30 pages • 1 hour read
The Lady With The Dog
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Background
Literary Context: Russian Realism
“The Lady with the Dog” is one of Chekhov’s most frequently anthologized short stories and, arguably, one of the greatest short stories written. It was originally published in the December 1899 issue of the magazine Russkaya Mysl, or Russian Thought, and featured a brief subtitle: “A Story.” Bookending one of the most prolific periods in Russian literature—the 19th century—Chekhov’s story and his legacy stand alongside other giants of Russia’s literary world.
Among its European and American counterparts, Russian literary realism similarly strove to represent places, experiences, and characters with utmost accuracy. Among his older contemporaries, including Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Chekhov is an expert of realist fiction who is most known for his short stories and plays. Like his fellow writers, Chekhov is fascinated with human experience in all its dimensions. He seems less interested, though, in capturing it in writing on a large scale. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1868-1869), raise profound questions about the meaning of human existence, the significance of morality, and the formation of individual and society. Chekhov explores these questions as they seem to present themselves in real life at its most ordinary and mundane: in apparent fragments and slices of life, often beset by uncertainty, ambiguity, and dead ends.
The beguiling simplicity of Chekhov’s prose often focuses on the smallest and most minuscule episodes of human life among ordinary and unremarkable people. In his characters, Chekhov points to an every-person with all their biases, limitations, and aspirations. As in real life, the sacred and the profane coexist in Chekhov’s stories. And, as in real life, Chekhov’s narratives do not necessarily lend themselves to an interpretation or a moral lesson. His work rarely features a clear-cut linear plot progression, a conventional “point,” or a final resolution. Viewed by critics as Chekhov’s response to Anna Karenina, in a space of a few pages “The Lady with the Dog” explores an ordinary adulterous relationship with all its faults and predicaments and, unfailingly, with Chekhov’s unwearied compassion.
Socio-Historical Context: Russia of Chekhov’s Day
Unlike in other European nations, the modernization and industrialization of Chekhov’s imperial Russia became a substantive force only in the latter 19th century. While serfdom was abolished in 1861 (the year after Chekhov’s birth), peasants and workers remained largely excluded from the country’s social and political life. Modernization of agriculture and factory production led to increasing poverty and displacement among low-skill laborers both in the country (perhaps like the provincial town of S—) and in large cities (like Moscow and St. Petersburg). Meanwhile, the same late-century manufacturing and agricultural improvements also contributed to the growth of the middle class—individuals with wealth, education, and influence, like the Gurovs and the Von Diderits. This growing portion of Russian society demanded a greater share of power in a country still largely ruled by the tsar and the aristocracy. Characters in Chekhov’s stories and plays often exemplify the tensions between society’s lower and upper classes, between widespread poverty and institutional privilege, and between individual opportunity and social responsibility.
Heightened political and social instability, and the resulting discontent, led to increasingly vocal calls for reforms and the liberalization of Russia’s still largely hierarchical society. Many of Chekhov’s fellow writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and activists questioned the established order. One of Chekhov’s younger contemporaries, Vladimir (Ulyanov) Lenin (born in 1870) would become the leading force of Russia’s bloody revolution in 1917. While Chekhov did not live to see this tragedy (he died in 1904), his writing often reflected and illuminated the intensifying sense of the inadequacy of traditional class distinctions, social norms, and institutions. In this sense, “The Lady with the Dog” questions the very bedrocks of Russian society—marriage, patriarchy, and class-appropriate behavior. The story shows them serving as attractive veneers for sexual manipulation, male egotism, and deception. For Anna and Gurov, these institutions form an “intolerable bondage” they seek to escape, as they do for many characters in Chekhov’s literary world.
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