Journal Four- The Lady with the Pet Dog

The story, The Lady with the Pet Dog by Anton Chekhov, is about a Dmitri Gurov. He is a 40 year old man that sees a woman walking her pet dog in Yalta. Gurov talks about women as if they are nothing of any importance to society and even calls them the "lower race" (232) but then admits that he injoys the company of women more than the company of men. He is in a bad relationship with his wife, so he ends up cheating on her many times with other women. Even though the man says that he does not like the kind of dog the woman has, she ends up sitting next to him in a park one day and he pets the dog so that he will have something to talk to her about. The woman's name is Anna and she is a younger woman, which seems to excite Gurov. While Anna is talking to Gurov, she seems to have some sadness in the way she speaks about her life and Gurov picks up on it. She is afraid that her husband will come and get her and but she does not want any hard feelings with Gurov. Finally after they have their affair, she leaves Gurov and goes back to her husband. She expalins to him that it is fate that they are now departing. Gurov starts to go back to what he normally does. He does not want to have a memory of Anna and he expects that his life will go back to normal, the way it was before he met her. Gurov thinks about Anna constantly and ends up going to visit her in her town. He goes to her husband's house, Von Diderits, and then decides to go to the theater to see The Geisha. He has a feeling that Anna will go to the theater that night with her husband to see it, and she does. Gurov waits until Diderits leave the theater for a second to go and smoke and Gurov goes up to Anna and tells her how much he loves her. After talking for a while, Anna tell Gurov that she has missed him and then they agree that she will come and visit him soon. She tells Diderits that she has to go to Moscow to see a gynocologist.
Anna goes to see Gurov, but feels very guilty for what she is doing and she tells Gurov how she feels, but he seems content with the situation that they have before them. He starts to feel bad towards the end because of everything that he has told her and then they both realize that "the most complicated and difficult part of it (their relationship) was only just the beginning" (242).



Work Cited

Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. "The Lady with the Pet Dog." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. 231-42. Print.