The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

 

Anton Chekhov at the Wikipedia

The Lady with the Dog at the Wikipedia

Dark Eyes, film adaptation

Dark Eyes, link to see it

Gurov and Anna, new adaptation

The Lady with the Dog, summary and analysis 

The Lady with the Dog audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov, near the mouth of the river Don, and died in Badenweiler, a spa resort in south Germany, when he was 44 years old.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, a reformer, issued the emancipation of the serfs and in 1881 died because of a terrorist attack. Chekhov lived in a convulsed period, but he stayed apart of the political fights.
Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf who bought his freedom. His father had a grocery, but the business went bad and he had to flee to Moscow. He was a drunkard and abused his family. But Chekhov said once he got his talent from his father and his soul from his mother; he said she was an excellent storyteller.
He had two older brothers who were studying at the University of Moscow, and had to remain three years more in Taganrog finishing his studies and selling the house. He earned money doing private lessons, writing stories for the newspapers and catching and selling singing birds. When he was 19 he went to Moscow to study Medicine.
He had to work for his family because his brothers and his father had a lot of problems with their jobs and with alcohol.
Chekhov went on publishing sketches for Alexey Suvorin, who paid much more than his previous publishers and gave him more space in the magazines or newspapers.
He had a change in his literary prospects when Dmitri Grigorovich (a very famous author in his time) celebrated his writings. So he started to consider himself a writer more than a doctor, although he went on practising medicine all his life.
At 24, he started to notice the first symptoms of tuberculosis, but he always hoped for the best.
At 27, he was stressed by overwork and went on a journey trying to get some rest. This trip was the origin of his famous story The Steppe.
When he was 30, he decided to go on a long journey to visit the island of Sakhalin, on the Pacific coast, north of Japan. The island served as a prison, and he wanted to report the situation of the prisoners there. So he got depressed.
Then he went to live in Melikhovo, a place forty miles south of Moscow, in order to improve his health and to have more tranquillity to do his writings. Here he wrote his plays. Now they are splendid pieces of theatre, but in his moment he was very disappointed with the public reception, even as Stanislavsky (the famous theatre theorist) wanted to play them.
He got worse of his TB and went to live in Yalta, a touristic and spa resort in the Black Sea, where he bought a big house, the White Dacha.
At 41, he got married to Olga Knipper, a well-known actress that performed in his plays.
In Yalta, he wrote The Lady with the Dog.
He died in Badenweiler in 1904 after drinking champagne. His body was transported for the funeral in Moscow on a railway-car... meant for oysters, and that caused indignation among the people who loved him. And when the convoy got to Moscow, there was a band playing music, and, at first, they believed that was for Chekhov, but it wasn’t, it was music for a funeral of a general, so another disappointment. As you can imagine, Chekhov's death has been fictionalized a lot of times: his was a glamorous end with a farcical colophon.
 
When talking about narrative techniques, there’s a term often mentioned: Chekhov’s gun. This alludes to a necessary principle of all short stories: you have to remove all superfluous things in a story (or in a play): “If there’s a gun hanging from a nail on the wall in the first chapter, then this gun must absolutely be fired in the second chapter.”
A very important story by Chekhov is The Steppe, because, from the point of view of literature, it is his most accomplished story, for it contains all the poetical elements he developed in his narrative, although the most known is the romantic The Lady with the Dog.
His plays were also revolutionary, because they weren’t “plot” plays, but “mood” plays, so a lot of people of his time didn’t like them because “nothing” happened in the story.
The play The Three Sisters has inspired films as Interiors, by Woody Allen.

 The Lady with the Dog

This is the story of a romance between a womanizer and a younger lady married to a dull husband, in a spa resort in Yalta. The woman felt that this was only adultery and dishonourable, and he at first thought that this affair would be the same as the others, something temporary. But it happened the other way round; they discovered what love really was and they decided to go on with their relationship, so he forgot all other women, and she mastered (somehow) her guilty feelings. This is very different from Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, where the affair ends badly for the woman. In Chekhov there is hope for them both.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:
Dmitri Gurov
Gurov’s wife
Anna Sergeyevna
Anna’s husband
What do you think is the function of the Pomeranian dog in the story? Would the story be possible without this dog? What kind of dog is a Pomeranian dog?
What can you say about:
Yalta
Oreanda
the Black Sea
How did Gurov classify women?
What were her/his feelings after making love? What is the meaning of the water-melon?
Why “Gurov got bored already, listening to her”?
What were their feelings after visiting Oreanda?
When she went away, there “was already a scent of autumn”. Why?
“The season brings back the days of one’s youth”. Personal question: do you think our memories are always false memories?
Why did winter, evening stillness, storms, make Gurov think about Anna?
He decided to confide his love to someone: Why? In the short story The Kiss something similar happens. Why is the reason for this need?
What decided him to go to S***?
Why did he want to go away from the “fence adorned with nails” outside Anna’s house?
What do you know about The Geisha?
Personal question: do you think all that is interesting in us rests on secrecy?
Describe the meetings of the two lovers in Moscow.
Do you think theirs would be an eternal love?
“Why did she love him so much”?

