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    The Lady With The Dog
    The Lady With The Dog
    The Lady With The Dog
    Ebook30 pages27 minutes

    The Lady With The Dog

    By Anton Chekhov

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    While vacationing in Yalta, Gurov, a married, middle-aged man, becomes enraptured by a lovely young woman on the beach walking her dog. After a brief affair, the couple part, but despite the pressures of their separate lives, both are deeply affected by their fleeting attachment.

    "The Lady with the Dog" was written shortly after Chekhov met Olga Knipper, an actress he would marry two years later. Considered to be one of his greatest stories, "The Lady with the Dog" deals with the complexities and realities of deep human relationships.

    HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781443428330
    Author

    Anton Chekhov

    Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Southern Russia and moved to Moscow to study medicine. Whilst at university he sold short stories and sketches to magazines to raise money to support his family. His success and acclaim grew as both a writer of fiction and of plays whilst he continued to practice medicine. Ill health forced him to move from his country estate near Moscow to Yalta where he wrote some of his most famous work, and it was there that he married actress Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in 1904.

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    Reviews for The Lady With The Dog

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Eerst gelezen toen ik 17 was. Herlezen toen ik 47 was. Mooi, maar een beetje goedkoop sentiment
    • 3/5
      Eerst gelezen toen ik 17 was. Herlezen toen ik 47 was. Mooi, maar een beetje goedkoop sentiment
    • 5/5
      Said to be the master of short fiction, I was pleased to sample his work. Mostly tales of romance that appeal to my adult male perspective, often a love gone wrong, myopic, misapprehending, tinged with tragedy. Some that I'll reread, some passages highlighted. Some endings felt abrupt, the tale unfinished, forcing me to re-evaluate what the story was really meant to draw my attention to.
    • 5/5
      Chekhov is known as the master of the short story, and after reading these five stories, it is easy to see why. Each story is exquisitely crafted and nearly flawless. Chekhov writes with such precision, especially when describing the natural world. His words perfectly evoke the scene: a garden in flower; a riverbank; an avenue of trees; a field just before a rainstorm; the sea.Chekhov contrasts the beauty and serenity of the natural world with the inner turmoil of his characters. For Chekhov, suffering is the natural human condition. His characters are mostly depressed, or if they are happy, their happiness is due to ignorance, corruption or insanity. In stark contrast to the beautiful world they inhabit, Chekhov's characters dwell in darkness, constantly struggling against their own limitations and the limitations imposed on them by others or by society. Chekhov's characters don't fear death; instead, they seem to welcome it as an end to the struggle.In these five selections, Chekhov addresses many of the highest themes of literature: the state of the mind ("The Black Monk"); the value of art ("The House with the Mezzanine"); the unending cycle of poverty ("The Peasants"); the corrupting influence of wealth ("Gooseberries"); and the mystery of love ("The Lady with the Toy Dog"). In these stories, Chekhov asks no less than what it means to be human. He doesn't offer easy answers; often his stories end with the question unresolved. But it is impossible after reading them not to feel moved by the power of Chekhov's words.
    • 3/5
      Some very engaging stories on human relationships and behaviour.
    • 4/5
      Meticulously detailed character portraits of rural Russia these short stories provide an intimate insight into the life and loves of a peasant people. There is much tragedy and some comedy but an inexorable passage of time in an infinite Russian homeland that both changes and never changes. Chekhov's stories resonate with the things that are left out and the things that are included. These, rather than the plots, are the key to understanding their meaning. Chekhov portrays an emotional but resilient and philosophical people who labour on from one generation to the next steeped in poverty, labour and vodka. These are excellent short stories but I think I'd prefer to read one every now and then in isolation rather than plough through all of them together as I have.This edition comes with an invaluable introduction as a guide to the stories. Read this rather as an afterword as it will send you back to re-read particular stories with eyes more fully open to the genius of Chekhov's writing.
    • 3/5
      The first set of stories that I read by Mr. Chekov were better and deeper. The general themes of the stories seemed love intrigues between married people and lovers. While stimulating hardly cause for deep thinking. Reading these stories one realizes how little things change.
    • 5/5
      Lovely. Gentle warm nostalgic ironic. all the best qualities one might associate with Chekhov. Intimate sense of its period yet does not seem dated. feel I have actually met a group of sad but rounded human beings.I know the plays quite well and read some of the stories a while back without really getting them. This reading was a delight.Give me more
    • 4/5
      After reading lots and lots of all too often mediocre fantasy and science fiction I was ready for a change of pace, and this collection certainly provided that. The stories feature brilliant characterization, bringing us smart, well intentioned, and sympathetic people who all too frequently act irrationally and ultimately to their own detriment. Chekhov does a remarkable job of capturing the essence of a person's entire life in a brief tale. Like the author’s great plays, the mood is generally tragic, with moments of humor. Many of the stories focus on infidelity, and/or the fading of romantic, idealistic, unrealistic love. In some of the stories we see good people who fail to follow their convictions and eventually turn into something they once would have despised. The editor suggest that the underlying message, that we have a duty to fight evil actively, is intended as a refutation of ideals espoused by Tolstoy. My favorites were "A Boring Story (From an Old Man's Notebook)," "The Grasshopper," and "Ionyich," but any of them are well worth the brief amount of time required to read them.

    Book preview

    The Lady With The Dog - Anton Chekhov

    The Lady With the Dog

    I

    It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.

    And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same beret, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every one called her simply the lady with the dog.

    If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn’t be amiss to make her acquaintance, Gurov reflected.

    He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them the lower race.

    It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days together without the lower race. In the society of men he was bored and not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he was in

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