The Lady with the Dog is perhaps Chekhov's best known and certainly one of his best-loved stories. It exemplifies the author's subtle yet powerful style, as Chekhov is economical with language and never says more than he needs. He conveys emotional complexity in just a few words, thus preserving the intensity of his characters' feelings. For example, on first seeing Anna at the theater in her hometown, Chekhov expresses Dmitri's romantic yearning with the passage: "she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lornette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy. He thought and dreamed." The author writes as though he is painting a canvas, producing a work that is grand in scope yet intimate in feel. The author uses colors to convey both the changing spirits and feelings of the characters, as they veer from the grandly impressive to the muted and prosaic. For example, the aging Dmitri's hair is described as graying, and he often wears gray suits, whereas the sea at Yalta is suffused with color as "the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it." Chekhov presents Yalta as a romantic oasis for Anna and Dmitri, a place of color, freedom, and intimacy that they cannot hope to recreate elsewhere. The lovers worry about what they mean to one another--Anna frets that Dmitri thinks of her only as a "common woman," while Dmitri thinks that Anna is beguiled by a false impression of him as a "kind, exceptional, lofty" man--because both recognize that their relationship is founded on past disappointments and future hopes, as well as on present desires. Chekhov thus plays with our implicit belief that characters do not exist beyond their narrative framework: clearly, Anna and Dmitri are people defined by the past and their dreams for the future, as much as they are by the short period of their lives conveyed here.

Author Biography

During the last ten years of his life, Anton Chekhov penned his great plays, spent time treating the sick, and wrote a small number of stories that are considered his masterpieces. The eleven stories collected here-"The Lady with the Little Dog," "The House with the Mezzanine," "My Life," "Peasants," "A Visit to Friends," "Ionych," "About Love," "In the Ravine," "The Bishop," "The Bride," and "Disturbing the Balance"-hail from this fertile period. They reveal a writer who, in response to the techniques of Symbolism and Impressionism, moved beyond nineteenth-century realism to become an innovator of the modern short story, influencing such key twentieth-century literary figures as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner