feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. All this changes when he meets Anna. For the first time in his life, he falls in love. The depth of his emotion takes him by surprise, and the true love that Anna bestows upon him humbles him and makes him consider his age and how unhappy he really is in the present circumstances of his life.

As for Anna, she undergoes significant change as well. When she meets Gurov, she is aware that she is unhappy, but she considers herself honest and pure and doesn't want to do anything sinful. However, after she falls in love with Gurov, she is willing to meet him and start an affair, something she would never have considered previously. In this way, she undergoes a significant character transformation due to the depth of her feelings for Gurov.

In the simplest terms, they both come to understand their feelings for each other. For Gurov, that means understanding that Anna is different from the other women he has had affairs with; far from being a member of "the lower race," as he dismissively calls women, he comes to realize that "for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him" as Anna.

Anna, for her part, changes in that she begins to understand that her desire for Gurov is something she can't will herself to forget. Even though she is riven with guilt over her infidelity, this feeling is replaced by the realization that she is desperately unhappy with her husband and that the happiness she feels with Gurov is something she is permitted to feel. The story ends with both of them understanding that their relationship is far from over, whatever shape it might take in the future.

Chekhov is not the kind of writer who would depict a truly revolutionary character change in a middle-aged character like Gurov. Chekhov knew that people in real life rarely if ever change so radically. What happens is that the cynical and corrupt Gurov meets and falls in love with the much younger Anna Sergeyevna who is naive and innocent and, as often happens in love affairs, the two exchange character traits, so that each becomes a different person by a sort of spiritual infection. Gurov becomes somewhat more like her and she becomes somewhat more like him. An example of how Anna changes is that she is willing to deceive her husband regularly in the same way that Gurov has been cheating on his wife. However, neither Gurov nor Anna are willing to "risk disgrace and divorce for his [or her] grand passion." Chekhov was a physician, and he often sounds more like a diagnostician than a poet. He had years of experience treating patients whom he was unable to cure and had to watch die. He sounds this way in "The Lady with the Pet Dog." He cannot help these two people. Their case is terminal. There is no solution, radical, romantic, or otherwise. At the end of the long story the author characteristically leaves them with their problem unresolved and unresolvable.

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

This is an example of what is so splendid about Anton Chekhov and why so many contemporary writers have idolized and imitated him. We have gone beyond the Romantic Age. Readers will not accept romantic solutions to problems of ordinary people. Gurov knows he cannot get a divorce and run off with a woman who is about the same age as his daughter. They would have nothing to live on. They are imprisoned in their environments and in their marriages. They both realize that she would feel remorse for deserting her children, if not for deserting her husband. In time her naive infatuation would dissipate and she would see the aging Gurov for what he is—and what he knows himself to be. As bad as their situation is at the end of the story, it is probably better than any such radical solution as divorce. They are just two people having an affair. It is complicated by the fact that they live far away from each other, but it is still just one of the countless extramarital affairs beginning, continuing, or terminating in many parts of the world. In time, theirs will probably come to a natural end and only remain with both of them as a bittersweet memory. Gurov will have changed, no doubt. He will not be such a womanizer, and he may be more understanding of people in general, of women, in particular. Anna has changed at least in so far as she has lost some of her naivete and idealism and will probably not feel guilty about her past sinfulness but rather will treasure the memory.

Raymond Carver was one of the many American writers influenced by Chekhov. He had a picture of Chekhov pinned to the wall above his writing desk. Many of Carver's stories end without a resolution to the focal character's problem. The problem itself seems to be the story’s conclusion. A good example is Carver's "Where I'm Calling From." There are many others included in the collection which takes its title from that marvelous short story.

The classic short story "The Lady With the Pet Dog" by Anton Chekhov tells of a man and a woman who meet while vacationing in Yalta. Dmitri Gurov is a banker in the midst of an unhappy marriage. He is used to picking up women and having brief affairs with them. He does not respect any of them, referring to them as "the lower race." Anna Sergeyevna has come to Yalta without her husband, so her marriage is obviously not going well either. The two have an affair together, and when it's time to leave, they expect to never see each other again.

The change that takes place in Gurov is due to the fact that, without realizing it at first, he has fallen in love with Anna. Unlike all the other women he has spent time with and then left, he cannot forget Anna. He thinks of her constantly.

Anna Sergeyevna did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him.

The thought of her obsesses him, and it bothers him that he has no one he can confide in and tell about his feelings for her. He resolves to find her in her hometown. When he does, she confesses that she has been thinking about him too, and they recommence their affair.

Gurov's transformation takes place after he leaves Anna, when he leaves the vacation resort where he met her.  When, at first, he meets Anna, he wants to just have a casual fling with Anna, he does not want to make any permanent attachments, both he and Anna are married to others.

Once back in Moscow, Gurov cannot get Anna out of his mind.  His life at home now seems mundane and pointless.  He realizes that he is in love with Anna.  He was forced to marry his wife.  His parents made the match and he had no choice in the matter.

