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Daily · Classics

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov · short story collection, 1917·5 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • Gurov sizes up a stranger before he even learns her name. Sitting in Verney's pavilion in Yalta, bank clerk Dmitri Gurov clocks the new arrival and thinks, "If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss to make her acquaintance." He is under forty, already a habitual adulterer who privately calls women "the lower race."
  • A cliffside seduction turns into a meditation on indifference. At Oreanda, watching the sea at dawn with Anna beside him, Gurov decides its "monotonous hollow sound" speaks of "the eternal sleep awaiting us" and hints at "a pledge of our eternal salvation."
  • Anna leaves by train and Gurov barely flinches. When her husband's eye trouble summons her home, Anna boards the express saying, "We are parting forever, it must be so, for we ought never to have met." Gurov walks off the platform feeling only "a slight remorse" and thinking, "It's time for me to go north."
  • A comment about oversalted sturgeon breaks him. Back in Moscow, a card-partner's throwaway remark about the fish "struck him as degrading and unclean" and convinces Gurov his whole social routine is "grovelling and curtailed." He invents a fake trip to Petersburg and travels to S---- to find her instead.
  • He ambushes her at the opera during 'The Geisha.' Gurov spots Anna in the third row beside the husband she once called a flunkey and corners her alone in the interval. They flee up a staircase marked "To the Amphitheatre," where she begs him, "You must go away... I will come and see you in Moscow."
  • A companion story tracks the same slow curdling. In "Ionitch," elsewhere in the collection, a district doctor who once loved Kitten Turkin turns into a fat, greedy man the town calls simply "Ionitch," who eats alone at the club and snaps, "Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions!"
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the story that proves Chekhov invented the modern non-ending, an affair treated as neither sin nor triumph, just an unresolved problem two adults carry into an unnamed future.

A married bank clerk starts a Yalta fling to kill time and ends up trapped in the first real love of his life, with no idea how to live it.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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