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
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
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