Lady With Lapdog By Anton Chekhov

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Love and Morality
“Lady with Lapdog” is a short story written by a well known writer, Anton Chekhov.
Chekhov writes a realistic story about Gurov and Anna, who fall in love, but are confined to their old lives with their other spouses. The overall message of the story is what love is and whether love is more important than morality as well as how “love” can transform someone. Chekhov uses many strategies as well as his straight forward writing to help address what love is and why love is more important than morality.
One factor that leads us to believe that Chekhov values love over morality, is his characters, Gurov, Gurov’s wife, Anna, and Anna’s husband. Gurov, The main lead is constantly unfaithful to his wife and it is clear that he …show more content…

Before Anna arrived Gurov believed that women were of a “lower race” and had multiple affairs with women that he had no connection with and at first Anna seems no different from the rest. When Anna leaves Yalta Gurov can’t help but feel sad of her departure and his encounter with her seemed to spark a change in Gurov, “He was moved and sad, and felt a slight remorse. After all, this young woman whom he would never again see had not been really happy with him. He had been friendly and affectionate with her, but in his whole behavior, in the tones of his voice, in his very caresses, there had been a shade of irony, the insulting indulgence of the fortunate male, who was, moreover, almost twice her age. She had insisted in calling him good, remarkable, high-minded. Evidently he had appeared to her different from his real self, in a word he had involuntarily deceived her. . . .”(2) Gurov realizes that he hasn’t been his true self because he's been living a double life one with his family and another in Yalta. After Gurov returned to his home town of Moscow, he told himself that he would forget about the time he spent with her and that he would continue with his ordinary life, but that was not the case. Love drove Gurov to see her again. “He would pace up and down his room for a long time, smiling at his memories, and then memory turned into dreaming, and what had happened mingled in his …show more content…

For example, Yalta is a vacation spot where Gurov meets the love of his life Anna, making it a place of excitement and new beginnings. “...these stories of easy conquests, of excursions to the mountains, came back to him, and the seductive idea of a brisk transitory liaison, an affair with a woman whose very name he did not know, suddenly took possession of his mind.”(1) This shows that Gurov has been in Yalta before and it helps convey the excitement of being in Yalta away from his family. But when Anna leaves Yalta, the mood changes and Gurov loses the excitement of being there and returns back to Moscow. “There was an autumnal feeling in the air, and the evening was chilly. "It's time for me to be going north, too," thought Gurov, as he walked away from the platform. "High time!”(2) While back in Moscow the mood of the story completely changes going from a warm, exciting encounter to a cold and lonely return. “When he got back to Moscow it was beginning to look like winter; the stoves were heated every day, and it was still dark when the children got up to go to school and drank their tea, so that the nurse had to light the lamp for a short time. Frost had set in.”(3) The setting goes with the mood as Gurov longs for Anna in the cold and lonely place of Moscow. A smaller example of setting can be witnessed during the first love scene Gurov has with Anna, “Her room was stuffy and smelt of some

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