The Lady With The Dog

Anna—the titular lady with the dog—occupies the moral center of gravity in her relationship with Gurov. At her young age of 22, she embraces her affair yet also displays a profound consciousness of its moral and spiritual implications. In her Yalta hotel room, she expresses remorse and insists to Gurov that she desires “something better” than her loveless marriage to a “flunkey” of a husband or even her relationship with Gurov (573). Arguing to Gurov, who feels annoyed by her moral sensitivity, she states, “I love a pure, honest life, and sin is loathsome to me” (573). Even at her parting with Gurov in Yalta, she still believes that they “ought never to have met” (575).

Anna regards her affair neither as a violation of God’s law forbidding adultery nor as a betrayal of her husband. Rather, she considers it a trespass against her own moral principles. As her relationship with Gurov deepens, she regains her moral standing by rejecting the false demands of her marriage to Von Diderits. Anna learns to loathe her loveless marriage as a form of adultery. To reclaim a degree of her and Gurov’s integrity, she forms a new relationship with Gurov that is less contrary to her deepest and truest convictions, one founded on genuine affection, loyalty, and compassion. In Yalta, the affair was an escape from the strictures of their constraining and loveless marriages. By the end of the story, however, both Anna and Gurov grieve yet accept their relationship’s necessary “secrecy” and “deception” as if they were “thieves” (583, 584). They seek to redeem their relationship by learning to embody the truer union that marriage should reflect.

A “tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual” (568), Gurov’s wife serves as a foil to Anna and as an antagonist in the story. The narrator describes her primarily from Gurov’s viewpoint, which raises questions about his bias and the reliability of his perspective. An avid reader with a prominent presence, Gurov’s wife seems to intimidate him. Keeping his true feelings secret, Gurov views her as “unintelligent, narrow, inelegant,” and as someone to be feared and avoided (568-69). Categorized by Gurov as insincere, “hysterical,” and assertive, she seems to elicit only his disrespect (572). This critical portrayal contrasts with the youthfulness and delicacy of Anna’s features, which captivate Gurov. Unlike Anna, Gurov’s wife remains nameless, as do the countless other women Gurov pursues and quickly forgets.

His wife’s apparently progressive choice of “phonetic spelling” coexists with her calling Gurov “not Dmitri, but Dimitri” (568) that recalls the Old Church Slavonic language of liturgies in the Russian Orthodox Church. Her peculiar use of Gurov’s given name suggests a degree of formality, distance, and condescension. When Gurov brings up love at home, her remark—“The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri” (578)—suggests she knows about his unfaithfulness, tolerates it, and despises him for it. Unlike Anna, she seems more at liberty to ignore her spouse’s expectations and use Gurov’s frequent absences to cultivate her own interests and habits. This apparent independence and contempt add to Chekhov’s criticism of marriage as a socially acceptable disguise of mutual deception, alienation, and disparagement.