The Lady With The Dog

“He remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly took possession of him.”

Setting the story in the seaside resort of Yalta, Chekhov initiates the major movement of the plot. Gurov finds that Yalta’s reputation for illicit romances spurs him to seek a quick and pleasant affair with Anna. His musings here suggest a situational irony—the contrast between the lightness of his expectations about Anna and the difficulties their love will outlast.

“This must have been the first time in her life she had been alone in surroundings in which she was followed, looked at, and spoken to merely from a secret motive which she could hardly fail to guess. He recalled her slender, delicate neck, her lovely grey eyes.”

Gurov anticipates the ease with which their relationship will progress as he reflects on his acquaintance with Anna. His initial admiration of Anna’s graceful features and beautiful eyes foreshadows how this admiration persists and grows throughout the story.

“It’s not my husband but myself I have deceived. And not only just now; I have been deceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be a good, honest man, but he is a flunkey! I don’t know what he does there, what his work is, but I know he is a flunkey! I was twenty when I was married to him. I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. ‘There must be a different sort of life,’ I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live!”

Regretting her affair with Gurov, Anna realizes that she began deceiving herself long before her relationship with him. Gurov later also develops a clearer awareness of his own self-deception. This shared awareness initiates the central quest for a life of greater integrity that the characters want to embody in their relationship.

“The monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more.”

Anna and Gurov seem to sense in the seascape’s permanence a sublimity—a terrifying beauty that points to humans’ insignificance, transience, and death. This memento mori-like meditation presents a rare glimpse of Chekhov philosophizing. However, this insight only lulls the characters into complacency and carefree enjoyment of their affair in the moment.

“Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”

Perhaps approximating Chekhov’s own convictions, Gurov expresses the idea that the world’s greatest aberration is humans’ willful surrender of their own integrity. This momentary epiphany in Oreanda foreshadows Gurov’s attempt to regain a degree of his compromised integrity in his relationship with Anna.

“He was genuinely warm and affectionate with her, but yet in his manner, his tone, and his caresses there had been a shade of light irony, the coarse condescension of a happy man who was, besides, almost twice her age. All the time she had called him kind, exceptional, lofty; obviously he had seemed to her different from what he really was, so he had unintentionally deceived her....”

Gurov develops early inklings of his duplicity as he and Anna part in Yalta. He also suspects that he has been dishonest not only with Anna but also with himself. Throughout the story, Gurov’s sense of his dishonest life and his discontent grow and eventually align more closely with Anna’s moral standing as they both pursue a more honest life together.

“Anna Sergeyevna did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him. When he shut his eyes he saw her as though she were living before him, and she seemed to him lovelier, younger, tenderer than she was; and he imagined himself finer than he had been in Yalta.”

Contrary to his expectations, Gurov’s affection for Anna does not fade but rather intensifies upon his return to Moscow. Now Gurov surrenders to this increasingly idealized love as it overshadows a more manipulative and less perfect time with Anna in Yalta.

“Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.”

Gurov feels so consumed by his love for Anna that his Moscow life feels like an imprisonment. Anticipating the latter image of the two caged birds, the narrative emphasizes here how conventional marital and social bonds can degenerate into drudgery. This instance also foreshadows Gurov and Anna’s search for greater freedom from these constraints.

“She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love; she looked at him intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.

‘I am so unhappy,’ she went on, not heeding him. ‘I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why, have you come?’”

When Anna confesses her love for Gurov when they see each other at the theater, Gurov does not quite say similar words to her. However, his intense feelings for Anna and his discontent without her in Moscow seem to mirror Anna’s sentiments, pointing to the more balanced sense of love the two have come to share.

“Everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open.”

Gurov’s reflection on his double life focuses on one of the story’s larger concerns with how publicly visible life can conflict with one’s inmost convictions. Paradoxically, Anna and Gurov violate outer social norms to reclaim a measure of their inner integrity.

“It was evident to him that this love of theirs would not soon be over, that he could not see the end of it. Anna Sergeyevna grew more and more attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable to say to her that it was bound to have an end some day; besides, she would not have believed it!”

Gurov reflects on how, when continuing his relationship with Anna seems impossible, the end of their love also seems impossible to imagine now. Recalling Gurov’s mistaken sense of beginnings and endings throughout the story, Chekhov’s narrative bends plot conventions toward an ending that only points to an ambiguous beginning.

“His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it seemed strange to him that he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own.”

Observing his and Anna’s reflection in the mirror, Gurov ponders their transience and mortality. Unlike earlier at Oreanda, this prominent memento mori moment reinforces the urgency of their relationship despite the odds.

“Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages.”

With these similes that characterize Anna and Gurov’s enduring love, Chekhov on one hand hopefully affirms marriage as a truer form of love, friendship, and familial bonds. On the other hand, he points out the crippling effects of institutionalized marriage that normalize a marital relationship as a form of imprisonment. His story dramatizes the conflict and overlap between these two viewpoints.