“Rothschild’s Fiddle” and “The Lady with the Dog”

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“Rothschild’s Fiddle” and “The Lady with the Dog”

by Anton Chekhov

THE LITERARY WORK

Two short stories set in Russia in the 1890s; published in Russian (as “Skripka Rotshilda” and “Dama s sobachkoy”) in 1894 and 1899 respectively.

SYNOPSIS

In “Rothschild’s Fiddle” a dying old coffin maker in a provincial town gives his prized fiddle to a fellow-townsman, a Jew whom he has previously persecuted: in “The Lady with the Dog” two adulterous lovers decide to continue their relationship despite the painful complications it will inevitably bring of their lives.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Stories

The Short Stones in Focus

For More Information

Initially known in the West for plays such as Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904; also in Literature and Its Times), Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) has increasingly gained recognition in the region as a master of the short story, a status long accorded him by Russian readers. Trained as a doctor, Chekhov began writing while still a student. By the mid-1880s, he was supporting himself and his family by producing a steady output of short, humorous pieces for popular journals. In 1888, however, with his story “The Steppe,” he embarked on a new phase, producing fewer but more profound stories. Often these tales lack much in the way of traditional plot, instead depicting in Chekhov’s unique and gently ironic voice what might be termed everyday tragedies, both small and large. Over the next decade and a half, Chekhov published nearly 60 stories, many regarded as masterpieces, including “A Dreary Story” (1889),”Ward No. Six” (1892),”The Black Monk” (1894), and “Peasants” (1897). Modern critics rank “Rothschild’s Fiddle” and “The Lady with the Dog” among his finest works, both in literary merit and in their realistic and careful observation of Russian life.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Stories

Russian writers and society in the 1890s

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, Russia had experienced a half-century of deep and often turbulent social change. In the 1830s and 1840s, liberal democratic influences from Western Europe had begun penetrating the shell of traditional absolutism within which the autocratic Russian emperors, or tsars, held in check both upper and lower classes alike. Then, from the 1850s to 1870s, these liberal voices found themselves oftentimes drowned out by a new generation of radicals. Whereas the liberals had advocated gradual reform of Russia’s backward, feudal society, the radicals called for violent revolution. In 1881 a group of radicals assassinated Tsar Alexander II, initiating more than a decade of harsh government repression under his son and successor, Alexander III. Alexander III died in October 1894, about eight months after “Rothschild’s Fiddle” was published; his son and successor Nicholas II, the last tsar, would pursue similarly repressive policies until he abdicated under the pressure of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Before the 1880s, Russian writers—especially a number of remarkable novelists—occupied a central place in the nation’s political and social ferment. From the late 1850s through the 1870s, the ideas of conservatives, liberals, and radicals had provided an ideological context for works whose majestic sweep would lead later critics to call that period the golden age of the Russian novel. Major examples include Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1863) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), artistic masterpieces that have endured yet focus on urgent political issues of their day (both also in Literature and Its Times). In contrast, Leo Tolstoy—often regarded as the greatest of Russian novelists—avoided topical political themes. To be sure, he drew on Russian history and society, but to create dramatic plots. These he infused with psychological insight to convey strongly moralistic views. For example, his Anna Karenina (1875–77; also in Literature and Its Times) depicts the slip of a nobleman’s wife into madness and then suicide as a consequence of an adulterous love. In addition to such influential fictional works, there was a vigorous periodical press at the time. Critics conducted combative dialogues on social and political issues in widely read journals such as The Contemporary and The Russian Herald, which also published many of the best known novels in serial form.

By the early 1880s, however, this generation of writers was passing: Dostoyevsky died in 1881, and Turgenev in 1883. While Tolstoy remained active, after Anna Karenina he experienced a religious transformation that led him to nearly abandon complex, emotionally dramatic novels like Anna Karenina in favor of religious and moral tracts or, later, more didactic fiction. At the same time, the government of Alexander III was cracking down on liberals and radicals in a campaign that historians have seen as a significant step towards a totalitarian police state. Thus, Alexander Ill’s oppressive reign began just as long dramatic novels with political and social content were becoming extinct on the Russian scene as a result of what one might call natural causes. In the face of government censorship, the voices of the social critics, too, were silenced or muted, and many of the leading journals were forced either to cease publication or to move away from political and social content.

