Listed high among the masters of short story is Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Even if you haven’t read his work, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of his technique in Chekhov’s gun. Instead of living in mystery, I have decided to finally dig into the author’s work and understand just what makes him an essential voice in the written word. Is he more than a simple gimmick and, if so, what does he have to say about the larger world around him? Like everything I’ve covered in the Short Stop column, his is a series defined by searching bookstores to find whatever speaks to me. At long last, I hope to better understand a name I’ve known seemingly since before I was a writing major but never had context for. Is Chekhov as great as they say? Follow along as I try to see if the payoff is worth the set-up.
The only thing more complicated for Chekhov than contemplating life’s purpose is his views on interpersonality. Despite leaning towards a compassionate worldview, his brand of tragic irony means that most couples will end the story in a state of anger that latches onto external conflicts of being a lower-class peasant whose only purpose is to work for the comfortable upper-class. Even so, the wealthy suffer their own turmoil as they must find ways to keep the stagnation from removing core parts of their humanity. In short, love is complicated by the structures that humans place on each other.
Nowhere is this clearer than, “The Girl with the Dog.” This isn’t a story of puppy love where everyone has their lives ahead of them. In fact, their narratives are largely in place with families already developed. And yet, the two lovebirds decide to go through with the affair multiple times, resulting in a different tragic outcome. It’s not that they don’t feel satisfied together, but that it’s a short-lived phenomenon that can never develop into anything greater. Alas, they are doomed to grow old as tangents with nothing to show for their progress. Maybe it’s the forbidden that draws them together, but the temptation becomes a greater pain by the end. It’s not so much a “what if?” as it is the more proverbial “why?” that neither can really justify.
At first blush, Dmitri can be read as a routine misogynist. He views women as being a lesser species, believing that they could never reach the achievements of the masculine. No matter how many women he courts, there is always a disconnect with their feelings, and nowhere is that clearer than how he describes his family. His wife is literate and well-spoken. On paper, she is the ideal partner for social standing. So why does he consider her unintelligent? Why must he be continually unfaithful to someone who has an ambitious mind?
The irony is on Dmitri. He is described as being younger than 40 with a child who is already 12. While this means that it wasn’t a teenage pregnancy, there’s still a sense that it was an unplanned experience. He was someone not yet ready to be a father. A sense of adventure was still inside him, and, because of that, the more refined elements of his life carry a resentment. He’s going through what would later be considered a midlife crisis, where he needs a sense of danger to remind himself that he’s a vital member of society.
That may explain why he’s fixated on the titular girl with the dog. She is described as being lowly, meaning that she lacks the moral confines of Dmitri’s wife. It could be assumed that this means sexual behaviors, but at its core, they’re just two individuals who feel lost in their lives. Despite being cultured, they feel the need to escape their spouses and visit this Russian city where they can roam free, feeling alone for the first time in years.
A detail that’s fun to nitpick is the image of a lady with a dog. The canine is in itself unremarkable, but the idea of someone holding them on a leash creates this study of power. In the relationship, the lady controls where he goes. He is trapped. Maybe Dmitri sees himself as his wife’s dog, or he sees the lady (Anna) as someone he can control on a leash. After all, he’s described women as being inferior. And yet, for all of her shortcomings and existing more as concept than individual, Dmitri adores her and spends more paragraphs chasing her than his own family.
It starts innocent at first. Upon learning Anna’s name, Dmitri insists on performing innocent romantic acts. They kiss and recall the lives they have escaped. Anna has a pretty good husband back home, but finds him at times dull. The exchange is fairly boilerplate and lacks any urgency on par with Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” where a brief act turns into magical realism. This is a mundane affair where two people talk about how miserable their lives are. Anna’s might seem better, if just because less is known. She’s also less willing to present herself as self-loathing.
