panned as belonging to the Pyotr Boborykin territory of anecdotal prose.
[16] Viktor Burenin disagreed, but (in his two reviews for Novoye Vreamya) accused Chekhov of having slipped into decadent mode and dismissed it as an ineffectual comment on "fashionable ideas of today", "all those graphomaniac Ariadnes and Chaykas who lie to themselves in their own writings".