The result by the mid-1880s was that Russian writers, formerly at the heart of cultural change, suddenly found themselves on the sidelines, and a pantheon of literary giants was replaced by a creative vacuum. Not until the 1890s would a major new talent emerge, and he would stand essentially alone. Anton Chekhov would dominate Russian fiction in the 1890s as no single figure had since the days of Alexander Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s. Chekhov would take Russian literature in a new direction, away from the dramatic complexities of grand novels with momentous political or social messages, and into smaller, more intimate fictional worlds.

Contrasting attitudes of rural and city folk

Traditionally Russian society fell into three basic estates or classes: the ruling aristocracy, the priests, and the serfs and peasants. The grand social novels of the mid-nineteenth century had emerged as this age-old social system began to disintegrate. Although the government was pursuing rapid industrialization by the 1890s, rural peasants still made up about 80 percent of the population at the end of the century. They lived in small village communes or towns, whose people survived mostly by communal farming, lumbering, hunting, fishing or, like the coffin-maker Jacob Ivanov in “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” small-scale artisanship. Some historians question the long-accepted view that Russian peasants were generally falling into ever deeper poverty in the closing years of the nineteenth century. However, historians agree that Russians themselves felt this to be the case at the time, a perception reinforced by two major famines in 1891–92 and 1897–98.

Attitudes to poverty among nineteenth-century Russian peasants, however, differed sharply from those of their Western contemporaries. As Russian peasants struggled along at subsistence level, they did not generally aspire to the greater material prosperity that would have been the goal of a Western farmer, homesteader, or artisan. Instead, they viewed survival itself as a worthy ambition, and thought of superfluous wealth as morally suspect, since in their eyes it had to be gained at someone else’s expense. An average Western laborer would see wealth as the fitting result of hard work and discipline, bringing well-deserved comfort and leisure. By contrast, a typical Russian peasant would see it as ill-gotten gain that brought only trouble, especially in the form of social censure. Society taught the peasant to strive not for earthly goods but for heavenly rewards, giving rise to Russian proverbs that reflect such values, such as “God smiles upon him who is satisfied with little” (Anonymous in Mironov, p. 481). In “Rothschild’s Fiddle” the rural coffin-maker Jacob Ivanov, portrayed as obsessed with profit, represents a sharp divergence from this common attitude, which Russian readers would have recognized.

In contrast with the rural population of more than 120 million (including provincial towns), Russia in the 1890s counted only ten cities that each had more than 100, 000 people, and only two large cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, with populations of just over one million each. (London’s population, by comparison, stood at over 6 million and New York City’s at over 3 million.) Both Saint Petersburg and Moscow could boast significant industry by the turn of the twentieth century and a professional class of lawyers, doctors, and civil servants, who emerged here and in the smaller cities to challenge the traditional dominance of the aristocracy. In “The Lady with the Dog,” Dmitry Gurov, the main character, works in a bank in Moscow and is very much the urban professional Muscovite. Gurov relishes the amenities of city life, enjoying “the lure of restaurants, clubs, dinner parties, anniversary celebrations; he was flattered to be visited by famous lawyers and actors, flattered to play cards with a professor at the Doctor’s Club” (Chekhov,”The Lady with the Dog,” p. 134).

