''The Lady with the Pet Dog'' is regarded as one of the greatest of all short stories, but it is not an easy story to "interpret," because Chekhov's chief aim in writing the story is to be as natural as possible and to respect people and things for what they are, rather than turning them into symbols and forcing them to convey a certain idea or message. Chekhov is reluctant to put himself above his characters and manipulate them. Perhaps the most famous criticism of the story comes from Vladimir Nabokov the Russian emigre who taught literature at Cornell University and wrote the classic American novel Lolita. In discussing Chekhov's story, he points out that ‘‘all the traditional rules of story telling have been broken ... there is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written.’’ One might wonder how such an uneventful and inconclusive story could be considered "great." It appears that Nabokov believes that its greatness lies in its trueness to the beauty and sadness of life. If one is looking for the kind of "entertainment" which helps one escape life, one will not find it in Chekhov, for he invites his readers to perceive and feel the beauty and pity of the world as it is. Nabokov states that for Chekhov ‘‘the lofty and the base ... the slice of watermelon and the violet sea, and the hands of the town-governor'' are all "essential" elements of that beauty. If one is looking for a satisfying moral or a final resolution, Chekhov will not provide one, for ‘‘there is no special moral to be drawn and no special message to be received,’’ Nabokov contends that ‘‘the story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes or dreams.’’

Nabokov also admires the economy and conciseness of Chekhov's descriptions and characterizations, which are ''attained by a careful selection and careful distribution of minute but striking features, with perfect contempt for the sustained description, repetition, and strong emphasis of ordinary authors. In this or that description one detail is chosen to illumine the whole setting.'' This not only permits Chekhov to say more with less, but it also keeps the focus on the world within the story rather than on the pyrotechnics of the writer. By not overwhelming the reader with elaborate descriptions or philosophizing, Chekhov makes his art appear casual.

Nabokov certainly exaggerates his claims that there is no "problem" or "climax" to Chekhov's story. Gurov is the protagonist; he is the only character who appears in every scene. The story is presented largely from his point of view, and it is his internal crisis, as we shall see, that indeed constitutes the climax of the story. And Gurov has a problem, though he does not recognize it until late in the story. At the beginning, he is a mildly bored philanderer on holiday, looking for a good time. He meets Anna and seduces her, and when she weeps over having been unfaithful to her husband, he is bored and annoyed. He bids farewell to Anna with a mild sense of regret, sorry that the affair did not make her happy, but his mood brightens when he returns to the bustle of Moscow. As the winter deepens, however, Gurov finds that Anna is constantly on his mind. He wants to speak to others of his feelings for her, but nobody will listen. This eventually leads him to a great feeling of disgust towards the ‘‘savage manners,’’ the "gluttony," the ''continual talk always about the same thing'' that defines his existence in Moscow society. ''Futile pursuits and conversations always about the same topics take up the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life clipped and wingless, an absurd mess, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.'' Gurov is so "indignant" after this moment of personal crisis that he cannot sleep and finds that he is ''fed up'' with his job and his children. He has no desire to do anything. This dramatic moment is often considered the climax of the story, though what exactly it signifies is debated by critics.

Soviet critics have suggested that Gurov's profound moment of alienation merely signifies his ‘‘moral regeneration.’’ Through the discovery of true love, they contend, Gurov has come to alienate himself from the amoral, gluttonous, frivolous life of his class. From this point forward he cares more about another human being, Anna, and less about his own sensual gratification, the pleasures of Moscow society, and the institution of bourgeois marriage.

These Soviet critics further note that Gurov and Anna are "ordinary" people of the middle class, not members of the nobility like the adulterers in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Gurov is, indeed, something of an "everyman," with a typical family life and a dull and vaguely defined job, and Anna is merely ''the lady with a pet dog.'' Nobody in Yalta knows her name; she is the wife of a minor bureaucrat from a faraway provincial town. That these two ordinary, unheroic people experience a moral awakening was significant to Soviet critics. They further claimed that this story serves as a commentary against the bourgeois institution of marriage. In a sense it was, for the marriages in his fiction are almost never happy, and people frequently seem to have married young and for the wrong reasons. But Chekhov does not present an alternative way of life and expresses little optimism about how humans might live if the obstacles to pursuing their desires were removed. His characters often have trouble understanding their desires in the first place.

