Literature Calls: The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov

This short story addresses one of the greatest problems faced by human beings: that is in discovering happiness one might have to ignore his social & moral obligations & vice versa. Yet no one has so far been able to give a solution capable of satisfying both these conditions & therefore man has remained in a dilemma over the centuries.

The Protagonist of this story is a man named Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov. He’s a married man with three children at school age. He’s extremely unhappy in his marriage as a result of the lack of love between him & his wife. The wife is a staid dominating woman who tries to regiment everything & everyone. She claims herself to be intelligent & sophisticated. Gurov despises this regimental nature of his wife & is truly scared of her. This bitter experience with his wife leads him to develop a bad attitude towards women & to consider them as the lower race. Though he continually enjoys their presence in swift, fleeting affairs he has nevertheless lost respect for them & harbours a cynical perception towards them.

This is when Anna Sergeyevna is brought into the plot. Her meeting with Gurov is highly crucial as it enables both of them to find happiness & to rediscover themselves. Anna is a married young woman who considers her husband as a flunkey. Though she respects him she doesn’t love him. Thus she too, like Gurov is captured in a failed, unsuccessful & dull marriage. Both are dull & tired of their current relationships & are in vulnerable & inflammable conditions. So this meeting is highly fatalistic & they were destined to fall in love. Gurov sees in her every quality that he sought in a woman. That is innocence, immaturity, sincerity, purity & shyness. Anna was a combination of all these. Therefore she addressed to the kernel of his existence & managed to dig out his true –self. In this aspect Anton Chekhov defines the word “Meeting” as a random person being able to bring about a structural change to one’s life. If that association influenced you, helped you to identify your true-self also known as rediscovering individuality which was buried in the deepest pit inside you, if it enabled you to see the true meaning of your existence, that is a meeting. As in the case with Gurov, it will leave a forever lasting impact on you.

This short story also explains the reason why the world becomes a beautiful place to some people and a boring, dull place for others. When you’re in love you have the knowledge that another person cares about you and you mean the world to them. That focuses your existence towards that person & the happenings of the world are of secondary importance. Therefore whatever happens in the world, since you’re happy, your perception towards the world is also positive. As a result of this you see the world as a beautiful place. So it comes to show that it’s not the world that is ugly or beautiful, but your internal beauty & happiness that decide the world is beautiful or not.

In the short story Chekhov also tries to address the moral dilemma faced by all human beings in the past, present & future. That is where one has to choose between moral & social obligations and his happiness. In this story both Gurov & Anna are married & therefore are restricted by the society as well as their own consciousness, sense of ethics to maintain an affair between them. But that affair is the only thing that matters to both of them in the whole. It was that affair which made them realize & rediscover their real self and helped them grasp the true meaning of life. If they gave up their relationship which made both of them happy & content they would satisfy the society but doom their own lives. Therefore Chekhov tries to convey a message as not to institutionalize yourself unless you’re absolutely sure that you simply love your partner. In this sense Chekhov also criticizes the modern practice of building families without the essential essence of love. Though he addresses this dilemma Chekhov places love in a very high pedestal. At the end though they both know it’s anti-moralistic, and anti-cultural, they both decide to continue their relationship for their own sake. This shows that Ckekhov disagrees with the old perception of placing man’s moral obligation on top of his discovery of love.