A Story of Illicit Love: The Lady with the Dog

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Anton Chekhov's short story The Lady with the Dog

This is the story of a man and a woman who meet while on a vacation and what happens. This is one of Chekhov's most celebrated stories written in his his usual spare prose and packed with meaning. Please read the story if you are not familiar with it and start posting when you are ready. I am ready to reply.

http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1297/

If you are interested in short story discussion, but not interested in Chekhov, please let me know. If you have other ideas about how to go about this please say so. I am trying to do something for those who want to actually discuss an actual literary text, but who do not have time to read full length books. A short story can usually be read in less than an hour.

I like the idea of posting the text so that it is readily available, and no one has to go out to buy a book just for one story. Be aware that because of copyright laws, it is hard to find most more recent authors on line.

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Oh, looks great, Hazlitt! Thanks. (No time to read now, but hope to later.)

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Well, the story is familiar to me from very long ago (I read it in the original version while being a high school student, some 25 years ago), but I want to notice the extremely high quality of translation: when I read the story, I did not feel that it was in English, I felt the specific Chekhov's style of writing.

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Ahhh.

It's beautiful. Bracing, true, elemental. It is interesting because if I read it in the New Yorker today, no knowledge of the author (which is how I usually read fiction in the New Yorker, as I find I am prejudiced for or against it if I know in advance who wrote it), I would find it beautifully written but stale... the theme has been done to death. (There was a story a year or two ago in the New Yorker by a Japanese author I like very much that was very similar.) But knowing that it's the template, the original, the one that influenced countless others...

Two questions for steissd: 1) What is the significance of "Dmitri" vs. "Dimitri"? 2) Do you think "flunkey" was the right word for Anna's husband?

Other questions (general): Was there anything specific to Anna that called forth those reactions from Gurov, or was it more about where he was in his life and what she represented? Do they have a chance of happiness together? (I think no. Too many illusions, too deeply damaged. They wouldn't survive the day-to-day grind of being together. Gurov would miss his daughter, hate that she hates him for what he did... etc.)

Lines I loved:

Quote:

Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings -- the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky -- 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.

Quote:

And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

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The story opens in Yalta. In the first few paragraphs what do we learn about Gurov's attitude toward women, and how does Anna feel about men?

Who is telling the story?

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Gurov finds it amusing to hold himself aloof from women and call them "the lower race"; but it is a sham.

Anna does not respect her husband; however she is a romantic, and self-deluding.

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Sozobe, I too wondered about the use of the word "flunky." I decided that it referred more to his personality or of how he perceived himself than it did to his actual position, job, or function in the world. If I recall correctly, when Gurov observed him in the theater he acted in a subservient manner.

I also liked the two passages you quoted. The part about the secret life seemed so true to life. Most of my working life, I felt that my real life was something that my fellow workers world know nothing about.

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Here are the opening three paragraphs:

"IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.

"And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same béret, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every one called her simply "the lady with the dog."

"If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss to make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected. "

It strikes me that Gurov was sitting around looking for action. Perhaps there were no interesting women to be found. Then suddenly they are talking about the "new arrival" almost as if they spoke of merchandise. He is simply interested in another casual affair.

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Oh, definitely. And Anna was too. She probably didn't admit it to herself, and I don't think this was "another", but that's what she was looking for.

Well... not "casual". She was looking for something more Profound, Meaningful, Life-altering. But an affair.

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Sozobe, It seems to me that Anna was disillusioned by her marriage to a flunky, and maybe resigned that life held nothing more for her. I had thought that she was just killing time walking the dog until he arrived in Yalta.

Do you think she was parading about in hopes of attracting an interesting man? Perhaps deluding herself that she was not so engaged?

As for Gurov, I doubt he had any idea what it was to feel love of the kind that was in store for him. All he knew was that he couldn't live without the company of women, and he was on the lookout.

What do you think?

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I completely agree that Gurov was on the lookout, and had no idea what he was in for.

In terms of Anna, though:

Quote:

"Forgiven? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and don't attempt to justify myself. 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! . . . I was fired by curiosity . . . you don't understand it, but, I swear to God, I could not control myself; something happened to me: I could not be restrained. I told my husband I was ill, and came here. . . . And here I have been walking about as though I were dazed, like a mad creature; . . . and now I have become a vulgar, contemptible woman whom any one may despise."

I think she never loved her husband, was always on the lookout for something more profound. I don't think she was parading herself, per se -- I don't think she connected the dots. But she wandered around waiting for life to happen to her.

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What did you think of the scene where she is pouring her heart out and he's sitting there eating watermelon (I picture the juice running down his chin and him spitting the seeds into a bowel)?

I could picture this in a movie.

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Right, that's the scene (the pouring her heart out part is what I quoted above.) It's masterful in going to the heart of each of their (flawed) characters.

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Sozobe, you are obviously right about her. Somehow, I had not noticed that line about her having lied to her husband about her reason for going to Yalta.

And yet, after that plaintive speech, he says, " I don't understand. .. What is it you want?"

Sozobe, it is obvious that you and I were posting right past each other for a few minutes )

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Yeah, what was interesting is we seemed to keep posting very similar things! Smile

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Russian names Dmitri and Dimitri are virtually the same; currently, Dimitri is considered being somewhat archaic, it can be more frequently found among Bulgarians and Greeks that belong to the same Christian denomination the Russians do. The name origins from the ancient Greek, and its menaning is "devoted to Demeter (the pre-Christian Greek goddess of fertility)". Later the name became Christian, and there is a popular Russian Orthodox saint, St. Dmitri of Don (not the British Don river, but the Russian one, it is located to the South-West of Volga). This was a Grand Duke of Moscow that defeated Tartars in 1342, thus contributing to Russian independence from the Muslim conquerors. His significance in the Russian history is parallel to this of Charles Martell that defeated Arabs in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD, in the French one.
I have some difficulty in assessment of Anna Sergeyevna's husband. He seems to me being quite a regular bourgeois man; his wife got, maybe, bored with routine of life with him, and this caused her interest in Gurov.

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Thanks for the history, steissd. Interesting.

What I was asking specifically is why it was significant that Gurov's wife called him "Dimitri" instead of "Dmitri." Was it an intellectual affectation?

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Well, the plot of the story pertains to the end of 19th century. I guess, at that time both versions were in use.

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OK. The way this was phrased...

Quote:

She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home.

...made me think that the "Dmitri/ Dimitri" distinction would signal something to a Russian reader of that time, such as intellectual pretentiousness.

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A Story of Illicit Love: The Lady with the Dog

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