The Lady with the Dog

Dmitri Gurov, a married Moscow banker who thinks of women as an amusing pastime, notices a young woman walking a small white dog along the seafront at Yalta. Their holiday affair is supposed to end when the season does, but back in Moscow he cannot forget Anna Sergeyevna, and he travels to her provincial town to find her at the theatre.

Published in 1899, this short story contains no great events and no clear ending, and it is often called one of the most perfect short stories ever written. In a few pages Chekhov shows how a careless man is changed, against his will, by real love, and leaves his lovers just as the hardest part begins.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.