VOCABULARY

amiss, staid, in the long run, eager, gait, made up, coaxing, hue, groyne, scales, flunkey, grasshopper, lofty, taunt, fix, stoop, thaw, kernel

Errand, by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver at the Wikipedia

Raymond Carver: bibliography

Errand: review

Errand: summary and analysis: enciclopedia

Errand: enotes

Short Cuts (trailer)

Jindabyne (trailer)

Birdman (trailer)

Everything must go (trailer)

A little bit of biography

Raymond (or Ray) Carver was born in a milltown in Oregon (on the West coast), in 1938 and died when he was 50 years old of lung cancer.
His father was a millsaw worker and a heavy drinker, and his mother worked as a waitress and a clerk, so they were a lower class family.
Raymond also worked with his father in the millsaw. He also learned to fish, so fishing is a theme that appears in some of his stories.
At 19 he got married to Maryann Burk, 16 years old. We have to suppose that they married because they had a baby the same year. Then they had another next year.
Both, Raymond and Maryann, had different jobs and they try to go on studying; Maryann finished her studies, but Raymond never finished any of his courses. Besides temporary occupations, he got precarious jobs as a writing teacher or university teacher, but because of his alcoholism he finished working as a janitor in a hospital and writing in his spare time.
At 34 he fell in love with Diane Cecily, editor at university, and he started drinking heavily and abusing his wife.
When he was 38 he began to date Tess Gallagher, a writer who later will become his wife. In this time he had to go to the hospital several times because of liquor intoxication. He realized that he had to stop drinking, and he started his second life thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous (but he never stopped smoking marihuana and even tried cocaine).
At 44, he got divorced (he was already living with Tess).
Six weeks before dying at 50, he got married to Tess.
He published his first short story when he was 23 and was studying at Chico Public University. It was called The Furious Seasons and bore a strong influence of William Faulkner.
His first short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published when he was 38. But although it was shortlisted for the National Book Award, he didn’t sell many copies.
He had more collections of short stories, and the most famous are What We Talk When We Talk About Love and Cathedral.
When we talk about Carver we talk about minimalism and dirty realism. Minimalism means avoiding all rhetoric, and that if you can say something in ten words, please, don’t use twenty. And dirty realism implies that in your stories you are going to use characters that belong to the lower classes of the society, that your heroes are going to be anti-heroes, e.g., isolated marginalized people, people with alcoholic problems or difficult relationships or broken families. So we have to suppose they are sad stories.
Everyone can feel the influence of Hemingway minimalism in his work, but he said his main influence was D. H. Lawrence.
It’s an irony, but the last story he wrote, before dying, is Errand, where he narrates an anecdote of Chekhov, another famous short story writer, just before his own death.

Errand

In this story, very different from his other stories because it’s almost “classical”, Carver writes about the last days of the life of Chekhov, a Russian writer revered by most short story writers. Chekhov was having dinner with Suvorin, a publisher, in Moscow, when he started bleeding from his mouth. The Russian author knows that his life is in danger and travels first to Berlin with his wife Olga Knipper, where he sees a doctor who doesn’t help him, and then to Badenweiler, a spa resort where he says he expects to get some recovery (although he doesn’t really believe it). He and his wife are staying in a hotel, and the doctor who treats him, Dr Schwörer, realizes that there’s no hope and orders champagne as the last honour to the famous writer. The author drinks and dies, and then there is a change in the way of telling the story, because we see the situation through the eyes of his widow Olga. Then, after a wake until morning, she asks a waiter who had come into the room to bring a vase of flowers to go and fetch the mortician. The story has a special ending, but I’m not going to be a spoiler revealing it.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters according what it is said about them in the story. But what do you know about them as historical people? Did they know Chekhov or his writings?

