Reaction to "The Lady with the Dog"

From the beginning of Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” the speaker paints Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov as a disgusting human being. While I would not particularly consider myself a strong feminist, I found myself quite offended by Dmitry’s views towards women. He openly considers them a “lower race,” yet admits to enjoying their company and falls for anyone attractive. Dmitry’s actions and thoughts in every situation lead the reader despise him; he is unfaithful, obnoxious, and takes innocent, unmarred Anna Sergeyevna as a lover, then disturbingly compares to his own prepubescent daughter. He does not care for anything more than passion with strangers. In short, Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov is introduced as a pig.

The interesting thing about the short story is how the speaker tries to change the reader’s feelings toward Dmitry. Even the questions at the end of the story lead the reader to believe that he should reconsider the speaker’s initial impression of Gurov. My feelings towards Gurov never changed. Originally, he only held Anna in a sort of ironic mockery as he cheated on his wife and ignored his children. Even at the end of the story, when Dmitry “transforms,” he is still despicable. Just because he decides that he loves this woman and wants to work through their flawed relationship and struggles together does not make him a decent person. He is still cheating on his wife and abandoning his children! He is not the victim of fate, marrying the wrong person at the wrong time; Dmitry is a selfish human being who makes a woman fall in love with him through deceit, then later decides that he loves her as well. Dmitry takes on the stance that new love is fresh and exciting, but thinks it fades quickly. Just because the love he has with Anna has not faded as quickly as it did with others makes him believe erroneously that the two of them can last. Their relationship is built on lies, yet they act as if they are blameless lovers scorned by destiny. Dmitry considers the two to be “like two migrating birds, the male and female, who had been caught and put into separate cages.” However, the poetic tragedy of their situation is far more poetic than tragic. Just because Dmitry actually finds someone to care about does not change my feelings towards him.

On the same note, why does Gurov feel that he can work through the hopeless train wreck of a relationship that he shares with Anna, but not his connection with his wife? Clearly he felt something for his wife when they first got married, even though he later considers the move a mistake. Why is Dmitry so willing to fix a relationship with a random woman over his own wife? The relationship Dmitry has with Anna was built on a foundation of deceit, and I believe that this “love” will fade just as his legal relationship has.

Whatever the speaker was trying to say about passion, love, commitment, struggles, and more, was completely lost on me with the lack of character development. While Dmitry may have changed his opinion of all women, he remains disgusting and confused by the reality of life. Despite what the authors of Fiction 101 seem to think, I do not believe that the reader should feel any sympathy for Dmitry, or feel any drastic change of emotion toward him at all. The entire short story became frustrating for me; I feel like the speaker was using overly-dramatic language and similes to arouse a change of heart in the reader, and I do not appreciate this. No amount of poetry will convince me that Dmitry is anything more than a pathetic man who seals his own fate.