The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

What It's About

This is the third volume of Constance Garnett's Tales of Chekhov series, collecting nine of the stories Chekhov wrote in his last decade. They share a common territory: the unremarkable lives of Russian doctors, landowners, civil servants and their wives, caught in moments of disappointment, longing or quiet self-deception. The title story, "The Lady with the Dog," follows a jaded Moscow banker who begins a holiday affair in Yalta that unsettles him more than he expects. Elsewhere, "The Black Monk" turns toward something stranger, tracing a scholar's descent through visions of a spectral monk, while "An Anonymous Story" and "The Husband" look at the compromises and cruelties of marriage from different angles.

Key Concepts

Chekhov is uninterested in villains or moral verdicts; his characters drift into unhappiness through weakness, habit and social convention rather than dramatic wrongdoing. Recurring concerns across the collection include the gap between private feeling and public respectability, the isolation of provincial life, and marriage as a kind of quiet trap. His famously restrained, undramatic style - showing rather than explaining - is on full display, along with the sympathy for ordinary failure that later writers came to see as distinctly his own.

About the Author

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian physician and writer, regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the language and, through plays such as "The Seagull" and "The Cherry Orchard," one of its most influential dramatists. He trained and practised as a doctor while writing, and his fiction is often noted for its clinical, unsentimental attention to human behaviour.

About This Edition

This is a 1917 translation by Constance Garnett.