The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
1899
The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
1899
Translated by Constance Garnett
In these stories, Chekhov does what few writers dare: he finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, the seismic in the mundane. Here, infidelity becomes an exploration of loneliness. Poverty becomes a meditation on dignity. A chance meeting in a resort town between a bored man and a lonely woman becomes one of the most quietly devastating love stories ever written. The title novella follows Dmitri Gurov, a married man on vacation who becomes obsessed with a young woman walking a Pomeranian. What begins as distraction becomes something that cracks open his entire life. Around it sit stories of provincial teachers, struggling peasants, and lovers paralyzed by their own tenderness. Chekhov captures the moments we do not speak about: the pause before confession, the weight of unspoken feeling, the way lives quietly unravel. These are stories that taught Hemingway how to say more by saying less. A century later, they still ache.
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“He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it”
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“My thoughts about human happiness, for some peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“العقل بالطبع شيء غير خالد بل زائل، ولكنك تعلم الآن لماذا أشعر بالميل إليه، فالحياة فخ محزن وعندما يحقق الشخص المفكّر فرصته ويبلغ وعيه درجة النضج يحس نفسه -لا إراديًا- كأنه وقع في فخ لا مهرب منه. وبالفعل فقد جاء إلى الحياة من العدم على الرغم من إرادته بفعل عوامل عارضة، فلماذا؟! إنه يريد أن يعرف مغزى وجوده وهدفه فلا يقال له أو تقال له حماقات، ويدق الباب فلا يفتح له أحد، ويأتيه الموت أيضًا على الرغم من إرادته. وهكذا كما في السجن عندما يشعر الأشخاص الذين جمعتهم المأساة المشتركة بنوع من الإرتياح عندما يجتمعون معا، كذلك الحياة؛ لا يحس الأشخاص الميالون إلى التحليل والتعميم بوجود الفخ عندما يجتمعون معًا ويقضون الوقت في تبادل الأفكار الحرة الأبية! وبهذا المعنى يُعتبر العقل متعة لا بديل لها .””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
