Anton Chekhov

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Anton Chekhovs The Lady with the Dog

• Setting

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Setting

• All stories embedded in setting time and place,
  however expansive or limited
• The Most Handsomest Drowned Man in the World?
• The Nose?
• The Lady with the Dog?

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• Character, plot, and setting all interrelated,
  but we need to look at them separately in order
  to understand how they work together.

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Anton Chekhov

• 1860 1904
• Born in Russia
• Medical doctor/playwright and short-story writer
• Died of T.B.
• His originality consists of an early use of the
  stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted
  by James Joyce and other modernists

http//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/
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• Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing
  to me. Eudora Welty, American writer, 1977

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The Lady with the Dog, 1899
http//flickr.com/photos/35975941_at_N00/808079175/
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Setting

• Two parts
• Yalta
• Moscow

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Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels
oneself in a melancholy day of late autumn, when
the air is transparent and the outline of naked
trees, narrow houses, greyish people, is sharp.
Everything is strange, lonely, motionless,
helpless. The horizon, blue and empty, melts into
the pale sky, and its breath is terribly cold
upon the earth, which is covered with frozen mud.
The author's mind, like autumn sun, shows up in
hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked
streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny,
miserable people are stifled by boredom and
laziness and fill the houses with an
unintelligible, drowsy bustle. ...
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There passes before one a long file of men and
women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity
and idleness, of their greed for the good things
of life there walk the slaves of the dark fear
of life they straggle anxiously along, filling
life with incoherent words about the future,
feeling that in the present there is no place for
them. ... In front of that dreary, gray crowd of
helpless people there passed a great, wise, and
observant man he looked at all these dreary
inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad
smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach,
with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a
beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them
You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to
live like that. Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences
of Anton Chekhov (BW Huebsch, 1921)
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Yalta
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Yalta
http//www.apextour.com.tr/limanlar/karadeniz/imag
es/yalta-black-sea-big.jpg
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Yalta
http//www.marine-marchande.net/groupe20mar-mar/D
ocuments/F.Massard/Croisiere_Mer_Noire/Yalta_Marin
e_Marchande/a-481_Arrivee_Yalta_05.jpg
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Snow on Palms, Yalta
http//www.travelblog.org/Photos/17575.html
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Yalta
http//www.travelblog.org/Photos/17582.html
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Boardwalk, Black Sea, Yalta
http//www.travelblog.org/Photos/17572.html
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Moscow
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Moscow Winter
http//www.grotta.flf.vu.lt/photogallery/galer/ima
ge/moscow.jpg
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Moscow in Winter
http//hep.fi.infn.it/PAMELA/dubna/moscow.gif
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Moscow
http//www.galenfrysinger.com/europe/moscow01.jpg
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Moscow
http//www.tsereteli.ru/files/objects/660/660.jpg
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Moscow Street scene
http//www.cp-tel.net/ashuford/RUSSIA/arbat3.jpg
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Moscow
http//faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history
/werckmeister/April_22_1999/City2.jpg
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Tolstoy is reported to have said that Tchekov
was a photographer, a very talented photographer,
it is true, but still only a photographer. But
Tchekov has one quality which is difficult to
find among photographers, and that is humour. His
stories are frequently deliciously droll. They
are also often full of pathos, and they
invariably possess the peculiarly Russian quality
of simplicity and unaffectedness. He never
underlines his effects, he never nudges the
reader's elbow. Maurice Baring, Landmarks in
Russian Literature (Methuen, 1916)
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Tchekov was the poet of hopelessness.
Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the
years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter
of a century long, Tchekov was doing one thing
alone by one means or another he was killing
human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of
his creation. Lev Shestov, Anton Tchekov and
Other Essays (Maunsel Co, 1916)
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The situation, indeed the entire plot of The
Lady with the Dog, is obvious, even banal
obvious, boring, and its merit as a work of art
lies in the artistry with which Chekhov has
preserved in the story a balance between the
poetic and the prosaic commonplace unromantic,
and in the careful characterization, dependent
upon the use of half-tones. Virginia
Llewellyn Smith, Anton Chekhov and "The Lady with
the Dog" (Oxford UP, 1973)
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Questions

• When Gurov and Anna take their first walk
  together, they discuss the strange light of the
  sea the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and
  there was a golden streak for the moon upon it.
  Why do you think Chekhov waits until this moment
  to provide descriptive details of the storys
  setting in Yalta?

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• How do the weather and season described in each
  section relate to the action in that section?
• What is Gurovs attitude toward his affair with
  Anna at the outset? What is Annas attitude? What
  are some indications that both Gurov and Anna are
  unprepared for the relationship that develops
  between them?

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http//filmplus.org/plays/orchard.html