Most love stories end at the wedding, the parting or the grave. The Lady with the Dog, written by Anton Chekhov in 1899, ends in the middle of a sentence, so to speak: two people have finally decided what they want, and the story tells us the hardest part is only beginning. If you have never read Chekhov, this is a very good place to start. It takes about half an hour, and it may change what you expect from fiction.
What happens in the story
Dmitri Gurov is a Moscow man in his late thirties, married young to a wife he finds dull and a little frightening. He has a habit of brief affairs, and he speaks of women, privately, in rather low terms. On holiday in Yalta, on the Black Sea, he notices a young woman walking on the seafront with a small white Pomeranian. Her name is Anna Sergeyevna. She is married, bored, and has come alone.
He befriends the dog first, and then the woman. They become lovers within days. Afterwards Anna is stricken with shame and calls herself a fallen woman, while Gurov, who has seen this scene before, cuts a slice of watermelon and sits through her distress with faint impatience. It is not a flattering portrait, and Chekhov does not flatter him.
Anna goes home to her provincial town, which the story simply calls S. Gurov returns to Moscow, expecting to forget her within a month, as he has forgotten the others. He does not. The rest of the story is about the surprise of that failure.
Why the lady with the dog still feels modern
The first thing a new reader notices is how little the plot cares about adultery as a scandal. There is no duel, no ruin, no death under a train, which is how a nineteenth-century novel such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would have handled it. Chekhov is interested in something smaller and stranger: what happens inside a man who thought he understood himself and turns out not to.
Notice the way the story shifts its attention. The early pages are full of surfaces: the seafront, the hats, the dog, the slow social ritual of a resort. As Gurov’s feelings change, the descriptions go quiet. Moscow in winter becomes grey and sleepless. His friends bore him. The things he used to enjoy, the club, the card games, the talk about nothing, now seem like a cage. The prose never announces that he is in love. It simply shows him unable to stand his own life.
A scene worth rereading
Early in the story Gurov wants to tell a friend about his experience and receives a careless reply about the sturgeon at dinner, which had a smell. That remark about the fish flattens him. It is a tiny comic moment, and it is the hinge of the story. He realizes that the most important thing in his life cannot be spoken aloud in the world he lives in. Chekhov gives you no speech about loneliness. He gives you a fish.
How Chekhov builds the ending
Gurov travels to Anna’s town and finds her house, with a long grey fence topped with nails. He sees at once that nothing could be more discouraging. Later he finds her at the theatre, where she is attending a performance with her husband, and the meeting is clumsy and frightened. Anna agrees to visit him in Moscow every few months, telling her husband she is consulting a doctor.
The final scene is in a Moscow hotel room. Gurov looks in the mirror and sees his hair going grey. He thinks about how he has aged, and how this love has come to him late, and that he, who was merely a casual man, is now something else. They begin to talk about how to free themselves from having to hide, how to end the need to meet in secret. No solution appears. The story stops with the sense that the path ahead is long and complicated.
That is the quiet daring of the ending. A conventional story would offer reunion or tragedy. Chekhov offers an open question and trusts the reader to carry it. For many writers since, the unresolved ending has been a model: you finish the story and it keeps happening in your head.
Things to watch for on a second reading
- The dog. It is the excuse for the first conversation, and it quietly disappears from the plot once it has done its work. Little objects in Chekhov do their job and step aside.
- Gurov’s two lives. He says his real life, the one that matters, happens in secret, behind a screen of dull public habits. The story then asks what happens when the secret becomes the only real thing.
- The moral tone. Chekhov does not condemn and does not approve. He was a doctor by training, and critics often point to a physician’s calm in the way he describes human weakness without scolding it.
- The sea. Both the early and later passages about Yalta mention the sea’s indifference, and the sound of it seems to say that all of this, the affairs, the shame, the hope, is small and will pass. Yet the story argues, gently, that small things are exactly what a life is made of.
Which translation to read
Chekhov wrote in Russian, and the English versions differ more than people expect. Constance Garnett’s early twentieth-century translations are in the public domain and widely available, and they are what many readers first met. They sometimes smooth over the dry humor of the original, and later translators have tried to restore it. If you can, compare the opening paragraph in two versions. You will see how much of Chekhov’s tone lives in small choices of word and rhythm.
A few facts that help
Chekhov wrote the story while living in Yalta himself, partly for his health, since he suffered from tuberculosis. He knew the seafront he describes. He died in 1904 at the age of 44, so this story comes from the last years of his career, when he had settled into the plain, unemphatic style that made him famous. He also wrote plays during this period, including The Seagull and Three Sisters, and the same habits appear there: people talk past each other, and the important thing is nearly always left unsaid.
Writers from Katherine Mansfield to Raymond Carver have been described as his heirs. The comparison is worth testing yourself. After you finish this story, read a short piece by one of them and see whether the same pressure is present beneath the calm sentences.
Closing thoughts
You do not need to like Gurov to be moved by him. That may be the point. Chekhov takes a man who is selfish and ordinary, and shows the moment when he is surprised into honesty. Read it once for the plot, which is simple, and a second time for the pauses between the lines, which are not. It is one of the shortest routes into the idea that a story can be about almost nothing and still be about everything that matters.
