Here it is, Chekhov’s best-known story. If you, an American reader, have ever read any selection of Chekhov tales, this one was almost certainly included in your volume.
I, too, had read “The Lady With the Dog” (probably more than once) and my hazy, warm memories of it were the main reason that I thought it might be worthwhile to take on the whole of Chekhov.
What can I say? This story was nothing like I remembered. Well, no, that is not exactly right. Certainly I remembered the broad outline of the story correctly (man and woman meet and fall in love) and the indelible final words: “…the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”
What I did not remember was that Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, the man and the woman, are married to other people when they meet; that Gurov is so, so much older than Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the dog; that Gurov is the father of a daughter not too much younger than Anna; that Gurov’s initial encounter with Anna is really a heartless dalliance undertaken in boredom in a heat-soaked, indolent resort town, where he has nothing else to do; that Gurov is generally bored by Anna; that Anna is wretched and guilt-ridden about their affair; that Gurov and Anna return to their spouses and their previous lives; and that Gurov tracks Anna down in her home city and reconnects with her there, which was not her wish.
Whether or not she truly wanted to resume the affair, Anna does. In the end, she sneaks to Moscow, and they meet in her hotel. Gurov—gray-headed, a father to a teenage daughter who seems similar to Anna in her lack of worldliness—and who is not so much younger nor much less sophisticated than Anna–realizes (I want to put that in quotes; he “realizes”) that he has, at long last, found true love.
And it is there, in the hotel, without actually having taken any of the steps toward establishing a true, full relationship with Anna, that Gurov recognizes that “the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”
That sentence certainly must be the most Chekhovian of all Chekhov sentences. But it struck me so much differently when I read it this time, in 2022, than when I first read it, probably back in the 1980s.
I have to say that a part of me was rolling my eyes about the whole story this time around. A mid-life crisis; an older man takes advantage of a young and inexperienced woman; a weepy, semi-hysterical young wife, etc. etc. etc. These days you might describe “The Lady With the Dog” as a portrait of toxic masculinity and, simultaneously, a patronizing portrait of a woman’s need for a man. You wouldn’t be all wrong.
On the other hand, the story does offer a rich, full portrait of the man (less so of the woman) in what is now a cliched situation; and the conclusion rings true—that is, Gurov does recognize that, after a rather manipulative and brief affair, a true relationship with Anna is an entirely different thing, and not an easy one.
And then comes that last sentence. Just to say it again: “the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”
When I read this some thirty or more years ago, as a young man, it seemed the most blindingly romantic moment in fiction, a crystalline statement of the beauty and weight of love.
Now, though, I wonder. Here is the man that Gurov was before meeting Anna: “[he] secretly considered [his wife] unintelligent, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago… and probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them the ‘lower race.’”
That is the guy who, a year later, is making a deep “realization” about the nature of love? Okay, if you say so!
Let’s face it: There’s no guarantee that Gurov will stick with Anna. He’s a lazy, philandering jerk. And he knows, as it says in the early pages of the story, that “every intimacy…inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable.”
Yes, that’s the same guy! So when he realizes that they still have “a long, long road before them,” well, who’s to say he won’t just take the nearest exit?
In all, I still think “The Lady with the Dog” is rich and complex. But it’s a far more ambivalent tale than ever I had found it in past readings. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it a portrait of an inveterate, ugly womanizer, but it might just be that.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
In my commentary on “Three Years,” I suggested looking to “The Lady With the Dog” as another story that points up the unexpected paths of love. These two stories do make a perfect pair, each a melancholy consideration of the ways we relate to the ones we think we love. As a counterweight, though, you could read “Love,” in which a husband cruelly caricatures his wife and insists, against all the evidence, that he loves her madly and truly.
A Chekhov Circus 