Extract

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin.

A man who considers women an inferior race and a woman in a white beret walk along the Yalta waterfront with a small Pomeranian, and neither of them suspects that what begins as a seaside affair will become the most serious and devastating experience of their lives. Chekhov published this story in 1899, near the end of his own life, and in it he achieved what no writer before him had quite managed: the depiction of an adulterous love that is neither condemned nor celebrated but simply, painfully real. Gurov returns to Moscow, Anna to her provincial town, and the distance between them becomes intolerable. The story ends without resolution, in a hotel room where two people weep and understand that the hardest part is only beginning.