Russian Lit - Essay Example

This is the tragedy of their love. The Theme of Love in The Lady with the Little Dog. The Lady with the Little Dog is one of Anton Chekhov’s most popular short stories and also one of the greatest love stories in literature. The entire narrative revolves round the theme of love. The protagonists, Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, are married and have their own separate, routine family lives that are not particularly cruel or intolerable. As such, their passion is not something which automatically deserves approval.

However, the compassion and tenderness with which the author delineates the love between Dmitri and Anna arouses the reader’s sympathy and justifies their common search for a meaningful relationship. Their passion transforms the cynical Dmitri into a true lover and a more compassionate man. The Lady with the Little Dog is a story of illicit passion and the conclusion is ambiguous. There is no ‘they lived happily ever after’ at the end. Their inability to overcome the clandestine nature of their meetings lends a tragic note to the narrative.

They are doomed to live apart. The protagonists’ love arises from a shared need, transforms Dmitri’s cynicism into true passion, and leads to their living double lives which cannot be reconciled with social norms. Dmitri and Anna come to Yalta with the shared experience of loveless married lives. Both have been married early in their respective lives: obviously in marriages which have been arranged for convenience, according to the custom in the Russia of those days. Dmitri is afraid of his wife and does “not like to be at home” (Chekhov, p. 361), while Anna despises her husband for being “a lackey” (Chekhov, , p.365). Both of them are obviously in search of romance and have come to Yalta prepared to actively seek out and enjoy new experiences and pleasures.

Dmitri is lured by the “tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair,” (Chekhov, p.362) and Anna yearns for “something better --- a different life” (Chekhov, p. 366). Anna is aware of Dmitri’s motive in pursuing her, but does nothing to discourage him. In spite of her moral qualms, and the comparative innocence of her character, she voluntarily surrenders to her passion. They deliberately embark on a one week fling, which they fully expect to be a temporary indulgence. However, contrary to their expectations, the beautiful surroundings, their common needs, and their shared celebration of “this sweet delirium, this madness,” (Chekhov, , p.368), take root as enduring love.

Dmitri enters into his relationship with Anna in the same spirit of cynicism with which he has always dealt with women in the past: despising them as “an inferior race!” (Chekhov, , p.362). Being unfaithful to his wife is nothing new to him. He is bored and irritated by Anna’s remorse and her continuous fear of being despised by him for being a “trite, trashy woman” (Chekhov, , p.366). He admits that she is deceived in thinking him to be “kind, extraordinary, lofty” (Chekhov, , p.368). He is ready to put Yalta behind him and move on with life in Moscow.

He is totally unprepared to find that his memory of Anna “followed him everywhere like a shadow and watched him” (Chekhov, , p.369). What begins as just a search for another conquest ends with making a new man of him. He realizes that “there was no person closer, dearer and more important to him in the whole world” (Chekhov, , p.372). He complacently thinks it is she who loves him and continues