The Lady with the Dog: A Holiday Affair Becomes an Unfinished Problem of Life

Anton Chekhov lived in Yalta in autumn 1899, where work on his new house interfered with writing. In September he explained to Russkaya Mysl editor Viktor Goltsev that carpenters and flooring workers made it difficult to finish his manuscript. On 30 October Old Style he sent the story, asking for proofs promptly so he could refine it. It appeared in the journal’s December 1899 issue, on pages 149–164.

Its conception preceded the completed manuscript. Editors of the scholarly edition identified a woman with a pug in notes from 1896, alongside fragments later used for the provincial theater and the characters’ psychology. In the completed story the dog is a white Spitz. Notes, observations of Yalta life and concentrated writing provide a documented route into composition beyond any proposed single real-life model.

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In the first of four sections, Moscow bank employee Dmitri Gurov notices Anna Sergeyevna walking alone with her dog at the seaside. Married and accustomed to affairs, he speaks contemptuously of women while relying on their company. Anna also has a husband and has come to Yalta hoping to escape a disappointing life for a while. Gurov’s play with the dog gives them a reason to talk.

The second section explores their differing responses after becoming intimate. Anna feels ashamed and fears contempt. Gurov initially finds her remorse tiresome, even eating watermelon slowly while she sits silently. An ordinary gesture separates a moral and emotional crisis from his familiar understanding of a passing affair. At their farewell in the railway station, he believes it has ended.

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The third section returns Gurov to Moscow. Clubs, dinners, newspapers and bank work continue, but Anna does not fade from memory like earlier lovers. When he tries to tell a card-playing acquaintance of her charm, the response concerns the sturgeon served at dinner. Their disconnected conversation reveals how little room his customary social life provides for this personal experience.

He then travels to Anna’s provincial town and meets her again at the theater. In the fourth section she regularly visits Moscow for secret meetings. Gurov takes his daughter to school and explains the weather while heading to an appointment: family life and concealed feeling share the same route. Seeing gray hair in a mirror reminds him of age, and he acknowledges that he has truly fallen in love for the first time.

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The story closes without divorce, elopement or punishment. They want to escape deception and separation but have no solution, with the most difficult part still ahead. The ending marks a changed understanding: they can no longer see themselves as before, yet a shared new life has not been established.

The text changed between the magazine and collected editions. The 1977 textual notes explain that Chekhov’s 1903 revision removed some language emphasizing Gurov’s vulgarity and coldness, shortened Anna’s explanations of marriage and strengthened his capacity for self-reflection. The revised text entered volume twelve of the second Adolf Marks collected edition, issued as a supplement to Niva in 1903, establishing the basis for the later familiar version.

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Admiration and disapproval followed publication. Early correspondence collected in the scholarly edition records Goltsev reading it at Moscow’s literary and artistic society. In a January 1900 letter, Lazarevsky described taking turns reading it with officers aboard a ship. Listeners connected the characters with their own experience, extending circulation from print into shared oral reading.

In his January 1900 diary, Tolstoy criticized the characters for lacking a worldview that clearly distinguished good and evil. Burenin treated the story as a frivolous farce mistaken for tragedy and objected to its unresolved ending. These early responses, preserved in the scholarly notes, show how moral judgments shaped readings of narrative form. The open ending troubled readers from the beginning.

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Constance Garnett’s translation was published by Macmillan in New York in 1917. The Lady with the Dog opened and named the third volume of The Tales of Chekhov, appearing alongside stories including The Black Monk. The translation retained four sections and the unresolved final difficulty, bringing readers in another language to the same pause.

The story’s continuing tension rests there. Love changes Gurov and Anna without automatically removing family responsibilities, social scrutiny or practical distance. Chekhov brings readers to take the pair seriously, then leaves them to continue living with unfinished choices.

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