The Lady With The Dog

One thing that stands out about Anton Chekhov's writing is that he describes and explains things in great detail. Describing Gurov's wife, "She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home." And the description of Anna, "walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her." His use of detail engages the reader more and more to understand and really picture what is happening. He establishes a setting before anything happens so that whatever that is going to take place in the scene is well portrayed.

The characters, throughout the story, don't exchange much dialogue. Their depictions of each other come from their thoughts such as "afterwards he thought about her in his room at the hotel" which also is foreshadowing. "Gurov looked at her and thought: "What different people one meets in the world!"" Why would he not just tell her that to her face? Why do they both feel the need to not respond to each other or make conversation? They seem to know a lot about each other with only little conversation between them.

A theme that arises in this story is something that is so prevalent today: affairs. Not knowing what this story would be about, but by reading the first couple paragraphs and knowing that Gurov was fascinated so much by Anna, it gave a hint that something along the lines of an affair was going to happen. Gurov is living two lives, which he realizes in the end, one in secret and one that everyone knew.