Anton Chekhov’s
“The Lady with the
Dog”
Setting
Setting
• All stories embedded in setting: time and place,
however expansive or limited
• “Sonny’s Blues”?
• “The Cask of Amontillado”?
• “The Lady with the Dog”?
• Character, plot, and setting all interrelated, but
we need to look at them separately in order to
understand how they work together.
Anton Chekhov
• 1860 — 1904
• Born in Russia
• Medical doctor/playwright
and short-story writer
• Died of T.B.
• Immense literary
reputation
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/
• “Reading Chekhov was just like the angels
singing to me.” Eudora Welty, American writer,
1977
“The Lady with the
Dog,” 1899
http://flickr.com/photos/35975941@N00/808079175/
Setting
• Two parts:
• Yalta
• Moscow
“Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels oneself in
a melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is
transparent and the outline of naked trees, narrow
houses, greyish people, is sharp. Everything is
strange, lonely, motionless, helpless. The horizon, blue
and empty, melts into the pale sky, and its breath is
terribly cold upon the earth, which is covered with
frozen mud. The author's mind, like autumn sun,
shows up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the
crooked streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny,
miserable people are stifled by boredom and laziness
and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle.
...
There passes before one a long file of men and
women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity and
idleness, of their greed for the good things of life;
there walk the slaves of the dark fear of life; they
straggle anxiously along, filling life with incoherent
words about the future, feeling that in the present
there is no place for them. ... In front of that dreary,
gray crowd of helpless people there passed a great,
wise, and observant man: he looked at all these
dreary inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad
smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, with
anguish in his face and in his heart, in a beautiful and
sincere voice, he said to them: ‘You live badly, my
friends. It is shameful to live like that.’”
— Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov
(BW Huebsch, 1921)
Yalta
Yalta
http://www.apextour.com.tr/limanlar/karadeniz/images/yalta-black-sea-big.jpg
Yalta
http://www.marine-marchande.net/groupe%20mar-mar/Documents/F.Massard/Croisiere_Mer_Noire/Yalta_Marine_Marchande/a481_Arrivee_Yalta_05.jpg
Snow on Palms, Yalta
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/17575.html
Yalta
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/17582.html
Boardwalk, Black Sea,
Yalta
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/17572.html
Moscow
Moscow – Winter
http://www.grotta.flf.vu.lt/photogallery/galer/image/moscow.jpg
Moscow in Winter
http://hep.fi.infn.it/PAMELA/dubna/moscow.gif
Moscow
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/europe/moscow01.jpg
Moscow
http://www.tsereteli.ru/files/objects/660/660.jpg
Moscow – Street scene
http://www.cp-tel.net/ashuford/RUSSIA/arbat3.jpg
Moscow
http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/April_22_1999/City2.jpg
“Tolstoy is reported to have said that Tchekov
was a photographer, a very talented
photographer, it is true, but still only a
photographer. But Tchekov has one quality
which is difficult to find among photographers,
and that is humour. His stories are frequently
deliciously droll. They are also often full of
pathos, and they invariably possess the
peculiarly Russian quality of simplicity and
unaffectedness. He never underlines his
effects, he never nudges the reader's elbow.”
— Maurice Baring, Landmarks in Russian
Literature (Methuen, 1916)
“Tchekov was the poet of hopelessness.
Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during
all the years of his literary activity, nearly
a quarter of a century long, Tchekov was
doing one thing alone: by one means or
another he was killing human hopes.
Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his
creation.”
— Lev Shestov, Anton Tchekov and
Other Essays (Maunsel & Co, 1916)
“The situation, indeed the entire plot of
‘The Lady with the Dog,’ is obvious,
even banal, and its merit as a work of art
lies in the artistry with which Chekhov
has preserved in the story a balance
between the poetic and the prosaic, and
in the careful characterization,
dependent upon the use of half-tones.”
— Virginia Llewellyn Smith, Anton
Chekhov and "The Lady with the Dog"
(Oxford UP, 1973)
Questions
• When Gurov and Anna take their first walk
together, they discuss “the strange light of the
sea: the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and
there was a golden streak for the moon upon it.”
Why do you think Chekhov waits until this
moment to provide descriptive details of the
story’s setting in Yalta?
• How do the weather and season described in
each section relate to the action in that section?
• What is Gurov’s attitude toward his affair with
Anna at the outset? What is Anna’s attitude?
What are some indications that both Gurov and
Anna are unprepared for the relationship that
develops between them?
http://filmplus.org/plays/orchard.html