Preview

Lady with the Dog

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
659 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Lady with the Dog
The problem of love in the story “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov
To begin with I should say, that Anton Chekhov in his creative work paid a lot of attention to unpredictability of people’s actions, to unusual even absurd people’s feelings and especially to love. Anton Chekhov can be surely called “the descriptor of daily routine”. But although his works are realistic and truthful, they make you think a lot about the unpredictability and sometimes cruelty of real life.
“The Lady with the Dog” is one of Chekhov’s best known love stories. It is interesting to read this story because it tells us about everyday life occurrence: two married people fall in love and don’t know what to do with it. The main characters are Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna Von Diderits. And what is interesting is that neither of them is very remarkable. Gurov “was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school”. Anna Sergeyevna was a “fair-haired young lady of medium height”. As we can see, they were simple people. And how could it happen that these people fall in love? Of course conditions play here a very big role. Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna were having rest in such a romantic place like Yalta. They had no worries, no problems; they were just enjoying the surrounding harmony: “the leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace…”(222). In such an atmosphere it is hard not to fall in love.
Neither Gurov nor Anna Sergeyevna thinks that their love has continuation: “We are parting forever – it must be so, for we ought never to have met… ”(223) And really! Their love has no “happy end”. Don’t forget that Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are married people. Of course, it is obvious that they are unhappy in their marriages. For example: “… he (Gurov) secretly considered her (his wife) unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In Anton Chekov’s “The Lady with the Dog”, Chekov uses direct language along with slight descriptions to dictate the setting. However, the main purpose for the settings of Yalta and Moscow are to influence Gurov’s motives and feelings. The atmosphere that Gurov is open to is infectious. The locations of Yalta and Moscow represent two different ideologies in Gurov’s life. Yalta expands on the mischievousness and romantic aspects of Gurov while in Moscow the boring and mundane life of Gurov is exhibited. The location called S. is brief, but also entails a rebellious attitude. The plot overall is pushed forward by the chronological change in venue.…

    • 306 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This article was published in The Explicator. In the article, Levitt from the University of Colorado in Boulder, examines the similarities between Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Anton Chekhov’s novel The Lady with A Dog. The author of the article supposes that Fitzgerald, who was intricately familiar with Chekhov’s work, may have used The Lady with A Dog as a template for his novel. The Explicator is a journal for literary criticism. It has been in publication since 1942 by Routledge, an academic publisher based in the United Kingdom. Today, Routledge is considered to be one of the world's leading publishers in the field of humanities. While the main subject of the article, the comparison between the two novels, is not a part of my chosen…

    • 145 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In these two stories the account of what takes place is told from opposing sides of the relationship. In Chekov 's version of "The Lady with the Pet Dog," the story is told from the perspective of the male side of the couple. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov is a forty-year-old banker who lives in Moscow along with his wife, daughter and two sons. His major internal conflict in this tale is that he has never been able to make a legitimate connection with someone of the opposite sex and considers women " the inferior race" (Chekhov 102). He cannot find any emotional worth in his interactions with other people, and most specifically in this story, women.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Still I say that a man who stakes his whole life on a woman’s love and, when that one card gets beaten, turns sour and sinks to the point where he’s incapable of doing anything at all, then that person is no longer a man, not even a male of the species.” (Turgenev 27). Bazarov makes his view of love very clear in this scene and also seems to foreshadow his demise. He says that someone who gives up everything after failing in the game of love, is weak. This would be an obvious notion from Bazarov since a nihilist has no respect for anyone or anything. Ironically, Bazarov clearly explains exactly what ends up happening to him in the story. He is the card that is beaten by Anna Sergeevna when she does not tell him whether or not she shares the same feelings as him, when he expresses his love for her. He tries to hide his sadness and frustration by engaging in a romantic manner with Fenichka Nikolayevna, the servant who becomes Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov’s wife at the end. When this fails as well, Bazarov knows he can no longer hide his feelings and need to love and appears to be a changed…

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The short stories called Desiree’s Baby by Kate Chopin and The Lady with the Pet Dog by Anton Chekhov both contain the theme of love but it is told in different ways for each short stories. As deep as both stories go, it is possible to see that the each author wrote about love but in opposite ways. Although the short stories show resemblances as far as how the men’s love for their lady make them dictate the tone of the relationship, it is evident that Anton Chekhov wants to show how love can suddenly appear while Kate Chopin tries to demonstrate how love may instantly disappear.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    These two stories offer a very interesting look into two people’s perspective of the same situation. Chekhov gives you the chance to see a man who was generally ambiguous when it came to love, but grew to understand it. He also learned how to love and how to look outside his own selfishness. Oates’s story takes a modern twist on Chekhov’s story. She gives you the opportunity to see how the story looks from the woman’s perspective. Oates’s story was more about self-discovery and learning how to love one’s self. The woman at the beginning of the story hated herself and through the affair learned how to change that, while Gurov was in love with himself, and learned how to truly love someone…

