Love in Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Little Dog

"The talk was that a new face had appeared on the embankment: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in Yalta and was used to it, also began to take an interest in new faces. Sitting in a pavilion at Vernet's he saw a young woman, not very tall, blond, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz." (232)

Few paragraphs are as celebrated in literature as the one opening Anton Chekhov's short story, "The Lady with the Little Dog." Perhaps one of the reasons why literary critics, from Vladimir Nabokov to Richard Ford, embrace it is because it foreshadows the entire premise of the story instead of merely laying an atmospheric foundation. Sentence by sentence, it hints at the nature of the story's romance. The paragraph alludes to Gurov's fantasy of Ana, rather than his love of her actual self, which illustrates that the feelings he holds for her end at infatuation, although the paragraph permits the possibility that they could potentially develop into more serious emotions.

The very first sentence of the paragraph sets up Gurov's infatuation with this mysterious woman, based upon the rumors surrounding her arrival. Gurov gravitates toward novelty and because Ana represents a "new face," as stated in the second sentence, he will inevitably be interested in her to some degree. Thus, before Gurov even spots Ana, he harbors preconceived notions about her. These notions feed Gurov's reflection in the third paragraph, where he presumes Ana has come to town without her husband or friends. A few paragraphs later, after only superficial observation of his subject, Gurov imagines her social class, her marital status, and that, during what must have been her first trip to Yalta, she was bored (233). Such speculative thoughts show Gurov's inspired, irrational side. He molds Ana into what he hopes her to be, not what evidence about her disposition and life station has proven to him.

The idea of Ana's being the stuff of Gurov's dreams also illuminates itself in the first paragraph. The third and final sentence in the opening paragraph describes Ana as diminutive and ghostly. She is "not very tall," indicating that she is small or at least gives the appearance of being slight. She is also blond; later, the reader discovers that Ana also has gray eyes (234), likely meaning that she has an overall pale complexion. Chekhov paints Ana as sort of phantom-like. Ana even walks a

white dog---not a black one or a brown one or a gray one, but a white one. At least in Western folklore and mythology, ghosts and their animal companions are white. Like a ghosts's wispy silhouette, Chekhov's description of the woman in the first paragraph should strike the reader as extraordinarily vague. The only reference to her age is that she is "young," which could cover a span anywhere from about fifteen to thirty or even thirty-five, depending on one's schema of the word and own age. That, however, is precisely the point: "young" is open to interpretation, just as Ana's character stands in Gurov's mind. Continuing with Chekhov's description of Ana: she is not especially tall, but that again provides little frame of reference for the reader. Is Ana of average height or is she petite? The modern reader may even wonder how tall the average Russian woman in the 1890s was. Like her age, Ana's height is also unclear. Furthermore, Chekhov says that Ana is blond but he never says to what degree---toe-head or golden or anywhere in between. Many well-known authors, from Charles Dickens to Henry James to even J.K. Rowling, create a more detailed physical profile of their main characters when they first introduce them to the reader. Throughout the whole story, Ana's thoughts remain largely hidden; the reader knows Gurov's mind much better. The few words dedicated to Ana depict her as timid, unsure, and pensive (235), perhaps indicating a lack of confidence in or even awareness of her own self. Chekhov has only presented ambiguities about her physically and otherwise, which is where her appeal to Gurov lies.

If Ana is ghost-like or at least vague, as the first paragraph implies, that means Gurov can fill all of the unknowns about her character with any answer he wishes. Gurov can idealize and claim to love her because he has not invested the time and effort to know her and therefore discover her flaws. Their Yalta fling, after all, lasts a single week. Such a small period of time permits Gurov to catch only a glimpse of who Ana is but nothing more, especially given her reserved nature. During the month or so that they spend apart before Gurov encounters her in the theatre, he obsesses over his memories of that one week. Immediately after Ana leaves him at the train station, he already misses her; as time passes, he dreams of her. His memories of her "burned brighter and brighter" (238). Finally, as Gurov leaves a club months after seeing the woman, he brings Ana up while in conversation with acquaintance. The acquaintance completely ignores talk of this "charming woman" Gurov met in Yalta (239), as if he had never even uttered such words. Gurov falls victim to nostalgia, clinging to something that never truly existed. Even when they see each other in Moscow ("once every two or three months" (242)), their visits are infrequent enough that the fantasy can live on. The fact that they always meet in secret adds an exciting element of touching 'forbidden fruit,' as well. Gurov believes that "every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy" (242), meaning that his public life, when Ana is absent, is mundane. The lovers rarely see each other and for such short periods of time (spare moments in hotels, only when they can escape their spouses) that the temptation of presenting their best, most tantalizing selves in each other's company is too great.

True love, however, demands recognizing and accepting the uglier aspect of a person's character, not only the aspects of his or her character that are easy to admire. It demands routinely caring for a person in everyday circumstances, 'for better or for worse...in sickness and health,' as wedding vows emphasize. This trying demand has always deterred Gurov in his past relationships, as evidenced by a sentence early on in the first part of the story:

"Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people...grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome" (233).

Gurov always forgets the weight of this burden and happily pursues his next fille because, again, he likes novelty.

Perhaps much later in the story when Gurov gazes into the mirror and realizes that he is aging, he admits that his womanizing must end. His denial has too greatly aged him and Ana. When he touches her shoulder at this point, he realizes that she is trembling and he seems to regret having accelerated her aging process. It is then, when Gurov feels Ana's warmth and notices her fading beauty that he acknowledges her as a person. It is also then that he likely becomes aware of the damage his fantasizing has done; he has behaved toward Ana as the women in his life have behaved toward him:

"Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him." (243). Gurov decides then to consciously avoid making that same mistake and loving Ana for herself.

For once, instead of prematurely fleeing the relationship, Gurov wants to face the hardship of overcoming preconceptions---such as chatter about a newly arrived woman with a little dog---and loving a person, such as Ana, for her humanness. This fact indicates that Gurov has the potential to fully love Ana but only if he manages to escape from the comforts of the fantasies that already begin to emerge in the opening paragraph.

Although the opening paragraph physically introduces the reader to Ana, it never insinuates the gravity of Gurov's feelings for Ana or how they may ultimately develop. They only clue the reader in to his general interest in her. In a frustratingly beautiful exercise in deduction, the opening paragraph, like the closing paragraph, leaves the reader wondering about the relationship's fate.

Bibliography

Chekhov, Anton. "The Lady with the Little Dog." Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007.