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... ... middle of paper ... ...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.
Anton Chekhov wrote a short story in 1899, entitled "The Lady with the Pet Dog. " It is about a love affair seen from the eyes of the man named Gurov. The story occurs in nineteenth-century Russia, in a town called Yalta. Joyce Carol Oates, in 1972, did a wonderful job of rewriting the story, changing the protagonist from the man to the woman. Her version also changes the setting to Nantucket Island in twentieth-century America.
With the idea of a love that is forbidden it is looked down upon and can cause problems for the people who have fallen for its’ hidden desires. In the short story “Drown” by Junot Diaz, the main character Yunior is conflicted with his sexual preferences due to how his community would react to him being a homosexual. In the short story the “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov the main character Gurov finds love with a younger woman while still being married, despite the idea of even being with another woman at that time was strictly forbidden. Whereas Gurov and Yunior are different as Gurov handles a relationship due to having multiple affairs, while Yunior is confused about his relationship with his friend because of his homosexuality,
This story mostly takes place in a vacation spot called Yalta. Throughout the whole story Yalta is explained as peaceful, romantic and with magical surroundings. The weather is warm and the scenery consists of white clouds over the mountaintops. The flowers smell of sweat fragrance and there is a gold streak from the moon on the sea. The two main character’s Gurov and Anna visit this vacation spot to get away from the lives that they are unhappy with. Both are unhappily married. The author explains Gurov as a women’s man, women are always attracted to him. However he thinks of women as the lower race. Knowing that women liked him, he always just played the game. He was always unfaithful to his wife. When he sees’s Anna walking around in Yalta with her dog he thought of it as just another fling. The character Anna is a good honest woman. When she is unfaithful to her husband for the first time she starts to cry to Gurov. She explains how she despises herself for being a low woman. This was the first time a person was not happy with Gurov. The soon realizes that she is unlike other women and describes her as strange and inappropriate. The story then takes a twist and Anna is to return home to her husband who is ill. This was their excuse that they need to part ways forever and stop this affair. Yet when Gurov returned home to Moscow he found himself lost without her. The
Many stories have the standard beginning, middle, and end structure that can be become very dull and predictable, diminishing the value and quality of a story. However, Anton Chekhov’s short stories brought upon a new era for literature when he introduced short stories with “zero ending” or “non ending” conclusions. Through this concept he can pull off bottom less endings, where the reader is assumed to ponder and wonder what will happen to the characters after the story ends. This paper will discuss this concept by comparing and contrasting Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Little Dog” and “Sleepy” to “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” by Heinrich Von Kleist, a short story with a more traditional standard structure.
Tolstoy's unique elaboration on the subject gives us a new option. The eccentric Pozdnychev presents the whole in a dark setting. Once again, these protests come from an observation of society, not from an understanding of love as a concept. What Pozdnychev strives for is a change of hearts, the bettering of his fellow men. Love should be exalted, and poetic, and sensual, but it is not. If it is not, it is because society and state have made it such, by legalizing prostitution, by encouraging young men to debauchery.
“The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov, is a story about love and admiration. Dmitri loved Anna because she seemed to be so much like himself for they are both in unhappy loveless marriages. I
“The Lady with the Pet Dog” exhibits Anton Chekhov’s to convey such a powerful message in a minimal amount of words. He uses the element of color to show the emotions as well as changing feelings of the main characters, Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, and the contrast of them being apart to them being together. For example, when Anna leaves and they are apart, Dmitri seems to live in a world of grey. As he begins to age, his hair begins to turn grey, and he is usually sporting a grey suit. Yalta is where they met, and it is described as a romantic spot filled with color and vibrancy and freedom, like when Chekhov writes “the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it.”
“Gurov felt bored already, listening to her. He was irritated by the naive tone [and] remorse”(The Lady with the dog, 294). Gurov is a selfish man who cares for no one but himself, he puts his needs, feelings and desires before anybody else. In the story The Lady with the Dog a man named Gurov is constantly cheating on his wife and one day, he meets a women named Anna and his feelings for her go far beyond any feelings he has ever felt.
In The Darling, Anton Chekhov tells the story of Olga Semyonovna, a woman who is empty without love in her life. Olga is widowed twice, takes a lover who leaves her, and eventually focuses on her old lover's child as the object of her obsession. In all these relationships, she takes on the ideas and emotions of her companion. She smothers the boy, Sasha, with so much attention that he cries out in his sleep. Olga's capacity to love is infinite, but that love is a parasitical and debilitating one.
Dmitri Gurov is a middle-aged man who has everything, a wife, kids, and a great job but is still unhappy. He hasn’t found love and as a result, degrades women when they are in his company. He considers his own caring wife "unintelligent, narrow, inelegant and did not like to be at home” (Chekhov). He constantly
“The Lady With The Dog” contains many themes that can seen as reality and fairytale type situations. Some of the themes were seen as unreal by the main character Gurov. Gurov thought the vacation in Yalta to be unreal but, thought that the city life in Moscow and weather affected how he related to Anna and helped him find meaning in his own life. The main themes within “The Lady With The Dog” are love. Love is the one of the main themes in the short story.
Released in 1983, Eldar Ryazanov’s A Cruel Romance remains the most compelling adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s nineteenth century play about a beautiful but poor young woman desperately seeking love in an inherently selfish world. As in Without a Dowry (1879), the film centers on the dramatic conflicts between not only Larisa Ogudalov and her various suitors but also amongst the aspiring men themselves. Through its representation of Ostrovsky’s themes, Ryazanov’s production depicts the ramifications of humanity’s obsession with money, leading to misery, jealously and even death. When viewed through the prism of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s approach of dramatic performance, A Cruel Romance is largely effective in conveying the pivotal tensions of Ostrovsky’s original play, particularly in relation Larisa and Paratov. Furthermore, Ryazanov enhances Karandyshov’s role in the film in comparison to the nineteenth century text, emphasizing both the pathetic nature of his character and his justifiable desire for retribution against his tormentors. Given the limitations of the film genre however, Robinson’s role is substantially diminished in A Cruel Romance, as the production team foregoes the opportunity to further antagonize Larisa’s suitors in order to focus on the central love triangle. Though Ryazanov does not take full advantage of Ostrovsky’s exploration of the exploitative nature of all of the male characters, he is effective in developing the central romantic tensions of Without a Dowry in his 1983 film production.
The story “The Darling” by Anton Chekhov, illustrates a woman that is lonely, insecure, and lacking wholeness of oneself without a man in her life. This woman, Olenka, nicknamed “Darling” is compassionate, gentle and sentimental. Olenka is portrayed for being conventional, a woman who is reliant, diligent, and idea less. Although, this story portrays that this woman, known as the Darling needs some sort of male to be emotionally dependant upon, it is as if she is a black widow, she is able to win affection, but without respect. Only able to find happiness through the refection of the beliefs of her lovers, she never evolves within the story.
As Smirnov barges in demanding payment from Mrs. Popov, readers learn he despises women because of past experiences. “There was a time when I played the fool . . . I ran through half my fortune as a result of my tender feelings” (Chekhov 5). Chasing his feeling of love, Smirnov falls short many times, never finding deep affection. The idea of love has led him to believe that gifts and experiences will lead to happiness.
This is a discussion of love and it’s intrinsic challenges, a theme espied in the 16th century; ‘The course of true love never does run smooth’. Playwright William Shakespeare foregrounded this in his play Romeo and Juliet, telling the story of two doomed and ill-fated “star crossed” lovers, born to feuding houses in medieval Verona. With love’s obstacles being a key theme, the play’s relevancy remains as potent as ever,