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    During most of his childhood, Anton Chekhov was very reserved and undemonstrative. Anton Chekhov’s education started when he began to attend a second-rate Greek school in Taganrog (Kunitz 52). Being an average pupil, he managed to gain a reputation for his satirical comments and for his pranks. Anton Chekhov’s inspiration was not something that he merely stumbled upon, it…

    • 1257 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Lady With The Pet Dog

    • 452 Words
    • 2 Pages

    “The Lady with the Pet Dog “, written by Joyce Carol Oates, is the story that I personally liked better then Anton Chekhov’s interpretation more because it presents a more modern the theme of the love affair between two people. The story presents a unique account contrast to the other version and the secret relationship between a man and a woman who are trapped by marriage that they feel unhappy about. I reason like this one more is because I like the way Oates shows the forbidden love in the eyes of a female protagonist since they show a different side of love that I am not use to seeing since I am a male. This story grabbed my attention due to the more modern type since it was easier to understand her actions and emotions which I like…

    • 452 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Ivan Ilyich Suffering

    • 1371 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The author of this story, Leo Tolstoy, based some of his perspective in this story off of his own personal experience. In our book it notes that this story resembles his guilt of not caring for his own brother while he was dying of tuberculosis, but of thriving for his own literary fame (739). The story is written during the realism era in literature. The period of realism entailed literature that spoke of the true lives of ordinary middle class citizens. It spoke in much detail of the characters themselves, rather than the surroundings or plot of the story.…

    • 1371 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    With the same title “The lady with the pet Dog” written by Joyce Carol Oates, a female author wrote modern view of the story of Chekhov and in new perspective. She presented similar theme as Chekhov of the passionate love affair between two adultery. This story was located in Nantucket in 1972. In this story Anna meets a man with a blind boy and she is unhappy with her husband so is the man “the stranger”. She thought that the man was a savior for her, that he came to her at a time “when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly.” (Oates, 1972 Pg.517). Her lover is a drawer, he draw Anna few times and later on he told her to pick a drawing; she picked the drawing with her being…

    • 212 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Lady With The Pet Dog

    • 1575 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, both parted from their significant others, find each other in their times of loneliness and eventually fall in love with one another. In "The Lady with the Pet Dog," Anton Chekhov portrays a strong theme of love, but he also presents a conflict within the characters themselves. The main character, Gurov, is faced with a number of conflicts within himself and Chekhov does a great job in making it obvious for the reader to isolate.…

    • 1575 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    the end

    • 751 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Love is not only a key theme in the novel “Red Dog”, but a key theme in life. Author Louis de Bernieres explains that’s without love not only for other humans but for everything around us, we would be lost. For the skinny “yank” living in the toughest environment in Australia love was the last thing on johns mind. He could never really stay in one place longer than two years at a time because he was afraid of losing the people he cared about, and in the past that was what happened. When he met Nancy things changed. He knew that he could spend his life living with her. John expressed this when he asked Nancy to marry him, happily saying yes. Love is not only the feelings between a couple but the relationship and history within them. Love is the most important key in life and without it life would be very dismal.…

    • 751 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lady With The Dog

    • 524 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Infidelity. Love. Innocence. These are all the things encountered in the story “The Lady with the Dog,” by Anton Chekhov. The story is about two married people; Dimitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna; who have an affair and fall in love. The distorted ethical code portrayed by the main character Gurov is bewildering. True love has altered Gurov’s perception of women, and changed his perception on what love really is.…

    • 524 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kate Chopin tackles complex issues involved in the interplay of female independence, love, and marriage through her brief but effective characterization of the supposedly widowed Louise Mallard in her last hour of her life. After discovering that her husband has died in a train accident, Mrs. Mallard faces conflicting emotions of grief at her husband’s death and exultation at the prospects for freedom in the remainder of her life. The latter emotion eventually takes precedence in her thoughts. As with many successful short stories, however, the story does not end peacefully at this point but instead creates a climactic twist. The reversal—the revelation that her husband did not die after all, shatters Louise’s vision of her new life and ironically creates a tragic ending out of what initially appeared to be a fortuitous turn events.…

    • 389 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In Chekhov's short story, "The Lady with a Dog," components of the setting, such as location, nature, time, and season, encourages the characters Anna and Dmitri to entertain their affair with a unattainable relationship and charming illusion. In the beginning of the story, the character Dmitri Gurov had been on vacation in Yalta when he hears of the arrival of a mysterious lady with a dog. Within the first paragraph, readers are presented a location contributes to setting up the theme dreamy self delusion. Yalta, a resort…

    • 217 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays