Your cheatin’ heart: Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady With The Little Dog’
The Lady with the Little Dog (1899) is a story about an affair. It is slight as far as stories of this kind seem to run, with the action contained in a dozen or so pages. As far as affairs are concerned, here, too, the plot appears wanting. There is no denouement, no intrigue, little drama. The tale cryptically terminates with the observation that “the end was still far, far off, and … the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.”
The one thing Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) – better known these days for theatrical works like Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard – perfectly captures here is that bright, brief moment when everything with one’s new beloved expands outward with rosy promise. This is a story about an affair, but that, in my opinion, is of secondary interest when reckoned against the subtle feeling with which Chekhov describes, and later implicitly questions, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov’s transformation from a man for whom “bitter experience” taught that “every intimacy … grows into a major task” to one who loved Anna Sergeevna “as one ought to—for the first time in his life.”
Prior to his chance encounter with Anna, Dmitri is (other than his habitual unfaithfulness) utterly conventional in appearance; he has a good job, passable children, diverting hobbies with friends. He is, from a certain vantage point, contemptible. One day, while on vacation alone in Yalta, he spies a woman walking along an embankment, behind her runs a white spitz. An accidental tête-à-tête in a café leads to a week-long courtship. Natural circumstances force their parting, and Dmitri heads home thinking “that now there was one more affair or adventure in his life, and it, too, was now over, and all that was left was the memory…” Anna, whose soul we are given to believe has been sullied for the first time, exits with something approaching regret, intoning “We’re saying good-bye forever, it must be so, because we should never have met.” In other words, things work out for each character much the way human nature dictates.
But Anna’s tell-tale memory follows Dmitri back to Moscow. Infatuated, life without her grows intolerable. He becomes uncharacteristically reflective, spending his days lamenting that “[u]seless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one’s time, the best of one’s powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee …” But flee he manages and, on pretense, travels to Petersburg to reunite – and rekindle his affair – with Anna. The two commence an earnest, devoted double-existence, summed up nicely by Dmitri’s remark that:
He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret … everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself … occurred in secret from others …”
It takes some credulity to believe in Dmitri’s reformation. Men of his character – these pathetic, life-long philanderers – tend, in the real world at least, to become more secretive, more despotic, more despondent as they age. What Chekhov asks, then, is to consider whether fundamental change is possible; whether a deep, abiding love can be born from deception and vice. Dmitri and Anna seem, for their part, to believe in this possibility, for “it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other … and it was as if they were two birds of passage, a male and female, who had been caught and forced to live in separate cages.”
Here the tale both ends and, oddly enough, must truly begin. As the faithfully married among us can attest, after courtship, the halcyon moments fade, and there you are, with your spouse, committed for life. Does Dmitri understand that while in one respect his relationship with Anna is unique, in another, it will over time come to resemble all marriages in its torpidity? Must we then believe, along with him, that “just a little more – and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin”? Or, mirroring Chekhov’s tale, is it best we leave these kinds of musings to the privacy of our own inner lives where, for good or ill, secrecy is still safeguarded.
Image credit: Antonio Guillem