The stimulation of life in Moscow or Saint Petersburg was often envied by middle- and upper-class residents of smaller provincial towns and cities, and such envy is a common theme in Russian literature. Anne von Diederitz, for example, the title character of “The Lady with the Dog,” grew up in Saint Petersburg but lives in an unspecified town, where she is bored with her comfortable but provincial existence and her civil-servant husband, whom she describes as a good but spineless man. She and Gurov meet in the fashionable southern resort and spa town of Yalta, on the coast of the Black Sea, where he is on vacation and she has fled from boredom. Chekhov, who rose to professional status by virtue of his medical education, lived in Yalta during most of the last decade of his life and wrote “The Lady with the Dog” at his villa there. He had moved to Yalta in 1897 for its warm climate, to alleviate the symptoms of tuberculosis, from which he would die in 1904 at age 44.

CHEKHOV AND TOLSTOY’S ANNA KARENINA

Leo Tolstoy’s influential masterpiece inspired a number of literary responses from Anton Chekhov, of which “The Lady with the Dog” is only the best-known example. Other stories include “The Duel” (1891) and “Anna on the Neck” (1898). In this last story, as in “The Lady with the Dog,” the adulterous woman is named Anne, or Anna in Russian, but in other ways the stories diverge. Chekhov’s fictional tone in relation to adultery, as illustrated by these two stories, ranges from satire (“Anna on the Neck”) to pathos (“The Lady with the Dog”). His stories never, however, adopt Tolstoy’s moral censure of the heroine’s behavior.

Changing views of marriage and divorce

Despite their widely divergent settings, social milieux, and focus,”Rothschild’s Fiddle” and “The Lady with the Dog” share an important subject, that of marriage. In the first story, Jacob’s changed attitude to Rothschild, a Jew he has formerly persecuted, is precipitated by the death of Jacob’s wife, Martha. Her death awakens Jacob to various parts of his life, including his marriage, in relation to which he reconsiders his own past behavior. In the second story, the two adulterous lovers Dmitry Gurov and Anne von Diederitz despise their own spouses and come to love each other “like man and wife” (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 140).

As both stories suggest, Russians’ experiences of love and marriage were strongly determined by social class. For peasants like Jacob and Martha, marriage was often literally a matter of survival: subsisting might require more labor than one person could supply alone. It was not unusual for affection between the two spouses to play little or no role in such partnerships. While those (like Gurov and Anne) who were better off did not face the pressure of actual survival, for Russians of all classes marriage commonly involved little choice and was generally planned by a couple’s parents, with an eye toward gaining financial or social advantage for the families. In “The Lady with the Dog,” for example, Chekhov describes Gurov’s marriage as having been “arranged early, in his second college year” (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 128).

Russian society was strongly patriarchal. The law viewed both a wife and a couple’s children as the husband’s property, although married women were allowed, technically at least, to retain control of their dowries. The state considered marriage a religious matter, so for most Russians it fell under the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. Traditionally, the church forbade divorce except in cases of “adultery, prolonged disappearance, sexual incapacity, and exile to Siberia after conviction for a felony”

THE DAWN OF FEMINISM

Like Russian writers, Russian feminists suffered persecution during the oppressive regimes of the 1880s and 1890s. During the 1860s and 1870s, the feminists had made significant strides, especially in the area of education, with a number of women’s colleges being established in this period. Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” describes Dmitry Gurov’s wife as an earnest intellectual, which suggests that she might have studied at one of these new women’s colleges. However, all but one were closed in the 1880s under Alexander III, and the nascent feminist movement was largely silenced. A revival of sorts began in the mid-1890s, aided by the growing proportion of women in the workforce (from 30 percent to 44 percent between 1385 and 1900). Educational opportunities for women also began to re-expand in the late 1890s: the first medical school for women opened in St. Petersburg in 1897.

(Wagner, p. 67). Moreover, the church placed obstacles in the way of fulfilling even these stringent conditions, for example, requiring that several witnesses testify to an act of adultery before allowing it to be grounds for divorce. In accordance with the strongly paternal social outlook, adultery was considered a public matter, not a private one. Like other such issues of family authority (including insubordination against the husband or father) it was treated as both a crime (by the state) and a grave sin (by the church).

