![]() ![]() Their union, while hot-burning, soon seems to them destined to stay furtive and intermittent. In the weeks following this passionate lovers’ meeting, Anna begins a routine of visiting Gurov in Moscow where, the omniscient narrator observes, they “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.” The young wife, Anna Sergeyevna, departs for her home and husband in the provincial town of S_ _ _, while Gurov, with no specific plans for Anna, travels back to his coolly intellectual wife and the tiresome business connections of Moscow.īut the effect of his affair and of Anna (the very lady with the dog-a Pomeranian) soon begin to infect and devil Gurov’s daily life and torment him with desire, so that eventually he thinks up a lie, leaves home and travels to S_ _ _ where he reunites (more or less) with the pining Anna, whom he encounters between the acts of a play expressively titled The Geisha. And after their short, breathless time together, their holiday predictably ends. The two engage in a brief, fervid tryst that seems-at least to the story’s principal character Dmitri Gurov, the Muscovite businessman-not very different from other trysts in his life. One lover is a bored, middle-aged businessman from Moscow, and the other an idle young bride in her twenties-both on marital furlough in the Black Sea Spa of Yalta. “The Lady with the Dog” concerns the chance amorous meeting of two people married to two other people. Such instruction, of course, is not always easy to comply with when one is young. He almost always approaches us with a great deal of focussed seriousness which he means to make irreducible and accessible, and by this concentration to insist that we take life to heart. Chekhov’s wish is to complicate and compromise our view of characters we might mistakenly suppose we could understand with only a glance. ![]() Rather, Chekhov seems to me a writer for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas, any part of which, were we to encounter them in our complex, headlong life with others, might evade even sophisticated notice. ![]() But typical of my attentiveness then, I remember no one telling me anything more than that Chekhov was great, and that he was Russian.Īnd for all of their surface plainness, their apparent accessibility and clarity, Chekhov’s stories-especially the greatest ones-still do not seem so easily penetrable by the unexceptional young. When I read him at age twenty, I had no idea of his prestige and importance or why I should be reading him-one of those gaps of ignorance for which a liberal education tries to be a bridge. Carver.Īs is true of many American readers who encountered Chekhov first in college, my experience with his stories was both abrupt and brief, and came too early. It seems a terrible thing for a story writer to admit, and doubly worse for one whose own stories have been so thoroughly influenced by Chekhov through my relations with other writers who had been influenced by him directly: Sherwood Anderson. Until I began the long and happy passage of reading all of Anton Chekhov’s short stories for the purpose of selecting the twenty for inclusion in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, I had read very little of Chekhov.
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