So what does Dmitri see in Anna? An assumption could be that they’re mirrors of each other. Both are the opposite versions of each other and, thus, reflect some desire that each carries. They crave a naivety that is missing. The author never calls Dmitri an idiot, but it can be suggested that he feels intimidated by academia and needs the thrill of danger, where the act of getting caught is enough to push him into dangerous corners.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the third section of the story. He’s unable to let go of Anna and decides to seek her out at an opera performance. Like everything else, this is more designed as a gamble, believing that because this is a public event that she is more than likely to appear. He has thought correctly, though his actions upon finding her are shocking. The repressed passion comes out only to be met with hesitation. Anna’s husband is nearby, and the thought of Dmitri getting caught repulses her. She needs to maintain her social order, suggesting a level of pride in hierarchy that Dmitri has clearly given up. It could be that as a woman, Anna understands the importance of a good husband, while the bar for men to succeed is on the ground, or possibly lower. Even then, the desperation between them is mutual.
The irony of this story is one of the most tragic. It is assumed that the reader knows how morally illegal their relationship is, and yet the prose makes it sound beautiful. There is no suggestion of what would be lost if either threw their lives away. It’s a dream that they strive for, often getting close to their goal but never transcending to something permanent. To Chekhov, these people are more of an outlet to each other for something metaphorical. The high only lasts for so long until they must leave, waiting until their next fix, and, even then, risks either falling into a state of immaturity. It can also be assumed how much Dmitri’s wife hates him, or at least has an intuition for why he thinks so little of him. He is the prototype for later American schlubs, of an idiot who marries the attractive woman. It looks nice, but it’s all hollow. If Dmitri lets that go, he also throws away a child, of which would make him appear a complete monster.
With every passing page, the reader asks how much longer this affair will go on. There’s assumptions that this will be the moment where everything reaches an end, where adults act like adults. Instead, it lasts until the final page where Chekhov gives one of his most depressing examples of tragic irony yet.
Dmitri kisses Anna like he has many times before. In all of this time, there hasn’t been any real development or understanding of each other. Instead, he looks over her shoulder into the mirror and notices that he’s now an old man. He has wasted his entire life. While it’s unclear why he didn’t see that in Anna, it’s still enough for him to have the existential crisis that underlines the whole story. On the surface, the affair is dull exhibitionism, only ever amusing to those at the center. And yet, it keeps happening as if it will unlock some greater answer.
At least from this perspective, Dmitri has wasted his life chasing an idea instead of embracing what was before him. Maybe he had that child by accident and is the lasting mistake he’s been outrunning. Is he just seeing Anna in the hope that he can find that escape? Of course, it’s hard to think Dmitri loves her as more than an object. He starts by seeing her as lowly and ends in repulsion of the passage of time. Even being unashamed to kiss her in public suggests how little regard he has for her private life.
What makes the story another intriguing entry of Chekhov’s portfolio is that it comments on the life unexamined from a different perspective. Where his protagonists often are seen suffering because of the relationships they developed, here Dmitri is trying to cheat fate and find something new. The only thing is that society won’t let him. He chases something illegal, and it may be the byproduct of arrested development. He is a young man who never got to have those free years. He is rejecting death in a different way. Pathetic in nature, Dmitri will die without anything satisfying him. It’s not a quest for wealth or even public image. It’s something more haunting that exists deep within himself.
To recall the title, is he the dog to the symbolic lady of life? Is he trapped being forced to see the world through someone else’s perspective? Or maybe he always had too much freedom and, because of that, was unable to decide what brought him joy. Whatever the nature may be, it suggests that love is never as simple as a kiss. Sometimes it takes deeper thought about what can and can’t be achieved. Even if Anna was his soulmate, it wasn’t meant to be. That tragic irony stings more sharply than anything Chekhov has covered so far. When the story ends, it’s not necessarily one of defeat, but of a man trapped in his own addictions and shortcomings, reminded of what he could’ve had. Now that’s brutal.
Coming Up Next: “In the Ravine”
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