Chekhov's 'The Lady with the Dog' - Short Story Appreciation Masterclass (Patreon)

You've sampled Turgenev. Now it's time to savour one of the most influential Russian writers of all time - Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1940).

We'll go back and forth between Turgenev and Chekhov, then start threading some Maupassant and Borges into the short story mix.

'The Lady with the Dog' is perhaps Chekhov's most famous short story, and makes a nice chaser to help digest Anna Karenina.

In this class, I will ask you to read through and pause at the end of each page for my commentary.

When you reach the end of each page, ask yourself:

1) What is going on?

2) What do you think is going to happen next?

3) If you could pick one thing from each page, what would it be?

If you would like a lovely collection of Chekhov's short stories translated by Constance Garnett, this one comes highly recommended by one of our very own HLBC family.

After the timestamps for the audio, we'll have a smorgasbord of questions to ponder:

• 0:00  Chekhov’s response to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
• 1:00 guidance for reading along
• 1:30 the influence of Chekhov
• 2:00 why read the Constance Garnett translation?
• 5:00 Saint Anton Chekhov
• 6:14 Chekhov’s childhood (or lack of) and emancipation of serfs
• 6:50 slavery exists foremost in the mind
• 7:10 Chekhov the doctor and educator
• 9:30 how Chekhov started writing
• 11:00 Chekhov the dramatist
• 11:13 straddling anti-romantic realism and modernism
• 11:35 Chekhov’s writing technique (“don’t tell me the moon is shining”)
• 13:30 “God save us from vague generalisations”
• 13:45 “he and she”
• 14:00 Aristotle on action and character
• 14:50 read the first page
• 15:30 POV and AK parallels (Dimitri vs Stiva)
• 16:40 the Pomeranian dog laden with meaning
• 17:30 Joseph Conrad and the tension between realism and symbolism
• 18:30 Nietzsche and the Apollonian-Dionysian duality of aesthetics
• 19:00 “sometimes a boat is just a boat” (H.G. Wells)
• 19:10 “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” (Sigmund Freud)
• 20:00 how do we learn about Dimitri?
• 23:00 the dog as Jungian shadow
• 27:00 Crime and Punishment tie-in
• 27:40 the consummation
• 30:00 discerning irony and subtlety in imaginative literature
• 31:50 staging and Gurov’s watermelon
• 34:00 wanting too much to live, “to live, to live!”
• 35:00 Proust tie-in
• 36:00 the Casanova Conundrum
• 37:30 can a white Pomeranian dog ever just be a dog?
• 38:30 “that which we find words for is already long dead in our hearts” (Nietzsche)
• 40:00 “everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects”
• 41:30 Discerning Chekhov’s influence upon Hemingway
• 43:00 omniscient authorial narration and unselfawareness
• 44:00 the art of the haiku and seasonal indicators (“shisei”)
• 45:00 reading Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Snowman’ beside Chekov
• 47:00 “only that which hurts incessantly is remembered” (Nietzsche)
• 49:00 ghosts following Svidrigailov in C&P
• 49:30 what was your reaction at the inflection point of the narrative?
• 51:00 reading the ending together
• 52:00 faced with one’s own mortality, trapped in an endless winter
• 52:30 an aspect that resonates with women, and one that resonates with men
• 53:00 speaking to a male anxiety, a Lothario anxiety
• 54:40 more Anna Karenina parallels
• 55:30 share your thoughts on this short story

A platter of questions:

• Is this an effective chaser to Anna Karenina?
• Would you reread this story?
• Are you keen for more Chekhov?
• How does Chekhov compare with Turgenev?

And a Chekhovian quote:

“Medicine is my lawful wife, literature is my mistress.”

Happy reading!