By the 1890s, however, an ideal of romantic marriage had begun filtering into the upper classes from Western Europe, and greater numbers of young people were resisting arranged marriages. The social stigma attached to divorce had started to lift as well. No longer was divorce quite so scandalous as when Anna Karenina had been published two decades earlier. While the Church would not grant significantly more divorces until after 1900, these social changes are reflected by a sharp rise in the number of petitions for formal separation, the legal equivalent of a Church divorce. Between 1889 and 1896 such requests nearly doubled, from under 2, 000 to almost 3, 500, and the numbers would continue to rise. At the end of “The Lady with the Dog” Chekhov hints that Dmitry Gurov and Anne von Diederitz might join that growing number, in seeking to “break these intolerable bonds” of their unhappy marriages (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 141).

The Short Stones in Focus

The plots—“Rothschild’s Fiddle.”

Set in “a small town, more wretched than a village,” the story opens with an ironic description of the town’s “depressingly low death rate” that sets the tone for what follows (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 93). It also suggests the cynical point of view of the story’s main character, the coffinmaker Jacob Ivanov. A bitter old man, Jacob is obsessed by what he sees as the opportunities for profit that life constantly and unfairly allows to evade him. The coffin maker, whose nickname is “Bronze,” supplements his income from time to time by playing the fiddle with a band of Jewish musicians, performing at weddings in the town. The flutist for the band is a man to whom Jacob takes a violent disliking:

A red-haired, emaciated Jew with a network of red and blue veins on his face. He was known as Rothschild after the noted millionaire. Now, this bloody little Jew even contrived to play the

RUSSIAN ANTI-SEMITISM

As in Western Europe, anti-Semitism had long been a feature of Russian society, but public and violent expressions of hostility towards Russian Jews surged during the 1880s to early 1900s. During this period, Russian mobs conducted anti-Jewish riots called pogroms, in which the rioters attacked Jewish neighborhoods in towns or cities, often with deadly results. The attacks gave expression to age-old hostility. Like other Europeans, many Russians viewed Jews as economically predatory, as relying on usury, for example, to make a profit at the expense of Christians, who, in theory at least, saw lending money at interest as morally objectionable. Living mostly in small towns, Russian Jews worked as peddlers, artisans, and traders in grain. A minority lived in the countryside, some of whom leased the right from landlords to sell liquor. This last trade prompted disparaging remarks from Russian officials, who accused Jews “of living at the expense of the peasantry and ‘sucking their vital juices,’ especially through control of the trade in distilled spirits” (Klier and Lambroza, p. 4). Periodic attempts were made to eject the Jews from the countryside and restrict them to the towns. The average official borrowed from Western Europe the false idea that Judaism taught followers to exploit the surrounding population, in this case, the Russian peasantry. By portraying his Christian main character in “Rothschild’s Fiddle” as obsessed by profit, Chekhov may have intended to combat such misguided stereotypes. Chekhov’s tale clearly wishes to create sympathy for the Jewish Rothschild, not an unusual goal for an author in this decade. Sympathetic literary treatments of Jews became common in the 1890s, as liberal writers reacted against their society’s growing persecution of Jews. Subtle details in Chekhov’s story bring to light not-so-subtle stereotypes of the era, which emerge most clearly in the Russian edition. Jacob complains about the flaky, scaly Rothschild, invoking a popular stereotype of Jews having a skin disease. Also the story ascribes the stifling smell of garlic to the Jewish band, invoking another peaasive stereotype of the day.

merriest tunes in lachrymose [tearful] style. For no obvious reason Jacob became more and more obsessed by hatred and contempt for Jews, and for Rothschild in particular.
(“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 93)

When Martha falls ill, Jacob takes her to the hospital, but the busy doctor has little time for her. She perceives that her days are numbered. Realizing that his wife of more than 50 years is dying, Jacob builds her a coffin. He reflects on the income he is losing by doing so for free, and she recalls their life 50 years earlier: “God gave us a little fair-haired baby, remember? We were always sitting by the river, you and I, singing songs under the willow tree” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” pp. 96–97). The little girl died, Martha continues with a bitter laugh, but Jacob can recall neither the child nor the singing under the willow. By the next morning, Martha has died.

