The lady with the pet dog

¶ … Reality in "The lady with the dog" by Anton Chekhov

In his short story, "The lady with the dog," Anton Chekhov deviates from the typical romantic, love story between two individuals who have found solace and true love for each other. Introducing the characters of the aimless and restless Dmitri Gurov and the silent, yet rebellious Anna Sergeyevna, Chekhov established a realistic setting and context wherein a love story takes place.

Devoid of any romantic elements, "The lady" may be considered, at first read, a realist narrative more than a love story. The setting and characters are too real, the readers can readily identify with them. A closer look at Chekhov's two main characters illustrates how realistic the short story's portrayal of a love story is. In Dmitri's character, readers bear witness to a man who was disillusioned with love, having a wife who was more of a parent than a wife, lover and friend. Anna, similarly, assumes the role of a dutiful and loving yet bored wife of an upstanding man, with a comfortable life that provides stark contrast to Dmitri's.

Chekhov utilized his characters as the primary element of romanticism in the story. Because to narrate a story based on fate and chance encounters would be repetitive and unoriginal, the story did not explicitly showed love and affection between the two characters. Instead, what Chekhov worked on is to illustrate the characters' motivation and preoccupation to see each other again, despite the limits in life they have put themselves in. Thus, the story becomes romantic in that they show tinges of human emotion in the midst of a very harsh reality, of people who are also disillusioned, just like what Dmitri and Anna were feeling when they met.

Apart from the presence of unique and genuine display of human emotions, "The lady" qualifies as a love story because of its faithful belief in love itself. Although no romantic exchanges happened between Dmitri and Anna, their actions were enough for the readers to surmise that indeed, there is love between them. The subtlety of their actions make their affair all the more romantic, because, set in the real world, who would consider the actions of two people committing adultery as romantic? Thus, a closer look at how love is given meaning by Dmitri and Anna opens the reader's eyes to the realization that one need not be verbalize or explicitly show his or her feelings in order to feel that love is present between two people. Thus, the author spared the readers any romantic words and dialogues, and provided them with incidents in the story that may seem trivial, yet significantly important to the lovers in the story. This is exemplified in the scene where the author narrates their rendezvous: "She was pale; she looked at him, and did not smile, and he had hardly come in when she fell on his breast. Their kiss was slow and prolonged, as though they had not met for two years..." The passage reflects the dominance of actions over words, and this was enough to make this incident in the story as real and romantic.