''The Lady with the Pet Dog'' is more optimistic than most of Chekhov's tales, for the couple is truly in love, and know what they want. Only social constraints keep them from being happy. Virginia Llewellyn Smith, however, focuses on the theme of love in Chekhov's fiction and rejects the idea that the story should be read as a social critique. She notes that while Gurov is ''shaken out of his romantic dreaming by a sudden recognition of the grossness of others in his stratum of society,’’ he ‘‘does not give up his job or abandon his social life. Instead, he leads a double existence... it is this life Chekhov is interested in, not in Gurov as a representative of his class.’’ She further observes that while Gurov and Anna are alone among their fellow men and women, this ''does not point a moral: but it is where the pathos in their initial situation lies. We are not impressed by their moral superiority, but moved by their loneliness.'' Love, Smith concludes, is the solution to this loneliness.

Smith, like other critics, notes the similarity of Gurov's position to that of Chekhov himself. Like Gurov, Chekhov fell in love for the first time in his life when he was almost forty (he was thirty-nine and soon to be married when he wrote this story). He knew that he was ill and doubted that he would have long to enjoy his love, and so the faith in love expressed in ''The Lady with the Pet Dog'' and the air of pathos and sadness provoked by the discovery of love are both perhaps rooted in Chekhov's own experience. Smith suggests that throughout his career Chekhov was torn between a romantic and a cynical view of love, contrasting the unhappy marriages and love affairs he witnessed with a romantic sense of what love could be. Gurov is also a romantic who enters every affair with high hopes only to be bitterly disappointed. When Gurov finally finds true love, he abandons his romantic dream of a love which can be simple and easy, and in the end struggles to keep true love alive in the real world.

Chekhov's attitude towards women is arguably reflected in this story. Gurov dislikes his wife, an outspoken woman who considers herself an intellectual, and he dislikes some of the sexually aggressive women whom he has been with in the past. Rather, he prefers Anna, who is soft and childlike, weepy and vulnerable, even a bit ''pathetic.'' Feminist critics might argue that Chekhov, or at least his protagonist Gurov, was threatened by strong women and preferred a woman he could dominate. There are other ways to read the sexual politics of the story. Chekhov himself describes Gurov as a man who believes women an ''inferior breed'' but who cannot ''live a day without them.'' By the end of the story, however, Gurov considers Anna his only ''true friend.’’ Her weakness and pathos may be, to some extent, symptoms of her boredom and depression. Just before Gurov speaks to Anna for the first time, he looks her over and decides that ‘‘her expression, her gait, her dress, and the way she did her hair told him that she was . . . married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was bored.'' Gurov jokes in their first exchange that people claim to be bored in Yalta as if they come from some exotic place, when in fact they come from dull and dusty provincial towns. This wry joke seduces Anna but is of greater significance than it appears, for we learn that young Anna is indeed bored and unhappy both at and away from home. Gurov is drawn to her ''pathetic'' qualities not only because they make her easy prey but also because these qualities in Anna reflect an aspect of Gurov that he is slow to recognize. Gurov, like Anna, is bored and unhappy in his marriage and is ''eager for life.’’ Moreover, he is not at home in the world, even before they meet. He seems to have no friends at Yalta and does not miss anybody back home. Gurov and Anna are both alone, lacking in other deep attachments, and perhaps Gurov feels sympathy for Anna in her sadness because he feels sad himself. When Gurov decides that he is disgusted with his life, perhaps he is discovering a loneliness and alienation which has bothered him for a long time but which he was unable to recognize until there was something meaningful in his life with which to contrast these feelings. That source of contrast was Anna and his unexpected love for her.

Source: Erik Huber, ‘‘An Overview of 'The Lady with the Pet Dog,'’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1998.
Huber has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiction Writing and currently teaches at the New York University School of Continuing Education.