Love in Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog

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Love has always been a controversial issue throughout centuries. However, it was, and is, still one of the most popular topics in literature.One cannot help but be reminded of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet when that particular topic is brought up, which is one of the finest examples on this topic. Despite all the literary works written about love, love itself remains unexplained. The questions “why” and “when” is often asked –it can usually be answered vaguely or deeply, but sometimes it remians unanswered. In Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen makes Mr Darcy, who has captured young girls’ hearts for decades, say “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”, which is both very informative and a vague answer, when asked by his love of life. It is vague, because it doesn’t exactly answer the question “when”. On the other hand, it is a perfect answer to describe the mysterious nature of love.

Similar to the nature of love, some stories also don’t have a beginning or end. Anton Chekov has been acknowledged to be the master of this kind of stories. People sometimes describe those stories as “a slice of life”. The Lady with the Lap Dog, for that matter, is an example to both unexplained love and these kind of stories. We don’t know exatly what marks the beginning and end of both the story and the characters’ love. However, we can still speculate on the quesitons “when” and “why” by exploring several theories.

In order to understand the nature of Gurov and Anna’s “love”, the question of “Who seduced who?” needs to be answered. When looked at the story step by step, the answer would be Gurov, since he w...

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...emselves.

Works Cited

Chekhov, Anton. “The Lady with the Dog” The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories. Macmillan, 1917. Rpt. in Custom Course Materials: ELIT 217. Ed. Peter Paul Stephan. Bilkent University, 2013. 82. Print.

Chekhov’s Lady With the Pet Dog. 16 November 2010. Web. 17 November 2013.

< http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com/2010/11/chekhovs-lady-with-pet-dog.html/ >.

Creasman, Boyd. "Gurov's Flights Of Emotion In Chekov's `The Lady With The.." Studies In Short Fiction 27.2 (1990): 257. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.

Fulford, Robert.“Surprised by love: Chekhov and ‘The Lady with the Dog’.” Queen’s Quarterly. n.d. Web. 17 November 2013.

Greenberg, Yael. "The Presentation Of The Unconscious In Chekhov's Lady With Lapdog." Modern Language Review 86.1 (1991): 126-130. Humanities International Complete. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.

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