Anna's love for Gurov brings out qualities of goodness in him that he did not know he had.  He begins to have romantic notions, very unlike him, he decides to go to St. Petersburg to see Anna.

When he sees her, she is shocked, but she tells him that she will come to Moscow to see him.  When Anna arrives, Gurov realizes that he loves her wholly like a husband does his wife.  They long to be together.  Gurov has discovered a new happiness in life, but is also trapped by his unhappy, lifeless marriage.

This practical unfeeling man is transformed into a hopeless romantic who finds true love and determines to find a way to live openly with his one true love.  Gurov's transformation does not end, it continues beyond the last words of the story.

"when she asks him how, he clutches her head, speaking of how he believes that although a rough time is coming up for them, one day in the not too distant future they would be together."

Themes include: the meaning of life, morality, deception and being one with nature.  When Gurov finds Anna, it is only then that he truly sees the beauty of the world. 

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Being a skillful short story writer, Chekhov establishes Gurov's character traits in the opening paragraphs of Part I. Gurov's observations are first described. This (1) introduces the co-protagonist, Anna, and (2) establishes the story as a psychological one: psychological narratives are interested in cognitive processes and motivations of the characters more than in plot and action. Chekhov then gives a brief glimpse of Gurov's social mores (a glimpse almost immediately contradicted). Gurov tells himself that since "'the lady with the dog'" is alone, without friends or family present, it is improper to approach her:

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

Gurov is describe in terms of his attainments, accomplishments and his opinions about his wife and women in general: he is not described by physical traits except to say he is "under forty." This supports the psychological structure of the story. His social mores are contradicted when the extent of his unfaithfulness and the comfort and ease he finds among women are described. His mores are again contradicted when he contrives to start up a conversation with Anna through attentions to her dog (after she seemingly singled him out by being seated next to him (by request?) at supper one evening.

From these details, Chekhov establishes Gurov's character. He is judgemental of women and awkward among men. He can't control his impulses even though morality requires it, social mores expect it, and his marriage demands it. He lives with personal contradictions without any apparent awareness or discomfort: the contradictions are his feelings that women are "'the lower race'" but that with "women he felt free, and knew ... how to behave ...." Gurov is dedicated and successful in work, however, even though he gave up his first loves of art and opera singing for a practical life after having "been married young":

he had taken his degree in Arts, but had a post in a bank; that he had trained as an opera-singer, but had given it up, that he owned two houses in Moscow.

He is gregarious and sociable though boring easily with the intricacy of intimate friendships. He gives them up when he feels them burdensome, only to begin another relationship again. Psychologically, this suggests a person interested only in superficialities or a person so afflicted with lost dreams and abandoned chances that he has no endurance for emotional connectedness: he gave up opera singing after training for it and he had "[e]xperience often repeated, truly bitter experience." This psychological analysis of Gurov's character on this point is in keeping with the psychological nature of the story. Finally, when under the cloak of secrecy, such as the summer resort at Yalta, he is a risk taker and is coercive to at least some extent as illustrated by his manipulation of Anna's dog in the restaurant.

The psychological dynamic of the story is how this character description of Gurov accords with the resolution where Gurov seems to have finally connected with himself and with Anna. The quietly echoing question of the story's end is whether Gurov's feelings are genuine and enduring or whether he will become bored with this relationship and later call it another "truly bitter experience."

One way in which Anna has been changed by her affair with Dimitri is that she has come to a point where she understands the pain in consciousness.  Prior to her affair, she had been living a conventional life with her "flunkey" husband.  Yet, her affair with Dimitri ignited the spark of life, what it means "to live".  In learning that what she wanted in life was "to live," Anna recognizes that there is pain intrinsic to such a condition.  Anna is immersed in complete pain because of her love for Dimitri, but it is a pain that indicates the essence of life and what it means "to live."  As a result of Dimitri's love for her she now sees herself and he as "a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages."  There is a sweet pain to this condition of being, one that Anna now knows.  While the ending is one in which we are left with more beginnings, Anna has found the essence of being in the world and the pain that goe along with that is now a pat of her condition in the world.  This only happens as a result of her relationship with Dimitri.

For his part, Dimitri has been changed by Anna in how he sees himself and his place in the world.  He no longer is the "casual lover" and he no longer sees women in an "inferior light."  He has become changed though Anna's way of seeing him.  In Anna seeing him as "kind, exceptional, lofty," he now recognizes that he must act in accordance to how she sees him.  He is changed because he can no longer accept a condition of the world where there is inauthenticity evident:

...everything that was of interest and importance to him, everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself ... was going on concealed from others; while all that was false... went on in the open.

Anna inspires in Dimitri a desire for something more than what is, an aspirational desire to transform his being in the world. It is one in which there is more pain evident, but in this new beginnings and a commencement of a new journey is also a part of this change.