Дама с собачкой

Why it matters

Chekhov’s late story begins like a seaside anecdote and turns into something harder to name. Gurov is a Moscow bank worker nearing forty; Anna Sergeyevna, a young married woman, is in Yalta alone with a small dog. When the holiday ends, Gurov finds he cannot put her aside. The story still reads as alive because it has no villain and no easy verdict: two ordinary people, a society that expects them to keep up appearances, and a feeling neither planned. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it one of the greatest short stories ever written.

It first appeared in December 1899 in the magazine Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought), written in Yalta, where Chekhov had moved on his doctor’s advice because of advancing tuberculosis. Its technique is the lasting lesson. Nabokov praised an ending that has no regular climax, and the story closes with the lovers beginning to plan how to be together, without a resolution: the hardest part, the text says, is only beginning. Other writers have answered it directly. Joyce Carol Oates retold it from Anna’s point of view in 1972, Brian Friel’s 2001 play The Yalta Game is loosely based on it, and Josef Heifitz’s 1960 Soviet film won a Special Prize at Cannes.

Notice how the setting works. Yalta is a place of walking and driving out to the nearby village of Oreanda, a resort where ordinary rules loosen, and the story then follows its characters back to places where they do not. Notice, too, the small, exact details that carry the feeling, and how rarely Chekhov names it. Commentators have noted that Chekhov fell in love with the actress Olga Knipper in Yalta in the winter of 1898-99, and that she later became his wife. Maxim Gorky read the story as a call to wake from a “sleepy, half-dead existence”, which is a useful lens for the last pages.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.