The Lady with the Dog-Anton Chekhov

     I actually enjoyed this reading, despite disliking the main character; Dmitri, an older man of about forty, is a bit of a woman hater. He refers to women as “the lower race” and dislikes intellectual women, finding more appeal in passivity and innocence, a huge red flag in my eyes. He doesn’t even have higher grounds to stand on; it’s stated within the story that “without his ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.” He’s a very unlikeable man, overall, so I’m disappointed to say that I really enjoyed certain parts of the story where he talked about his ‘love’ for Anna Sergeyevna. Paragraph 86 was particularly great in my eyes; it says “Anna Sergeyevna too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the one happiness that he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the inferior orchestra, of the wretched provincial violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.” I don’t typically enjoy romantic stories (or so I thought), but I love how this paragraph speaks to readers. I can imagine exactly what this (detestable) man looks like in this theater: love stunned, breathless, a bit depressed. The sense of finality at the end contributes heavily to the way I imagine the scene, and I just really like it. It’s nice. There's another line later on that says, in reference to Dmitri, “And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love--for the first time in his life.” It’s the same sense of finality and yearning and sadness; maybe this was very deliberately done, maybe I just have an affinity for corny literature and interpret it the way I want to. Either way, I did enjoy the story, although there were interesting points brought up during class that made me feel sheepish for liking it. 

    During the discussion in class, someone brought up the fact that Dmitri probably feels so strongly about Anna simply because he cannot have her, something that he isn’t used to, which is a really good point and definitely possible. Dmitri doesn’t like independent women, and while Anna isn’t necessarily independent, she is unobtainable in any real sense because she’s married; I feel like that’s definitely the reason he wants her so badly. Free indirect style, something else we talked about, fits really well into this story. All of the cheesy, deeply invested love declarations (that I liked) throughout the story are displayed almost as if Dmitri is the narrator; this makes it easier to view these declarations as real love rather than something superficial. It definitely swayed my reading; I hadn’t even considered the fact that his love for Anna was probably born out of the fact that he can’t be with her. It’s an interesting thing to consider and offers a lot of room for interpretation. 

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