30 pages • 1 hour read
Anton ChekhovThe Lady With The Dog
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1899A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Communication Inability or Failure
The characters’ failure or inability to communicate throughout the story often contributes to a lingering uncertainty about how they relate to one another. Apparently commenting on larger problems of modern life, Chekhov suggests that the resulting ambivalence is endemic across genders and relationships. Gurov’s habitual avoidance of his wife and his unfaithfulness to her point to an unavoidable breakdown of communication between them. On occasions when he spends time around his wife, like in the company of men, he must be also “bored and not himself,” distant and “uncommunicative” (569).
In contrast, Gurov generally feels comfortable around other women, but this apparent ease does not consistently characterize his relationship with Anna. Early in their acquaintance in Yalta, they share a meal silently; later on, as they watch a steamer’s arrival, Anna talks a lot but asks “disconnected questions, forgetting next moment what she had asked” (571). Eventually, she falls silent, and when Gurov proposes an evening outing, she does not reply. Even amid otherwise ongoing conversations, these silences suggest an ambiguity that overshadows the relationship. As Chekhov’s characters cannot or will not disclose their true thoughts and desires, the exact nature and extent of their relationship remains uncertain—for them and for readers.
In the Yalta hotel room, as Anna verbalizes her remorse about their sexual intimacy, her words appear to Gurov as “strange and inappropriate” (572). He feels boredom and annoyance, viewing her emotions and words as “unexpected and inopportune” (573). Gurov’s response—silently eating watermelon for half an hour—again ruptures their communication and forecloses opportunities for genuine emotional connection that cannot be easily restored later. Despite all the romanticism of their following moments at Oreanda, their mutual silence dominates the scene. As their affair in Yalta continues, so does their inability to communicate, as Anna often meets Gurov’s compliments with sadness.
Gurov’s return to Moscow condemns him to secrecy and silence about his growing love for Anna. When he casually tries to mention Anna to an acquaintance, the non sequitur reply prompts him to reconsider his Moscow life as shallow and inconsequential. Detesting its worthless “pursuits and conversations,” Gurov acutely feels the weight of pervasive communication breakdown (578). Gurov and Anna’s meeting at the theater of S—shocks them both into silence, and apart from a few muttered phrases, Gurov’s words then fail him. Just as Gurov views his ties to his Moscow life as tenuous, his love for Anna also seems more fragile in such instances.
In the final hotel room scene, the inability to communicate persists between the characters, their hard-won love still seems frail, and their connections seem to fail as soon as they establish them. In her sadness, Anna for a while “could not speak; she was crying” (583); when Gurov wishes to offer words of comfort, he seems silenced by glimpsing Anna and himself reflected in the mirror. Despite some growth of their relationship throughout the story, at this point, Anna and Gurov still struggle to connect by articulating their thoughts and feelings. Chekhov’s comparison of their relationship to birds living in separate cages suggests not only Anna and Gurov’s present marriages but also the persistence of boundaries even in their shared love for one another.
Like with Anna and Gurov’s future, Chekhov’s narrator leaves the extent of their love and its depth uncertain in the end. The characters’ shared love must overcome both external social boundaries and internal communication barriers. In the context of Chekhov’s criticism of institutionalized marriage, these failures in the story point to an ongoing communication struggle and the resulting isolation and uncertainty Chekhov sees as characteristic of the modern marriage. At times, Chekhov shows communication failure to be more gender-specific and more prevalent among men than women. However, mixed-gender social situations and Gurov’s habitual silence among men form the story into Chekhov’s broader commentary on the ambivalence of human relationships.
Conflict Between a Life Lived and a Life Desired
Chekhov uses Gurov’s reflection on his double life to examine the persistent incongruity between a human life lived and a human life desired. This incongruity adds another layer to his social commentary on modern life. At first, Gurov’s extramarital affairs seem to soften this apparent conflict. They compensate for his unhappy Moscow life with intimacies that Gurov misses in his marriage and family. On returning from Yalta, Gurov comes to a crisis when he faces the widening gap between his increasing love for Anna and the Moscow lifestyle that he now abhors. His lived life of conventional marriage and family now seems detached from the true center of his life as he wishes to live it. Gurov begins to reconcile his inward desires and outward choices only as he pursues his love for Anna. In Gurov’s changes, Chekhov suggests a potential to reject patriarchal stereotypes or diminish their influence on the relationship.
Earlier in the story, Anna faces a similar conflict. She tells Gurov that as she acknowledges her self-deception in her marriage, she also desires “something better” (573). She insists on wanting all along to “live” a “different sort of life”—a “pure, honest life” without sin (573). At this point, she sees her affair with Gurov as sinful. Anna’s sense of her affair and her marriage persists, even when the two part in Yalta, because they “ought never to have met” (575). Only later does Anna realize more fully how her loveless marriage to Von Diderits may be a greater sin. To bring her choices and desires closer together, Anna seeks a life of honesty and purity outside her hypocritical marriage in her relationship with Gurov. As Chekhov’s story captures Anna’s internal moral realignment, it also emphasizes the kind of pressures facing the modern marriage.
