The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

About the book

In the title story, Dmitri Gurov meets Anna Sergeyevna during a holiday in Yalta, where the apparent separateness of resort life encourages an intimacy neither can easily place within ordinary obligations. Chekhov follows the changing significance of their encounter through small perceptions and uncomfortable returns to familiar surroundings. The other stories extend the volume's attention to lives whose outward arrangements conceal dissatisfaction, vulnerability, or an unacknowledged need. A Doctor's Visit, Ionitch, and The Black Monk bring different pressures of work, ambition, illness, and imagination into view. These narratives rarely offer a single explanation that would make their characters transparent. Their force lies in the discrepancy between what people can recognize about their situation and what they are prepared, or able, to change.

• Intimacy and obligation
• Unfulfilled lives
• Self-knowledge

Why read it

For stories that make a passing encounter or an ordinary professional life reveal emotional conditions its participants cannot comfortably name.

Story collection · translated by Constance Garnett