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Youth and Innocence
The first time that the narrator mentions Anna, she is described as a “young woman in a toque.” The word “young” is the most important component of this description because Anna is consistently linked to youth throughout the text. For instance, Chekhov uses the word “young” and/or “youth” to describe Anna six separate times over the course of the story and Dmitri even notes that it was not long ago that Anna was a schoolgirl like his daughter. Initially, the reader may be tempted to assume that Dmitri is merely fixated on Anna’s youth because he is comparing Anna to his wife. After all, the reader learns that Dmitri is, in part, disgusted with his wife because she “now looked nearly twice as old” as himself. However, over the course of the story, the reader can determine that Chekhov’s emphasis on Anna's youth extends beyond mere vanity and aesthetics. Anna’s youth is both linked to and provides the explanation for her innocence, her naïveté, and her lack of romantic and sexual experience. This aspect of Anna’s character is initially viewed as an ideal trait and Dmitri celebrates her “timidity” and her “awkwardness of youth and inexperience”—presumably because he likes having complete control of their relationship. However, over the course of the narrative, Anna’s youthful innocence loses some of its charm as Dmitri begins to criticize himself for being an aging, graying old man who seduced young women by pretending to be someone he was not. As a result, the ambiguity with which Chekhov writes about Anna’s youth and innocence forces the reader to form their own opinion on the subject because Chekhov refuses to define his characters in black-and-white terms.
The Transformative Power of Love
When “The Lady with the Dog” opens, Dmitri Gurov is skeptical of love. He is trapped in an unhappy marriage, he has turned to serial adultery to cope with said unhappy marriage, and he has allowed his relationship with his wife to color how he feels about women in general. Dmitri has had a string of affairs but he has never allowed himself to get too attached to any woman. It is easy for him to keep his affairs at arm’s length because he feels that every affair begins pleasantly but ultimately spirals into an “excessive complication” which produces an “intolerably irksome situation.” In short, he is a rake who is not particularly connected to his own feelings nor the feelings of others. He meets Anna while on vacation in Yalta and he initially thinks that their relationship will just be another “simple and amusing” affair that will eventually run its course. However, this is not what comes to pass; Dmitri falls in love with her. Dmitri is confident that Anna will soon be nothing but a “wistful memory” as soon he returns to Moscow, but he finds himself haunted by her memory even a month after they have parted ways. His feelings continue to grow until he is finally able to admit to himself, and subsequently the reader, that he is so in love with Anna that he is prepared to uproot his life for her. This is a stark contrast to the bitter adulterer that the reader meets at the start of the text and Dmitri’s altered characterization is a testament to the transformative power of love.
Mortality and the Passage of Time
There are many indicators of time passing throughout “The Lady with the Dog.” For example, Dmitri frequently uses words such as “fortnight,” “week,” “month,” and “year” to keep track of his experiences, so much so that it is very possible to plot the events of “The Lady with the Dog” along a timeline. The text also emphasizes the changing seasons (a common way to highlight the passage of time in literature) as well as general observations about time including the line “the days pass quickly.” The word “time” is also used a grand total of twenty-four times throughout the text in various contexts. Chekhov places such a heavy emphasis on the passage of time in his story about love and deception to show that love cannot overpower mortality. At the end of the story, after Dmitri and Anna have rekindled their affair, Dmitri looks at himself in the mirror as he comforts a distressed Anna about the strain that being apart puts on her. As he looks in the mirror, Dmitri notes, in the same breath, that his hair has turned gray and that he is in love for the first time in his life. His is a bittersweet epiphany because Dmitri is both happy to have found love and saddened by the knowledge that he wasted so much of his life on meaningless affairs instead of trying to make a genuine connection with someone.