The funeral goes smoothly, which pleases Jacob at first. Later, though, he is seized by regret, realizing “that never in his life had he been kind to Martha or shown her affection. … He had no more noticed her than a cat or a dog” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 97). As Jacob returns home, Rothschild approaches and tells Jacob that Mister Moses, the band’s leader, wants him to play with them. Jacob, who feels like crying, just wants to be left alone. But Rothschild persists, whereupon Jacob turns on him threateningly and chases him off. As Jacob slurs Rothschild (referring to him in the Russian original as a flaky, scaly Jew), several street urchins join in the chase, shouting Yid after the retreating Rothschild, the peasant word for “Jew.”

Walking along the river, Jacob notices that he has come to the willow tree, and suddenly he remembers the baby Martha had recalled before dying. Other memories overtake him, and with amazement he thinks about how he has ignored the river for 40 or 50 years. It could have profited him. All the ducks and geese—he could have bred and slaughtered the animals and sent them downriver to Moscow—the down feathers alone would have fetched ten rubles a year. Life seems to have flowed past without gain,”without enjoyment—gone aimlessly, with nothing to show for it” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 99).

The next morning, feeling sick, he goes to the hospital. The same doctor gives him the same cursory treatment as usual, and Jacob returns home knowing that he is dying. On the way, he contemplates his approaching death, deciding:

Death would be pure gain for him. He wouldn’t have to eat, drink, pay taxes or offend folk. And since a man lies in his grave not just one but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit would be colossal. Man’s life is debit, his death credit.
(“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 99)

At home he takes up his fiddle and begins to play, improvising a sad song that reflects “his wasted, profitless life” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 100). Arriving to say that once again Mister Moses is calling on Jacob to play, Rothschild timidly approaches. He is afraid of being attacked again, but Jacob waves him in and Rothschild listens to him play as tears run down both their cheeks.

Jacob is sick all day, and that evening a priest hears his confession. When the priest asks him if he remembers any particular sin he has committed, Jacob thinks of Martha’s unhappiness and of Rothschild, then says,”Give my fiddle to Rothschild” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 100). Now everyone wonders how Rothschild got such a good fiddle, and when he plays Jacob’s sad tune, everyone weeps. “So popular is this new tune,” the story concludes,”that merchants and officials are always asking Rothschild over and making him play it a dozen times” (“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” p. 101).

“The Lady with the Dog.”

As the story opens, Dmitry Gurov, a professional man in his late thirties from Moscow, has just entered his third week of vacation at the Black Sea resort town of Yalta. Married with three young children, Gurov has for years been repeatedly unfaithful to his wife, a woman who considers herself as an “intellectual” and appears to be an unwomanly sort of woman (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 127). He is now on vacation alone and hears of “a new arrival on the Esplanade: a lady with a dog” (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 127).

Spotting the attractive young lady as she walks her white-haired dog on the promenade, he thinks to himself,”If she has no husband or friends here she might be worth picking up” (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 127). One afternoon as he sits eating in an outdoor restaurant, she takes the table next to him and they strike up a conversation. A married woman named Anne von Diederitz, she has indeed come to Yalta alone and is already bored with the place. After leaving the restaurant, they stroll along the sea and chat before parting. Back in his hotel room, Gurov remembers “her slender, frail neck, her lovely grey eyes” and assumes that they will run into each other again before too long (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 129).

