And as he spoke and walked, he kept thinking that not a soul knew or would ever know about these secret meetings. What puzzled him was that all the false part of his life, his bank, his club, his conversations, his social obligations—all this happened openly, while the real and interesting part was hidden.

- Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

Known for his wariness of marriage and his fear of commitment, Anton Chekhov avoided entangling relationships. He had taste for brothels and more than 30 love affairs to his name. But he also knew that he would die young due to tuberculosis. He had no way of knowing that positive thinking or prayer would one become cure-all’s under late capitalism.

"The Lady with the Dog" is a standard reading for many short fiction courses. Chekhov wrote it shortly after meeting the actress, Olga Knipper, whom he would marry —despite the consternate horror of friends and family—two years later, in a clandestine wedding on 25 May 1901.

Eight years his junior, Knipper first caught his eye with her stage presence. He also wrote the parts of Masha in Three Sisters and Ranevskeya in The Cherry Orchard for Knipper, who became known as “Masha” to Russians of her generation, and who went by this name in their correspondence.

Among Chekhov’s other affectionate nicknames for her: doggie, baboon, granny, cricket, sperm whale, and little German (her parents were Germans who became Russian citizens). Their vast correspondence has been published and translated.

The plot of The Lady with the Dog” is simple: the married protagonists, Gurov and Anna, have a seaside dalliance in Yalta. The pacing is unremarkable. Initially, one is struck by Gurov’s expressions of misogyny, and his disdain for women— a disdain which eventually excludes Anna.

To Chekhov’s credit, Anna doesn’t rescue Gurov from his misogyny. Nor does she redeem him by making him a more virtuous person; they continue their secret tryst while remaining married to their spouses. Here is how Vladimir Nabokov translates and quotes the expository passage:

He had two lives: an open one, seen and known by all who needed to know it, full of conventional truth and conventional falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life that went on in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, combination of circumstances, everything that was of interest and importance to him, everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that constituted the core of his life, was going on concealed from others; while all that was false, the shell in which he hid to cover the truth his work at the bank for instance, his discussions at the club, his references to the 'inferior race,' his appearances at anniversary celebrations with his wife-all that went on in the open. Judging others by himself, he did not believe what he saw, and always fancied that every man led his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy as under cover of night. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Variations in Translation

A few variations on the way different translators have given us Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” focusing on a specific passage, or the moment when Anna begins to worry about sin.

In the original story, there are no italics, so I added italics to highlight the differences in phrasing that stood out in the same passage from “The Lady with the Dog,” as translated by Ivy Litvinov.

But here the timidity and awkwardness of youth and inexperience were still apparent; and there was a feeling of embarrassment in the atmosphere, as if someone had just knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, “the lady with the dog,” seemed to regard the affair as something very special, very serious, as if she had become a fallen woman, an attitude he found odd and disconcerting. Her features lengthened and drooped, and her long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. She assumed a pose of dismal meditation, like a repentant sinner in some classical painting.

“It isn’t right,” she said. “You will never respect me any more.”

On the table was a water-melon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was very touching, revealing the purity of a decent, naive woman who had seen very little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table scarcely lit up her face, but it was obvious that her heart was heavy.

The same passage of “The Lady with the Dog” as translated by Constance Garnet.

But in this case there was still the diffidence, the angularity of inexperienced youth, an awkward feeling; and there was a sense of consternation as though some one had suddenly knocked at the door. The attitude of Anna Sergeyevna—"the lady with the dog"—to what had happened was somehow peculiar, very grave, as though it were her fall—so it seemed, and it was strange and inappropriate. Her face dropped and faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she mused in a dejected attitude like "the woman who was a sinner" in an old-fashioned picture.

"It's wrong," she said. "You will be the first to despise me now."

There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was touching; there was about her the purity of a good, simple woman who had seen little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that she was very unhappy.

Of Garnet’s translation, one might note that Nabokov uses and modifies Garnet’s translation (which he finds deplorable) in his lecture on Chekhov.

And here is the same passage of “The Lady with the Little Dog” in an excerpt for which the translator is unnamed:

But here was all the timorousness and angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness, and an impression of bewilderment, as if someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeevna, the “lady with the little dog,” somehow took a special, very serious attitude towards what had happened, as if it were her fall—so it seemed, and that was strange and inopportune. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in an old painting.

“It ’s not good,” she said. “You’ll be the first not to respect me now.”

There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeevna was touching, she had about her a breath of the purity of a proper, naïve, little-experienced woman; the solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up her face, but it was clear that her heart was uneasy.

Each translation has its own shining instances. Heretically, I’m going to cobble together a collage excerpted from the three referenced translation, a translated take of sorts:

But the angularity of inexperience was apparent in the awkwardness; there was a sense of embarrassment, as if someone had just knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, “the lady with the dog,” seemed to view their tryst as something grave and serious which suddenly rendered her a fallen woman, an attitude he found inconvenient. Her features lengthened and drooped; her long hair hung grievously down both sides of her face; she assumed a pose of dismal meditation, like a repentant sinner in some classical painting.

“It’s not right,” she said. “You won’t respect me.”

A watermelon sat on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began eating it slowly. At least half an hour passed in silence.

In this moving position, Anna Sergeyevna evoked the innocence of a woman who’d experienced very little in life. The single candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that her heart was heavy.

Ode to a Melon Slice

Ultimately, Chekhov’s watermelon slice is the shrug that ties the scene together: it speaks for the man who lacks an self-reflexivity or insight into his emotional palette. “In his attempt to stay and convince Anna that he respects her, Gurov satiates his physical appetites—because he doesn’t know how to do anything else,” Patrick Thomas Henry writes:

He doesn’t offer any immediate consolation, nor does he offer a slice of watermelon. Nor is he the confident, authoritative figure that he’s projected to Anna: that awkward half hour of silence signals that Gurov, actually, gets easily rattled. Chekhov needn’t inform his reader about any of this—about Gurov’s selfishness, his frail performance of authority, or his single-minded sexual desire for Anna.

By slicing and eating the watermelon, Gurov proves Anna right. In that moment, he only respects his desires and not her—not her, her needs, her inner life.

There is a bit of Yalta in the secrets between Knipper and Chekhov as well, or the implication of a possible pregnancy by another man (as detailed by William Boyd). Rumors aside, it was Knipper’s idea to seek a bath cure in Germany as her husband’s tuberculosis worsened. Despite the long-distance nature of their relationship, this time she traveled with him, and committed the moments to memory on paper. In Knipper’s memoirs, she describes the increasing breathlessness of his final moments, and the doctor’s decision to inject Chekhov with camphor and then order champagne:

Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drained it, lay quietly on his left side and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed, and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child…

The writer admires how Chehkov leveraged external details to convey a character’s emotional interior— to thicken and texturize the walls of that interior, as distinct from the floorboards and the ceiling. In a letter to his brother, Anton, dated May 10, 1886, Chehkov walked him through the room of writing details. I leave you in correspondences:

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you’ll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared.

You will bring life to nature only if you don’t shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential.

God save us from vague generalizations!

Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.

Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.