Critical Essay

Anton Chekhov-The Lady with the Dog

Introduction

The writer and literary critic Richard Ford argues that Chekhov's stories are "impenetrable for ordinary young people”, because they show us "mature feelings" and subtleties that is not easy apercibirse. According to this interpretation, supported by many other authors, is required to have tasted feelings like loneliness, resignation or despair, to identify and to understand all the melancholy locked in Chekhov's stories, because they are full of "experience life ".

According to the proponents of these theories, Chekhov would have accumulated all this knowledge about the human condition through the practice of medicine, which allowed him to keep dealing with people from all walks elderly, peasants, poor people.

I guess this is so, and although I have greatly enjoyed reading in a recent phase of my youth, I agree that the reading of his works at an older age may be able to make me appreciate other nuances of his stories now surely I will have overlooked. To develop this work on Anton Chekhov, I chose to focus on one of his most famous stories, The Lady with the Dog. Besides being possibly the best known, I think one of the most characteristic stories by Russian author, therefore chosen as the theme for its narrative style and, above all, by Chekhov technical resources applied to it (Levitt, pp. 157-60).

Discussion

Chekhov defined as "the master of the story that has no plot”. Without going so far, what we can say is that Chekhov told stories that may seem ordinary or bland, but does so with such skill that gets to wonder at his way of describing everyday situations and feelings.

The Lady with the Dog is a good example of this feature Chekhovian. It's a story that contains no special, the characters are neither heroes nor villains, but people with a current existence, it would seem even boring. The main plot elements of this love story could be sex, adultery, or the outcome of the story and far from exploiting its drama, which makes Chekhov is very toes pass on these issues, lingering apparently insignificant details, yet eventually form the best possible description of the environments in which the characters move, and the real feelings of these.

Basically, The Lady with the Dog is a small essay on how the love between two people arises from a particular point of view while Chekhov had this feeling. For him, love is born from a kind of sadness or compassion for your loved one. For example, I find it revealing tenderized Chekhov description given by a young narrator of his story Beauties:

"That beauty gave me an odd feeling. It was neither ecstasy nor desire nor enjoys what Masha awoke in me but a painful but pleasant sadness. It was sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, even the girl herself ... and had the impression that all had lost something important and essential in life that we would never find (Djikic, ...