It is a week later, and the two have indeed spent more time together. As they stand at the pier and watch a steamer come in, Gurov kisses the lady with the dog, and they go to her room. Gurov contrasts her hesitancy and inexperience with other women whom he has seduced, some lighthearted and cheerful, others harsh and overbearing. Afterwards, she is morose:

She thought of it as her “downfall,” it seemed, which was all very strange and inappropriate. Her features had sunk and faded, her long hair drooped sadly down each side of her face. She had struck a pensive, despondent pose….
(“Lady with the Dog,” pp. 130–31)

Bored by her remorse and naivete, Gurov tries to cheer her up. They take a cab to the nearby port of Oreanda, where they sit on a bench by the sea until dawn and watch the beautiful sunrise. In coming days, however, she continues to be wracked by guilt and by the fear that he will no longer respect her. Then she gets a letter from her husband, who says he has eye trouble and asks her to return home soon. She tells Gurov that their affair is over and that they must never see each other again, and Gurov sees her off at the train station. Gurov, too, decides it is time to return home.

Back in Moscow, however, he finds he cannot forget her as easily as he thought. A month goes by and as the frigid Moscow winter sets in he thinks of her more and more. His life seems intensely boring to him, he is impatient with his friends and family, and he sleeps badly. He decides he must see her. Making up a story to his wife, he journeys by train to the town where Anne had told him she lives. After checking into a hotel, he sees an advertisement for the debut of a performance, just the sort of event she and her husband would likely attend. He himself goes and indeed spots her entering with a tall round-shouldered young man he assumes to be her husband. When she sees him approach, she turns pale; a moment later she walks out into the hallway and he follows. She tells him that she has thought of him constantly, too, but says he must leave. She promises to come see him in Moscow.

She begins visiting Moscow every two or three months, taking a room in a certain hotel. They spend time together in her room and manage to keep the affair secret. One morning he goes to see her and finds her emotionally wrought. She cannot stand the secrecy and feels that their lives are in ruins. Going to soothe her, he catches sight of himself in the mirror. His hair is turning gray. He marvels at how much he has aged in the last few years and how his looks have faded, feeling compassion for the lady with the dog.

This life—still so warm and beautiful but probably just about to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so? Women had never seen him as he really was. What they loved was not his real self but a figment of their own imaginations—someone whom they dreamed of meeting all their lives. Then, when they realized their mistake, they had loved him all the same.
(“Lady with the Dog,” p. 140)

He realizes that he too—for the first time in his life—is in love, and that the love he shares with Anne has transformed them both. They discuss how they might end the secrecy and the deception, and reconfigure their lives to be together. As the story ends, Gurov feels that soon “the solution would be found and a wonderful new life would begin. But both could see that they still had a long, long way to travel—and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning” (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 141).

Chekhov’s compassionate neutrality

Looking around him in 1892, Chekhov summed up his literary generation’s sense of political and social disengagement:

We truly lack a certain something: if you look up the skirts of our muse, all you see is a flat area… . We have neither immediate nor remote goals, and there is an emptiness in our souls. We have no politics. … I won’t throw myself down a flight of stairs the way Garshin [a promising young writer who committed suicide in 1888] did, but neither will I flatter myself with thoughts of a better future.
(Chekhov, The Letters of Anton Chekhov, p. 243)

Writing in the midst of this malaise, Chekhov rejected the grand dramatic canvases and social messages of a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky. Instead, he used his natural affinity for the short story to comment subtly on political and social issues, and to probe the gray areas of the human heart within a more mundane context. Above all, Chekhov wished to explore the truth rather than to preach it, and accordingly he approached his characters with compassion rather than judgment.

Shaped by Chekhov’s own inclinations as well as by the political environment of the 1890s,”Rothschild’s Fiddle” and “The Lady with the Dog” both illustrate these concerns. The two stories do not so much ignore social issues as treat them in a determinedly undramatic way. “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” for example, touches on Russian society’s long-standing anti-Semitism, but subordinates that issue to the moving but inconclusive interactions between Jacob, on the one hand, and Martha and Rothschild on the other. Similarly, Chekhov deliberately makes the adulterous lovers in “The Lady with the Dog” resemble those of Anna Karenina, but on a less ethically loaded, or judgmental, scale. In keeping with this less judgmental scale, events are left unresolved, as they frequently are in real life, rather than tied up in a neat package. In place of the gripping climax of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Chekhov withholds a dramatic denouement from the reader, instead ending optimistically but inconclusively, allowing for the possibility that the love affair might somehow just limp along without resolution one way or the other. Whereas the conclusion of Tolstoy’s novel passes stern judgment on the immorality of its tragic adulteress, Anna, Chekhov downsizes his Anne to a “very ordinary little woman” in a story that does not condemn her for her adulterous behavior (“Lady with the Dog,” p. 137).