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Suvorin

Maria Chekhov

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Olga Knipper

Dr Karl Ewald

Dr Schwöhrer (and his presciptions)

The waiter (the young blond man)

What happened at the restaurant in Moscow?
What were the characters’ feelings about the TB?
Personal question: Do you have an opinion or a belief about the immortality of the soul?
What do you know about TB?
Where is Badenweiler?
Explain the courtship between Olga and Anton.
What can you say about The seagull and The Cherry Orchard?
Why did Chekhov mention the Japanese?
Summarize in one sentence Chekhov’s death.
What do you think is the meaning of the “large moth”?
What is the meaning of “history” in the sentence “Dr Schwöhrer picked up his bag and left the room and, for that matter, history.”
What happened with the bottle’s cork?
Describe the scene between Olga and the young man at Anton and Olga’s room.
What is the meaning of the title Errand?
In the last paragraphs, there is a change in the verbal tense: the past tense has changed into “would”? Why?
What do you think is the meaning of picking up the cork in the last sentence of the story?

VOCABULARY

private, take in (took in), stanch, jest, sleet, well-wisher, out-line, junk, bearskin, numbered, reckless, on the mend, complexion, Moët, grapple, mortician

The Swimmer, by John Cheever

John Cheever at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer at the Wikipedia

Analysis, summary, characters, themes... click here

More analysis: click here

Another study guide (clear and to the point): click here

The Swimmer audiobook (from minute 3.31 on)

The Swimmer (film) at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer (trailer)

Presentation, by Begoña Devis

Biography

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His father was the owner of a shoe factory, which went bankrupt with the crash of 29, and the family fell into relative poverty. After this fact, the father left the family, and the young Cheever lived for a time in Boston with his brother. During that period he survived by publishing articles and stories in various media.
He was expelled from the academy for smoking, which ended his education and this was the core of his first short story, Expelled, which Malcom Cowley bought for the New Republican newspaper. From that moment, Cheever devoted himself entirely to writing short stories that progressively found space in several magazines and newspapers, and finally in the famous magazine The New Yorker, with which he maintained, until the end of these days, an intense relationship.
He was called the Chekhov of the suburbs, because many of his stories occurred in the middle class neighbourhoods that were born around New York during the recovery of the economy after the Second World War.
In 1957 he won The National Book Award for his first novel, and in 1971 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his compilation of stories. He wrote primarily about the decline of the American dream, alcoholism and homosexuality, and sometimes his characters had dubious moral.
A movie was made from his short story The Swimmer in 1957, played by Burt Lancaster. At the time it was unsuccessful, but now it is considered a cult film by cinephiles.
John Cheever died in New York in 1982 at the age of 70.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer is a short story by John Cheever about a relatively young and handsome man who decides to go back to his home, 8 miles from where he is at the moment, swimming. For this he plans a tour along the pools of his various friends and neighbours, a route that he will call “Lucinda River” in honour to his wife. This wild idea will take him on a personal journey with surreal overtones. As the journey progresses, the character’s disorientation, his temporary alterations and the doubtfulness of his feat are revealed. At first his neighbours are friendly and accommodating, but there comes a time when everything gets worse, being forced to cross a public swimming pool, later when a neighbour accuses him of being  an intruder and in the last pool he sees how an old lover looks at him with disdain, and she doesn’t even offer him a drink. When he finally gets home, we do not know if a day, a month or a year, later, he finds it closed and empty
In my opinion, it is a metaphorical journey, in which the protagonist wants to return home but cannot find the way to do so. Alcoholism is always present, and the sinking in it (and not in the pools) is what increasingly disorients him and prevents him from getting where he would like. A journey on a magnificent sunny day, in which an attractive young man is about to do something heroic, but instead he finishes as a defeated man who has lost his home, family and even his memories.

It is a dark and desperate story, but of great narrative force and with a dreamlike and surreal component that makes it especially attractive.

QUESTIONS

Characters:

Neddy Merrill

Mrs Graham

Enid Bunker

Grace Biswagner

Shirley Adams

Mr and Mrs Halloran

Helen and Eric Sachs

Places:

At Westerhazy’s

At Levys’s garden

At Lindleys’s

At Welchers’s

At the Recreation Center

At home

Can you point out the hints the narrator give us along the story about the decline and fall of the hero?
What social class do the characters belong to?
What do they drink?
What is the National Audubon Society?
Can you find parallels between this story and the Odyssey or a Pilgrimage?
What season is the story situated in?
What is a point of no return? And what is the point of no return in the story?
Greetings: he kisses women and shakes hands to men. What do you think of this kind of greetings, one for men and another for women?
Where do you prefer to swim: swimming pools, the sea, rivers, reservoirs?

 VOCABULARY

golf link, artesian well, cumulus cloud, dogleg, hurl, choppy, saddle, hoist, portage, bony, de Haviland trainer, spigot, cordite, put sb out to board, tool (v), bask, roughhouse, cerulean