ARTicles vol. 2 i.1: Chekhov and the Lapdog

When Anton Chekhov published “Lady with a Lapdog” in December of 1899, his ending disappointed some readers. One aficionada, Serafima Remizova, wrote the author, imploring him to bring the story of Dmitry Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna’s love affair to a conclusion. “I read your story, and I should like to ask you to write the continuation of it,” urged Remizova. “You have abandoned your heroes . . . at the most critical moment in their lives, when they have to make a decision. But which one? This is a difficult problem. . . . It is very important for someone like you, Anton Pavlovich, who can see into the human heart, to show . . . how happiness can be found in such a situation. . . .”

Remizova wasn’t the only one to notice how Chekhov had left his readers hanging. In his lecture on “Lady with a Lapdog”, Vladimir Nabokov noted: “All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken. . . .” Unlike Remizova, however, Nabokov wouldn’t have changed a thing. After listing all the unorthodox qualities of the short story, he added: “And it is one of the greatest stories ever written.”

The plot of “Lady with a Lapdog” is deceptively banal. Dmitry Gurov, a womanizer who’s approaching forty, has an affair with a young, married woman while vacationing at the Black Sea resort of Yalta. This “lady with a lapdog,” Anna Sergeyevna, takes their romance seriously, but Gurov takes it lightly, like his other seaside liaisons. When he returns to his wife and children in Moscow, he expects the memories of his summer fling to fade. But he can’t get Anna Sergeyevna out of his mind. After Gurov makes an impulsive trip to her backwater town, Anna starts coming to Moscow, meeting him in secret. Chekhov ends his story inconclusively: “And it seemed that in just a little while a solution would be found, and a new, beautiful life would begin. And it was clear to both of them that they still had a very long way to go–and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.”

Chekhov left it up to his readers to fill in Anna and Dmitry’s future. In his famous 1959 film adaptation of “Lady with a Lapdog”, Soviet director Josef Heifitz shot the final scene as an incarceration, focusing on Anna Sergeyevna, alone in her hotel room, rapping desperately on the window while Dmitry trudges home to his family through the snowy night. Chekhov’s ending isn’t as grim as Heifitz’s last image, but the story does invite readers to draw their own conclusions.

“Lady with a Lapdog” ends in medias res, and abrupt, rapid cutting typifies the story’s narrative technique. The author often moves cinematically through time, jumping to new scenes without warning. Chekhov, for example, makes a leap after Gurov meets Anna in her small town’s theater: “And in her eyes, it was clear that she really was unhappy. Gurov stayed a bit longer. . . . And then, when everything was quiet, he found his coat and left the theatre. And Anna Sergeyevna started coming to visit him in Moscow.” Without any exposition, the narrator simply states that Anna began going to Moscow to commit adultery. These cuts and jumps through time convey how suddenly and unexpectedly Anna and Dmitry have an illicit affair, fall in love, and settle into a life of hiding behind closed doors. Love catches them off-guard, when they’re both already married to people they can’t stand–Gurov to a woman “he secretly considers limited, narrow-minded, and unrefined” and Anna to a petty provincial bureaucrat, whom she considers a “lackey.”

But love doesn’t rescue Anna or Dmitry from their stale marriages; nor does it improve their lives. On the last page, Chekhov changed his line “love had made them both better” to “love had transformed them both for the better,” and finally settled on the neutral, “love had transformed them both.” The Russian critic Vladimir Kataev writes: “In contrast to the ‘resurrection’ and ‘rebirth’ endings well known in Russian literature from the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, no solution is found in the conclusion to the problems that have been raised in the story, and no light of truth is revealed.” Dmitry and Anna experience an emotion they’ve never felt before, but their awakening to love brings a sense of entrapment.

Yalta was the perfect place for Chekhov to set the beginning of his story. The summer residence of the czar’s court, this fashionable Crimean resort was a playground for Russia’s elite. It was also a town notorious for trysts. After “Lady with a Lapdog” was published, elegant women with little dogs began appearing on Yalta’s promenade. The town, which Chekhov himself described as abounding in “slanders, intrigue and the most shameless calumny,” was obsessed with identifying the real lady. Elena Eduardovna Podgorodnikova, a woman who would stroll along the promenade with her pooch long before dog-walking was in vogue, became the prime suspect.

There was another possible source of inspiration, but she didn’t have a dog and she wasn’t an inexperienced young woman. A few months before writing “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov had spent a fortnight in Yalta with Olga Knipper, an actress from the Moscow Art Theater. Like Anna and Dmitry, Olga and Anton had strolled along the promenade and admired the ocean from the vista at Oreanda that summer; like Anna, Olga Knipper had a German last name; and like Anna and Dmitry, Olga and Anton had to live apart. That fall, Olga was busy rehearsing the part of Yelena for the Moscow Art Theater’s production of Uncle Vanya; and Chekhov, banished from Moscow by doctors who knew his tubercular lungs couldn’t endure another Moscow winter, was settling into his new house in Yalta and writing “Lady with a Lapdog.” Near the end of his story, Chekhov describes Gurov and Anna as “a pair of birds, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages.” Around the time he wrote those lines, Chekhov sent a pair of cufflinks in the shape of two birds, one melancholy, one coquettish, to Olga in Moscow.

Just as Chekhov was beginning a relationship with a woman he would soon marry (after having resisted marriage his entire adult life), he wrote a story about people who fall in love at the wrong time. Although neither Anton nor Olga was married, their love affair was strained. While Chekhov was dying of boredom in Yalta, Olga was quickly becoming one of Moscow’s leading ladies. Perhaps this thirty-nine year old writer–who had been exiled to his “warm Siberia” for his health and who would die in less than five years in a German spa with Olga Knipper at his side–perhaps this man also sensed that he had fallen in love too late, and that the most complicated, difficult part was yet to come.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg