Where in the world does love come from?
Chekhov's "The Lady With The Little Dog" makes us wonder
There is a moment in Anton Chekhov’s extraordinary story “The Lady With The Little Dog” where the author takes the kind of chance that only a master would dare. The main character, Gurov, a married man on the make, has just seduced Anna, this young wife, after a very brief courtship – if you want to call it that – at a Russian vacation spot called Yalta. And she is the one who immediately regrets it.
“Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in an old painting,” Chekhov writes.
“It’s not good,” she said. “You’ll be the first not to respect me now.”
There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.”
Reading the story, you sort of swallow hard. How unlikeable is Chekhov trying to make this Gurov guy? After all that silence – a HALF HOUR – they start to chat and suddenly, she lets loose, how she married young out of boredom as much as anything, how her husband is “a lackey” and “I told myself there must be a different life. I wanted to live and live…I was burning with curiosity…you won’t understand it, but I swear to God that I couldn’t control myself any longer, something was happening to me…”
She’s bearing her soul to the man while he’s munching on watermelon – not offering her any. And how does Chekhov have him respond?
“Gurov was bored listening, he was annoyed by the naïve tone, by this repentance, so unexpected and out of place; had it not been for the tears in her eyes, one might have thought she was joking or playing a role.”
Reality, her reality has just entered the story. And Gurov, insensitive and selfish, oafish, really, does the only thing he can think of. “Enough, enough,” he says, before kissing her and calming her down. He’s not going to get into this. He just wants to quiet her.
After a bit, they decide it’s time to part, to go back to their own lives. She asks to take one final look at him. Gurov is unmoved.
Here’s Chekhov again: “He had been affectionate with her…but all the same…in his treatment of her in his tone and caresses, there had been a slight shade of mockery…”
Clearly, it seems, this is not a nice man, a character that we are not rooting for in the slightest. Chekhov has shown him in about the least-flattering light we can imagine.
And Anna? “She had all the while called him kind, extraordinary, lofty;” Chekhov writes. “Obviously, he had appeared to her not as he was in reality, and therefore he had involuntarily deceived her.”
Did she see something that wasn’t there? Is Chekhov trying to suggest we never truly see the person across from us and they never truly see us? Love gets in the way. That perhaps it’s actually a good thing? Can anyone really explain love anyway?
When Anna and Gurov part and head for their separate corners so to speak, their real lives, whatever sympathy we have is for her, not him.
But back at home in his loveless marriage, he finds himself unable to forget her. In just a couple of pages, Chekhov paints a man who, for the first time in his life, it seems, is captured. He paces, he’s overcome with memories of her, finally can’t stop himself. He gets himself a hotel, everything seems gray and he notices – subtle bit of Chekhov imagery – a small statue of a horseman who has lost his head. Hmmm. He goes to Anna’s home and finds it surrounded by a fence, “long, gray, with spikes.”
“You could flee from such a fence,” thought Gurov.”
Suddenly, as a reader, we understand, almost certainly before Gurov does, that he is in love. As ill-advised, as wrong as this love is in almost whatever society you can think of, it has happened, in spite of, maybe even because of all that. Their lives are intertwined now and we sense that there will be no undoing it. Love will not be denied, Chekhov seems to suggest, almost a force of nature.
The author has them meet, fleetingly, in a public place in Anna’s hometown some months after the dalliance and it’s immediately clear the spark, the fire, the ache remains. They meet a few times over the months, they finally decide to meet in Moscow, Gurov’s hometown. We’re wondering where this will go. How will Chekhov resolve this? With happiness or heartbreak?
She is sitting in a chair in a hotel room and as he walks over to caress her shoulders, he catches his own image in the mirror. Suddenly, he looks deeper and sees his entire life unfold.
“His head was beginning to turn gray,” Chekhov writes. “And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled…Women had always taken him to be other than he was…and not one of them had been happy with him…And only now, when his head was gray, had he finally fallen in love as one ought to – for the first time in his life.”
It seems to arrive as a gift from above, a man who so often sought and secured intimacy but it mattered no more to him than a slice of watermelon. Now, though, it inescapably did. And he didn’t want to escape. And neither, it seemed, did she.
In teaching this story to high schoolers, I wondered if Chekhov’s work was a bit too subtle for them. I hesitated for several years, then tried it out and to my surprise and delight they found themselves – like Gurov – smack in the middle of the story, hanging on his every word. They seemed to understand it somehow beyond words, well past where they were in their lives.
So as Chekhov winds up this remarkable tale, he just sets the story on that beautiful, unpredictable pageant we call life and steps back.
“And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found,” he writes, “and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be the most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.”
The noted Russian novelist Vladmir Nabokov, who taught at Princeton, always used this story and marveled at it.
“All the traditional rules of storytelling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so,” Nabokov explains. “There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written.”
Is it because almost everyone who has read this story, from December of 1899 when it was first published to now, grasps it on a subliminal, almost magical level they might not ever be able to explain or is it that, like a song or poem that lands in a special way, each of us have at least some notion of what love truly is, and feels like; how it enriches, takes over, flows through and we hope, always hovers over our lives from the moment, it walks in the door, jumps off a bulletin board and somehow springs to life, even if - maybe especially if - we never saw it coming.
Like ol’ Gurov.
HERE’S A LINK TO A PDF OF THE STORY - Cut and paste in your browser:
https://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/webpub/english/compclass/Public%20Domain%20Readings/Chekhov%20The%20Lady%20with%20the%20Dog.pdf
Beautiful, John. Really well written , an ethereal subject, thought provoking on so many levels as love is subjective and experienced differently by many different people. I’ll read this quite a few times I’m sure. Thanks!
G
Geez, this was so brilliant that it made me want to go out and immediately grab all of your books.
I can’t buy them at the moment, and I can’t monetarily contribute to this site right now either, and I know this is a pale substitute for that, but I think that was a very beautifully written and thought provoking essay.
I’m new to your sub stack site and trying to catch up by reading older posts. I’m a huge Dylan fan, so I want to seek out those…
…but this post/essay was just wonderfully done.
And thanks for introducing me to a previously-unknown-to-me short story :)