Review The Lady with Dog by Anton Checkhov

 

THE LADY WITH THE DOG REVIEW

            The Lady with the Dog is a story by Anton Chekhov about a man and a woman who fall for each other regardless the fact that both are married and each lives in a city a hundred miles away from the other's. The story is an adulterous affair story between Dmitri Gurov, a near forty-years-old-man who has been trapped for years in a loveless arranged marriage, leaving him bitter, unfaithful and cynical, and Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the dog, a young married lady, who is also trapped in a suffocating marriage.

Gurov is a familiar character. He’s any one of a number of male characters on mad men and countless others. As the developments, Chekhov creates the protagonist Gurov to change as subtly and credibly, undergoing a winding course of emotional and moral growth. He realizes that he has fallen in love with Anna which is his first love in life, a life where arranged marriages are the norm and couples live loveless lives and in which he hasn't been able to shed his masks and express his real emotions. While about Anna Sergeyevna, she is a melancholy woman who falls in love with Gurov, a man she met in Yalta during her vacation. Although she realizes that it is a forbidden love, she can't simply stop loving him and be done with it. 

There are three diferent setting of places in the story, that is Moscow, Yalta, and the unnamed town of S. The seaside resort of Yalta serves as a romantic backdrop for their trysts. By contrast, Moscow is the social prison in which Gurov lives–locked in his loveless marriage and shallow friendships. While about the time, there is no clear explanation about when the story takes place. Can be said, it is timeless. Where the atmosphere, according to the characters said, they are bored, depressed, sad, melancholic. What makes it sad is the fact that Anna Sergeyevna is suffering from the same dilemma that Gurov is: dissatisfaction with her own, stifled life.

Chekhov's writing technique is able to draws the readers in. There's a kind of simplicity in it that resonates with them. It's not too flowery and purply, but its simplicity is remarkably beautiful and fits the subtlety of the story. He uses  some literary devices, such as personification in line “the wind howled in the chimney” or “the moonlight lay on its surface in a golden strip.” The writing style should be enjoyed, but the way he shows-not-tells was sometimes overally dull. There were specific parts that had not wonderfully written.

The romance elements are felt purely despite its utter wrongness. However, the story has underdeveloped and unlikeable characters, not that attractive one, but it also consits of intimate thoughts and dreams of two people in love. It is interesting since it explains how finding true love can be both life changing, excruciating, and completely wonderful. From the story, the readers can likely take a lesson that we don't get to choose whom we love. One of the suspense described is when Gurov found Anna Sergeyevna in theatre, then she leads him out and talks to him. That scene is something bringing a tension.

The Lady with the Dog is free of any plot-dependent constraints, still not betraying the storyline with no absurd nor pretentious claim for not telling a story, and the author does not create the plots complicated, lets it uncomplex and incomplete. Chekhov tends to concern on the apparent trivialities of the daily life of ordinary Russian people. There is no bold plot, but enough to have the readers involved in Anna and Dmitry’s sufferings and emotions. The ending is ambiguous. Chekhov finishes the story by saying that the end is far off and that the most complicated part is just beginning. He leaves the ending blunt with no resolution.