Now he bursts out in a letter to her. She is his “precious, unusual actress,” his “wonderful woman,” and
if you only knew how happy your letter made me! I bow down before you, bow low, so low that my forehead is touching the bottom of my well, which has today been dug to a depth of sixty feet. I have got used to you and miss you….
And then comes one of his evasive fantasies:
If Nadenka only knew what is going on in my soul there would be quite a scandal.
(“Nadenka” was Chekhov’s imaginary jealous wife or fiancee.)
There is no doubt that Chekhov’s passion was serious. Before he met Olga he had written to his brother Mikhail, who was thinking of getting married:
What am I to say? To marry is interesting only for love; to marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at a bazaar solely because it is of good quality.
The most important rivet in family life is love, sexual attraction. … all the rest is unreliable and dreary, however cleverly we make our calculations. So you see, what’s needed isn’t a nice girl but one you love. No mean obstacle, that you’ll agree.
Now, alone in Yalta, Chekhov writes what was to become the best-known of his love stories, The Lady with the Little Dog, in which a chance love affair takes possession of two people and changes them against their will, and which closes with them far apart and rarely able to meet. Their fervor for each other grows with every new good-bye. If the story seems to evoke aspects of Chekhov’s meetings with Olga Knipper, it is transferred to a couple totally unlike them. In The Lady with the Little Dog, Gurov and Anna are both married. He works in a bank in Moscow, Anna lives in a dead provincial town called S—, a town which will reappear in The Three Sisters. Each has gone on a stolen holiday to Yalta, a resort notorious for its casual love affairs. Gurov is an experienced forty-year-old amorist who has a stern wife. Anna is married to a dull provincial civil servant. She is ten years younger than her husband. The opening sentence of the story dryly establishes the inciting spell of holiday gossip.
It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a little dog.
This at once stirs the hunting instinct of the experienced Gurov. He sees her, “the new person,” sitting near him in an open-air restaurant. Her dog growls at him and he shakes his finger at it. He has seen at once that she is pretty, naive and “angular” in her gestures. She marvels when he tells her that he has an arts degree and has been trained to be an opera singer, but had given it up to work in a bank. She tells him, in her awkward way, that her husband is some sort of official.
In Yalta the only exciting event of the day is the arrival of the evening steamboat. She says she is expecting a friend. They join the crowd at the harbor and he notices that Anna is pretending to look at the disembarking passengers for her “friend.” They wait on the quayside until the crowd has dispersed and dusk creeps up on the couple standing alone. He suggests they go for a drive along the coast. She does not answer. He kisses her and whispers, “Let us go to your room.” Silently she agrees. Her room is lit by a single candle and smells of the scent she had bought the day before at a Japanese shop. Gurov thinks, “What encounters one does have in life.” He had known “carefree, good-natured women, happy in their love and grateful for happiness, however brief.” He had also known women
like his wife who loved insincerely, with idle chatter, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression suggesting that this was neither love nor passion, but something more significant.
In others he had glimpsed a rapacity, a wanting more from life than it could give, and these were
unreflecting, domineering, unintelligent women… not in their first youth, and when Gurov grew cold to them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their underclothes seemed to him like scales.
We shall not see the seduction. Unlike later novelists, Chekhov never describes the sexual act: Russian manners and especially the censor would not have allowed such scenes. We shall know the seduction has occurred only by the look of consternation on Anna’s face,
as though someone had suddenly knocked at the door. She had her own special view—a very serious one—of what had happened. She thought of it as her “downfall,” it seemed, which was all very strange and inappropriate.
“It’s wrong,” she says, and adds the hackneyed words, “You will be the first to despise me now.” The nonplussed Gurov cuts himself a slice of a watermelon which is on the table and for a silent half hour “eats without haste.” (Yes, we think, that is the point so many novelists have missed: a seduction stuns.) She begins to sob, “God forgive me, it’s awful,” and breaks into banal confessions of guilt, how she had wanted, for once, “to live, to live!” She has been mad and dazed in Yalta and lied when she had told her husband—whom she calls a “flunkey”—that she was going away because she was ill. Gurov calms her and at last they both begin laughing. They eventually go for a long drive to Or-eanda along the beautiful coast, and we hear that her husband’s grandfather was a German but her husband is Orthodox Russian—oddly close to Olga Knipper’s origins.
At Oreanda they sit by the shore and listen to the monotonous, conniving, breaking of the sea. One remembers the sea breaking in The Duel. For Gurov it is a symbol of the mystery of an eternity that seems to both enlarge and dwarf us. (In his Notebooks Chekhov had written one of his gnomic phrases: “It seems to me: the sea and myself.”) The couple sit a little apart on a bench and are silent. Gurov is thinking:
[E]verything is beautiful in this world—everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of existence and our human dignity.
True or untrue? Gurov, the experienced seducer, is changing.
The couple part: he to Moscow, she to the town of S— For Gurov the affair seems simply one more conquest, yet he finds Anna haunts him. To relieve the seriousness of the tale, Gurov is seen about to confide what has happened to a man at his club, but the man mishears him and thinks he is talking about the sturgeon they had just eaten. Gurov is surprised and disappointed that he does not dream of Anna. He now looks at other women, thinking for a moment to find her in them. He cannot rid himself of her image. This might be the end of many of Chekhov’s earlier love stories but now he wants it to grow, and we shall see Gurov driven to unforgettable pursuit. He is impelled to go to S—, and does so, telling his wife that he has to go to St. Petersburg on some errand. There he finds Anna’s house. It is ominously surrounded by a long gray fence, studded with nails, a symbol of the inaccessible “prison” in which she has had to live since her marriage. The sound of a piano being played suggests she and her husband may be there. He catches sight of her dog being let out into the garden by a housekeeper and he has the impulse to call it, but he is in such fear and confusion that he has forgotten the dog’s name. He returns to his hotel and is desperate until he sees a poster saying that The Geisha is opening the following night at the local theater—an occasion when she, her husband and all official people are likely to be there. Now the story changes key.