When Chekhov began to write humorous stories and sketches, he thought he was doing it simply for money. By chance the selection came to 52 stories-a full deck! But, as Chekhov once wrote, “in art, as in life, there is nothing accidental.”

A great writer simply prepares the soil, plants the seed, often just by mentioning a look or a single word, and the reader’s own, and spontaneous emotion will burst into being.Our intention in making this collection has been to represent the extraordinary variety of Anton Chekhov’s stories, from earliest to latest, in terms of characters, events, social classes, settings, voicing, and formal inventiveness. Forget the gnashing of teeth, the tears gushing forth, the beating of the breast. It teaches a writer that the less he writes about emotion the better. And that is what I love about Chekhov’s writing and this story in particular. These minute, concise descriptions speak volumes. When he glimpses Anna’s husband, whom she has described to him as a “flunkey”, he notices that “the gleaming insignia of some scientific society which he wore in his buttonhole looked like the number of a waiter’s coat”. Before the love affair, Gurov regards women as “the lower breed” and finds the lace trimming on the negligees of his easy conquests “like the scales of a snake”. Gurov’s wife was “a tall, black-browed woman, erect, dignified, austere, and, as she liked to describe herself, a ‘thinking person’”.

It was this story that taught me, partly, how to write, and how to write as sparely as possible. He leaves the whole thing open-ended and yet, and here’s the odd thing, it doesn’t feel unsatisfactory at all, like so many books that end on a question.Īrtwork from a Chekhov story collection (Handout) And Chekhov doesn’t make it a happily-ever-after story. He falls in love.Įvery good story should involve the characters changing in some way – and in “Lady with a Lapdog”, Gurov, the hero, changes completely. They start the usual affair – but this time something out of the ordinary happens. He picks up Anna, a very young also-married woman – her husband is back at home – who has a small Pomeranian dog.

It’s about a jaded married man, something of a serial seducer, who finds himself alone during the season at Yalta. And whenever I re-read it, my first desire, at the end, is simply to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

It was a fascinating exercise because it made me realise that you could write complete crap when you were young, but, if you worked hard enough at it, eventually there was a chance that you could write something as brilliant as the story which, to me, is the best story in the entire world: “Lady with a Lapdog”.

A Russian Affair by Anton Chekhov