Chekhov himself declared that the short story format did not give him room to tell his readers what to think, so he preferred to let them make up their own minds. But the artistic choice of striving for authorial neutrality can be ascribed only partly to the format. Innovative for its time, it was also a conscious reaction to Russian critics who demanded that literature deliver a clear social message, and to the novelists of a previous generation who had met and shaped those demands. Finally, it emerged as well from the oppressive political environment under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Their governments discouraged the expression of social and political opinions with unprecedented intensity, exerting pressures that happened to dovetail both with Chekhov’s unique talents, and with the convenient passing of the earlier more strident literary generation.

Sources and literary context

Noting the diverse subject matter and striking originality of Chekhov’s stories, critics have suggested that in general he relied more than most other writers on his imagination and broad observations, and less on specific models from either real life or literature. As the above discussion suggests, it may be that reaction played a stronger role than emulation in Chekhov’s creative process; Anna Karenina is an example of the literature to which he reacted with “The Lady with the Dog.” However, Chekhov certainly admired Tolstoy’s writing, which was a major influence on Chekhov’s early work, even if he had rejected the strain of puritanical didacticism in Tolstoy’s fiction by the 1890s. Chekhov’s preference for describing rather than judging his characters does have an immediate precursor in the technique of Ivan Turgenev, whose work Chekhov also admired greatly. While Chekhov was influenced by Turgenev’s authorial objectivity, however, he did not follow the older writer in weaving stories around explicit political and ideological conflicts.

Some critics have seen the relatively positive attitude to love in “The Lady with the Dog” (which contrasts sharply with that found in earlier stories such as “Rothschild’s Fiddle”) as an echo of events in Chekhov’s own life. Two years before writing the story, when Chekhov was still a bachelor with several unhappily concluded love affairs behind him, he met the actress Olga Knipper, who was starring in the Moscow production of his play The Seagull, and whom he would marry in 1901.

Reception

“Rothschild’s Fiddle” was first published in the newspaper The Russian Gazette on February 6, 1894, and “The Lady with the Dog” was first lished in the magazine The Russian Idea in December 1899. While “Rothschild’s Fiddle” received less contemporary attention than some of Chekhov’s other, longer stories, recent critics have acknowledged its combination of darkly ironic humor and emotional power. Thomas Winner, for example, has explored the story’s juxtaposition of beauty (represented by music) and banality (represented by Jacob’s cynicism).

“The Lady with the Dog,” by contrast, made a deeper immediate impression on both readers and critics alike. It has been called Chekhov’s best-known story. One early reaction came from a younger fellow writer, Maxim Gorky, who wrote enthusiastically to Chekhov in January 1900, the month after “The Lady with the Dog” appeared. Praising its simple delicacy, Gorky felt that the story had reached a pinnacle. Chekhov was bringing about the culmination of Russian realism, the name used for the diverse literary movement including the works of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.

Do you know what you’re doing? You’re killing Realism. And you’ll succeed, too—for good, forever. It’s a form that has outlived its time—really! No one can go further than you along its path, no one can write so simply about such simple things as you can. After the most inconsequential of your stories, everything else seems coarse, written with a log instead of a pen.
(Gorky in Troyat, p. 239)

Later critics singled out “The Lady with the Dog” as superbly representative of a well-known innovation of Chekhov’s, the so-called “zero ending.” As the influential critic and author Vladimir Nabokov summarizes,”All the traditional rules of story-telling have been broken in this wonderful short story… . There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written” (Nabokov, p. 32).

—Colin Wells