Reading Response to “The Lady with the Little Dog” by Anton Chekhov

                  I know we talked about the intro a little in class, but I just want to reiterate how well the characterization is in the first few pages of this story. One of my favorite lines is “He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often, and, probably for that reason, always spoke ill of women” (31). I got everything I needed from this one portion and even though I resented him, it made me even more curious to see how the lady would respond to this type of man. I love the fact that he knows he’s attractive and confident around woman because I was rooting for this lady to be his downfall.

            I like the initial exchange between Gurov and the lady because it shows us what we’ve been told. He’s good with women and this woman seems to be taking the bait. The language throughout the story is beautiful, which made me like Gurov more. At one point he says of Anna, “it must have been the first time in her life that she was alone in such a situation, when she was followed, looked at, and spoken to with only one secret purpose…He recalled her slender, weak neck, her beautiful gray eyes” (34). There’s something creepy about this passage, yet it reads beautifully. I wouldn’t describe someone as having a weak neck unless I was a dominant, power-hungry individual so this description characterizes Gurov more. Another line that struck me was “when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty aroused hatred in him, and the lace of their underwear seemed to him like scales” (35). The “scales” was surprisingly well-fitted.

            The scene when the two are looking down at the sea close to the church showed me how complex a character Gurov really is. In the beginning, I almost wrote him off as someone I hated and wouldn’t like, but the story eases you into his inner thoughts that I can’t help but be interested by. Gurov thinks that “everything is beautiful in this world” (37) despite what he says after. I honestly don’t know if he transformed as character, aka going from a womanizer to someone who could love, or if it was there all along. I personally think his mindset held him back because he just assumed all women were the same and only saw them through that lens. Perhaps he just needed the right girl, even though she doubts everything about them. It’s cliché, but effective in this story. I was shocked by Anna’s parting words: “We’re saying goodbye forever, it must be so, because we should have never met” (38). If I heard something like that I would break down in tears. It’s harsh but Gurov is harsh and he didn’t come into this affair with the intention of loving anyone.

            Something I took from this story is the way emotion is portrayed. I have trouble digging deep and bringing out a character’s emotions and here a womanizer is seen having a terrible time because he’s in love. He has trouble sleeping, gets angry and bored, and the narrator tells us all of this. If I wasn’t told that he was feeling all these things, I don’t think I’d understand his love for Anna or be affected by it. When he’s at Anna’s, he “paced up and down”, “thought with vexation that Anna Sergeevna had forgotten him”, and is “unable to remember the spitz’s name”. We see that he’s nervous and this stems from the love that he just admitted to having towards Anna. It all flows well and eliminates confusion.

            I think my favorite part of this story is when Anna begins seeing him regularly and Gurov reflects on his life: “everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself….occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell…all this was in full view” (45). He calls him and Anna “two birds of passage” (47). I enjoyed this and the ending because it started with a man living a lie in which the lie was that he “loved” the women he had affairs with. Now the lie has become the affairs itself because he experiences real emotion. It took time, but the story was developed well to make this ending believable to me. It wasn’t just a changing the player sort of thing but rather showing how his relationship with Anna brought out who he really was. And yet the ending isn’t all cheery and rainbows. It’s a realistic portrayal of what happens when life doesn’t go how you expect. I could read the end over and over again. It definitely fills it all in.