V.S. Pritchett on 'The Lady with the Little Dog.
……………
Now,
alone in Yalta, Chekhov writes what was to become the best-known of his love
stories, The Lady with the Little Dog, in which a chance love affair
takes possession of two people and changes them against their will, and which
closes with them far apart and rarely able to meet. Their fervor for each other
grows with every new good-bye. If the story seems to evoke aspects of Chekhov’s
meetings with Olga Knipper, it is transferred to a couple totally unlike them.
In The Lady with the Little Dog, Gurov and Anna are both married. He
works in a bank in
Anna is
married to a dull provincial civil servant. She is ten years younger than her
husband. The opening sentence of the story dryly establishes the inciting spell
of holiday gossip.
It
was said that a new person had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a little
dog.
This at
once stirs the hunting instinct of the experienced Gurov. He sees her, "the
new person," sitting near him in an open-air restaurant. Her dog growls at
him and he shakes his finger at it. He has seen at once that she is pretty, naïve
and "angular" in her gestures. She marvels when he tells her that he
has an arts degree and has been trained to be an opera singer, but had given it
up to work in a bank. She tells him, in her awkward way, that her husband is
some sort of official.
In
like
his wife who loved insincerely, with idle chatter, affectedly, hysterically,
with an expression suggesting that this was neither love nor passion but
something more significant.
In
others he had glimpsed a rapacity, a wanting more from life than it could give,
and these were
unreflecting,
domineering, unintelligent women... not in their first youth, and when Gurov
grew cold to them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their
underclothes seemed to him like scales.
We shall
not see the seduction. Unlike later novelists, Chekhov never describes the
sexual act: Russian manners and especially the censor would not have allowed
such scenes. We shall know the seduction has occurred only by the look of
consternation on Anna’s face,
as
though someone had suddenly knocked at the door. She had her own special view—a
very serious one—of what had happened. She thought of it as her "downfall,"
it seemed, which was all very strange and inappropriate.
"It’s
wrong," she says, and adds the hackneyed words, "You will be the first
to despise me now." The nonplussed Gurov cuts himself a slice of a
watermelon which is on the table and for a silent half hour "eats without
haste." (Yes, we think, that is the point so many novelists have missed: a
seduction stuns.) She begins to sob, "God forgive me, it’s awful,"
and breaks into banal confessions of guilt, how she had wanted, for once, "to
live, to live!" She has been mad and dazed in
At
Oreanda they sit by the shore and listen to the monotonous, conniving, breaking
of the sea. One remembers the sea breaking in The Duel. For Gurov it is a
symbol of the mystery of an eternity that seems to both enlarge and dwarf us.
(In his Notebooks Chekhov had written one of his gnomic phrases: "It
seems to me: the sea and myself.") The couple sit a little apart on a bench
and are silent. Gurov is thinking:
everything
is beautiful in this world—everything except what we think or do ourselves
when we forget the higher aims of existence and our human dignity.
True or
untrue? Gurov, the experienced seducer, is changing.
The
couple part: he to
Gurov
goes to the theater. There she is, "this little woman, in no way remarkable,"
clutching the "vulgar lorgnette in her hand," and there also is her
tall, obsequious husband, wearing an order on his uniform, and it does indeed
look like a waiter’s number. Gurov sits there through the first act; then at
the interval the husband goes out to smoke. Thinking that all eyes in the
audience are on him, Gurov goes over to speak to Anna. He can hardly speak, nor
can she, and she stares in terror at him. She rushes out of the auditorium and
he follows her into the drafty corridor. Their love becomes theater within
theater. A cold stale wind seems to blow as she races past vulgar crowds of
officials in uniforms "legal, scholastic and civil," past ladies, past
fur coats swaying on their pegs as they rush by, down stairs and passages, until
at last he catches up with her, breathless, under a balcony. A Chekhovian detail:
two bored schoolboys who are smoking cigarettes look down to watch as Gurov
takes Anna into his arms and kisses her and she clings to him. There the lovers
stand, dazed, almost speechless, in the buzz of chatter and the sound of the
meaningless tuning up of the orchestra. She gasps out a promise to find an
excuse for coming to
Remember
that we have seen the story through Gurov’s eyes and that Chekhov’s
intention is to show him as a maturing and feeling man arguing with himself
about the unexpected situation. The scene requires a momentary point of ironic
distraction. It happens that Gurov has to drop his little daughter at her school
on the way to his secret rendezvous, and as they walk the child asks her father
why the pavements are still slushy after the sleet storm in the night. Gurov
tells her kindly: "It is three degrees above zero, and yet it is sleeting.
. . . The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different
temperature in the upper strata of the atmosphere."
The
child chatters on: "And is there no thunder in the winter, Daddy?"
He
explains that too. When he has dropped the child at her school he is free to
reflect on his two lives, full of stereotyped truths and untruths.
Everything..,
in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the
kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
The real
subject of the story is this serious conflict in the minds of the lovers. At the
hotel they are in each other’s arms and their theories vanish. Every two or
three months after this they will meet and wrestle with their dilemma.
[They]
could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband. They forgave each
other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in
the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both. .. And it
seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new
and splendid life would begin.
And
there Chekhov leaves them. As he once said, it is not the function of art to
solve problems but to present them correctly.