In the Library
The Lady with the Dog
Anton Chekhov, 1899
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 30 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 7k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy wrote the full novel Chekhov condenses to twenty pages: the same adulterous love, the same impossibility, but without the train.
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Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway strips a relationship to a single conversation the way Chekhov strips it to a single affair.
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert writes the same provincial adultery, but his Emma is deluded where Chekhov's lovers are painfully clear-eyed.
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About the book
In a Yalta hotel room a woman weeps over what she has just done, sure she is ruined, and the man beside her cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it, unhurried, while she cries. That is Dmitri Gurov at the opening: a Moscow banker who has had many such affairs and trained himself to feel nothing, who privately calls women the lower race and means it. Chekhov's quiet cruelty is to let this man walk back to his wife and his card games and his comfortable contempt, and then discover, weeks later, that he cannot stop thinking of Anna Sergeyevna and her little white dog, that for the first time in his life he is helplessly, absurdly in love. The terror of the story is not the affair. It is the recognition that love is real after all, and has arrived too late, in the wrong life, with no way to live it. The last page leaves them in a hotel room sensing that everything difficult is only just beginning, and that no solution is anywhere in sight.