The story suggests that these changes are far from linear. As Anna and Gurov transition to a relationship that promises greater harmony between their lives lived and their lives desired, their respective paths through these changes are circuitous. For Gurov, his already unhappy conventional life becomes even more loathsome to him. He also begins to see his former affairs as loveless and futile, while his love for Anna grows into a truer, far more essential, and integral part of his person. Anna similarly learns to recognize the sinfulness of her miserable marriage and hope for a redemption that lies in her more honest relationship with Gurov. Here, Chekhov suggests a web of internal tensions in the institution of marriage that may be hard to untangle without stepping out of marriage itself.
Yet, even with these changes in their sense of their respective marriages and relationship, the internal incongruity between Anna and Gurov’s desires and their actual lives persists. On one hand, it appears that “fate itself had meant them for one another” (584). At the same time, they fail to comprehend how the same fate traps them in their respective loveless marriages. Unlike at their parting in Yalta for Anna, this time the resolution seems far from clear. As the characters reach a greater harmony between their desires and their choices, the story’s ending still leaves them in the state of lingering, unresolved conflict. The final irresolution of this tension suggests that a divergence between the desired and the real may be an inevitable human predicament, inherent in all the complexity and contrariness of the human condition. It seems that Anna and Gurov learn to see their persistent predicament more clearly at the end of the story. In this sense, Chekhov hopes, “this love of theirs had changed them both” (584).
Characters and the Natural World
Chekhov’s use of nature both stimulates the characters’ development and inhibits their growth. With a humanist move at the end of the story, Chekhov reduces nature to a blank space, where his protagonists alone can make or unmake the difficult future ahead of them. Chekhov’s use of summertime in Yalta, a popular Black Sea resort, instills into Gurov and Anna a certain degree of ease, creating a kind of oasis in which their relationship can naturally unfold. Yalta’s reputation for illicit romances already makes their connection more likely. Combined with the relative anonymity among many seasonal visitors, Yalta’s setting soothes Gurov into feeling “fairly at home” (568). This is a different kind of home from his native Moscow, where he “did not like to be at home” (569). In Yalta, away from his wife, Gurov’s experienced eye quickly perceives “that [Anna] was a lady, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was dull there” (569).
Chekhov evokes here a kind of tourist mythology that Gurov uses to seek out Anna—a potential for a brief but bright passion, with the summer warmth, scenic mountains, and the sea as the backdrop. As they discuss the “strange light on the sea,” the “water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it” (570). This picturesque beauty contrasts with Gurov’s Moscow life, where he seems to have traded his former ambitions as an arts student and opera singer for a position in a bank. Yalta, however, is its own world, perfect for one of his “easy conquests” (569).
Chekhov’s narrative, however, quickly pivots away from a view of nature as a custom-made frame for human events. The splendor of the restless sea at Oreanda suggests a repose of oblivion and death and points to a potential future in which humanity no longer exists to admire its beauty. This scene and subsequent sadness overshadow the relationship despite Gurov’s best efforts. The sea’s memento mori—meaning “remember that you die,” a reference to human mortality—at Oreanda anticipates a cooler autumnal air at Anna’s parting from Yalta and the approaching winter.
Gurov’s return to Moscow and Anna’s to S— ushers in a growth of their relationship that seems to have ended at Yalta. In Moscow, Gurov comes to see Yalta’s “cypresses and palms” as foreign to his world (576). At the same time, in his growing love for Anna, Gurov begins to perceive his familiar Moscow life as just as foreign: stupid, repetitive, and meaningless. Anna’s growing feelings for Gurov unfold in her own “madhouse or a prison” (578). As Gurov learns later, she inhabits a gray world, with a looming gray fence outside her windows.
Chekhov’s narrative earlier features Yalta’s world, which organically fits the fleeting beauty of the characters’ love. In the story’s later scenes, the harshness of autumn and winter mirror Anna and Gurov’s inner turmoil. For Gurov and Anna, Moscow and S— become foil settings for their love, organically unfitted not only for a love affair but also for any meaningful human relationship.
In this way, nature vacillates between a friend and a foe for the lovers. Gurov’s walk to the hotel to meet Anna dispels the meanings and roles nature seems to have played so far in the story: “Snow was falling in big wet flakes,” creating a kind of tabula rasa—a clean slate—for Anna and Gurov (582). The snow’s whiteness makes a freer space for them to reconsider their relationship not in terms of their Yalta past or Moscow present, but as an unknown future, a world of their own making. Chekhov’s use of the natural world throughout the story at times follows and at times defies its significance for the story’s characters. With nature’s final appearance as white snow, Chekhov playfully erases its presence from the story, seemingly to make room for the characters’ own unrealized future.
Related Titles
By Anton Chekhov
