Love and Ambiguity in Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog"

Introduction: A Love Affair Without Easy Answers

Anton Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Dog" is a portrait of a love affair that is intended to be brief, but whose reverberations change both participants' lives. In Gurov, the male protagonist, Chekhov has created a character who is at once pitiable, despicable, and relatable. He is relatable mainly because one often feels both pitiable and despicable when it comes to love; it just depends on whether you are the one who is lovesick or the one in control — the one doing the hurting. The central purpose of the story is to ask more questions than it answers. It leaves the reader wondering where the story will go after its end: Will the main characters continue their affair, or is it doomed to fail?

Chekhov plays with his audience by challenging them to make moral judgments about the characters and then, a mere paragraph later, introducing information that makes them question that same judgment. He plays this game through literary technique: every moment of the story is imbued with ambiguity. Like love, nothing in the story's world is black and white.

Gurov and Anna: Trapped in Loveless Marriages

Nearly everyone, at one point or another, has gone through a period of dissatisfaction with their choices in life. The feeling can be suffocating, and one will seek an escape wherever it can be found. The two main characters in the story are no exception: Gurov and Anna both have problems in their respective marriages.

Gurov is a relentless womanizer, married to a woman he does not respect. Early in the story, he remarks that his wife is "unintelligent, narrow, inelegant." This gives the reader the immediate impression that there is something fundamentally flawed about their relationship, yet nowhere in the story is there a depiction of them at home together where their dysfunction could be observed. All the reader knows of Gurov's wife is what he himself shares. This creates two competing feelings: either (a) Gurov's wife is truly a difficult woman to be married to, or (b) Gurov's perception of her is a convenient excuse to avoid the guilt of adultery. Interestingly, the one line of dialogue his wife is given — "The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri" — pokes fun at Gurov and slightly endears the reader to her. So from the outset, the reader is not sure whether Gurov is merely a victim of a loveless marriage or an unfeeling cad.

Gurov's womanizing leads him to Anna, the "lady" of the title. She too is frustrated with her life, though her dissatisfaction stems from her inability to understand or connect with her husband, compounded by the general restlessness of youth. Her feelings about her husband are made clear when, after her first encounter with Gurov, she says, "My husband may be a good, honest man, but he is a flunkey!" She does not respect her husband — specifically his occupation — but she appears far more remorseful about her nascent relationship with Gurov than he is about his part in it. She continually calls herself common and low, telling Gurov, "I love a pure, honest life, and sin is loathsome to me. I don't know what I am doing."

From a moral standpoint, it is comforting to the reader that Anna does not approach the affair as callously as Gurov, who views cheating on his wife as "a light and charming adventure." While both characters are doing something wrong, Anna seems to be the innocent party, and the reader gets the impression that Gurov is taking advantage of her naivety. Anna goes on to explain what drew her to Yalta: "I was twenty when I was married to him. I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better." This statement alone makes Anna the more sympathetic character. Youth can lead a person toward decisions they later regret, even seemingly sensible ones like marriage. Anna seems trapped in an impossible position: she must give up her life for love or remain stuck in a marriage with a person to whom she feels no connection.

Shifting Sympathies and Character Complexity

Chekhov's strength lies in the complexity with which he constructs Gurov and Anna. It becomes clear through the narrative that it is too simplistic to cast Anna as the passive, flattered receiver of Gurov's affections and Gurov as a predator stalking prey. In fact, when Gurov and Anna part ways, Gurov becomes completely lovesick. This is expressed in how his entire view of Moscow — his hometown — changes after he returns from Yalta.

When he first gets back, he extols the joys of a Moscow autumn and says that "he already felt a longing to go to restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, anniversary celebrations, and he felt flattered at entertaining distinguished lawyers and artists, and at playing cards with a professor at the doctors' club." These are the pleasures of his ordinary life — yet he is soon unable to appreciate any of them. As his thoughts of Anna grow stronger, he becomes completely indignant toward the city he once loved, saying:

The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it — just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

This passage drives the audience's sympathy back toward Gurov. He too is trapped in a situation he cannot escape — and in some ways his trap is worse than Anna's, because he has children and a well-established life in Moscow. Gurov is clearly tormented, comparing his existence to a prison. Shortly thereafter, the narration tells the reader that Gurov "was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything." It is evident that this affair is different from the others he has conducted, both in its seriousness and its implications. Both Anna and Gurov are complicit in the affair, yet both stand to lose a great deal by pursuing it.

Conclusion: Life Without a Neat Moral

The story teaches the reader that, when it comes to love, right and wrong is not always clear. It is fitting that the ending is more of a beginning; this is not a story that can be neatly wrapped up with a moral. In this way, the story is the opposite of a parable. It defies simple morality because Chekhov is arguing that in life and love, there is no single correct way to do anything. It is therefore possible that Gurov's wife is both a lovely person in general and "inelegant" to Gurov. Equally, the reader can feel sorry for Anna's cuckolded husband while also understanding why she sees him as a "flunkey."

Where one imagines the story going after its ending depends on how one has reconciled the moral problem of adultery with the passionate love story of the protagonists. If one is swayed by the romance, one might picture Gurov and Anna leaving their spouses and living happily ever after. If one remains troubled by their cavalier deception of two possibly innocent people, one might envision their affair collapsing after the story's close.

On a personal level, the story summons all the ups and downs of a complicated love affair and lays them bare before the reader. Love is not an easy road for anyone, but especially not for two people like Anna and Gurov — already committed to others and very different from each other. The complexity with which Chekhov creates the world of these two characters is a testament to his understanding of the human condition. He seems to understand that life is full of the soaring heights of new love and the lows of doubt and disappointment. More importantly, he understands that our stories rarely end neatly.

Works Cited

Chekhov, Anton. "The Lady with the Dog." Ibiblio. Web. 4 Apr. 2011. <