Category: Literature (Page 3 of 6)

The stories we tell

March 3, 2012 / admin

We need stories.

They help us make sense of our existence, of where we have been and where we are going, of what is right and wrong, and what purpose and meaning we find along our way, crooked or straight.

It seems there is a story ready-made for every phase of our lives. We borrow these stories and mold and shape them to fit our own circumstances.

There is the story of birth, the story of coming of age, the boy-meets-girl story, the overcome-odds career story. The stories of joy and grief, of love and loss, and of success and failure, of faith and redemption. Finally there is the last story, the story of death, one that others will have to tell for and about us, for we will have departed the stage.

Some stories are one-of-a-kind, bespoke stories, made unique by events or by circumstance: the first man on the moon or the last man (or woman) standing after a tornado has swept through a farm town.

Others are universal, archetypical, templates for the human condition, mythic in their scope and focus. In some magic way these legendary stories reflect elemental truths or record traditions of great value.

Scholars like Joseph Campbell have outlined the repetitive myths that have excited our imaginations for centuries: the Quest of the Hero, the Pursuit of Love, the Adoration of the Sacred, our Rendezvous with Death.

These stories tap into powerful human memories, into what Jung called the collective unconscious, in strange and surprising ways. How else to account for the continuing popularity of the saga of Beowulf? The story’s appeal to its original 8th century audience seems natural: it tells of a hero who fights the monsters that roam in the dark outside the warmth and light of the Great Hall, both a cautionary tale and one designed to inspire the courage of its listeners.

The primal power of Beowulf has lasted. The saga has been retold in fiction and film repeatedly. There have been four full-length cinematic versions in the first decade of this century alone, including one featuring Angelina Jolie (director Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 Beowulf) and another, Outlander (2008), that reimagines the story from the perspective of a warrior from outer space.

Hollywood will never run out of material, for like children at bedtime, we seem to crave hearing the same tale—with some embellishments—over and over again.

Then there are our own stories, the ones we tell ourselves. They chronicle our existence. They may, or may not, align with what others see or experience but they are stubbornly ours. In them we often play the role of unreliable narrator (a term invented by literary critics), and yet we can be reliably expected to fashion a story that somehow meets our psychic needs. We may be victim or hero, bystander or protagonist, innocent or guilty. We may sand off the rough edges and conveniently forget those awkward moments that don’t quite fit into the storyline we have crafted. Under extreme pressure, we may even create a freshly-conceived, alternative reality and come to believe in it.

We need these stories, both the personal and the borrowed. Stories help us find our place in a confusing world. They make sense of the whys and wherefores of our lives. They can gird us for combat, or prepare us for love. They inspire us. They are the stuff of harrowing nightmares and of transcendent dreams.

They may very well be what sets us apart from the rest of creation. Who else tells stories? And who else lives by them?

Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”: icebergs, raisin bread, and the short story

October 31, 2009 / admin

What makes Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” so intriguing even some eight decades after its publication is how this brief story illustrates some of Hemingway’s literary rules of thumb in practice. It features Hemingway’s clean, plain-style prose (“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way”); his “iceberg principle” of omitting detail and forcing the reader to decode the story; and his belief that symbols should be naturally baked into a narrative (like, he once wrote, plain bread) and should not stick out “like raisins in raisin bread.”

Hemingway was always conflicted about matters literary. On the one hand, his contrived “author-as-action hero” persona hampered extended discussions of literary theory. After all, why would a naturally-gifted author ever pay attention to such effete concerns? So Hemingway often maintained that authentic writing meant translating emotional experience onto the page: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Yet Hemingway cared deeply about his literary reputation (see, for example, his dismissal of rivals F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford and his aggrandizing self-portrait in A Moveable Feast) and recognized that he had to advance some “theory of writing” to engage and satisfy his academic critics. In many ways he shared the attitude of the Beatles’ John Lennon, who mocked music critics for writing “intellectual bullshit” about his songs but acknowledged such interpretations served to establish the group’s mythology (“Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you.”)

There’s an air of contrivance about “Hills Like White Elephants”—as if Hemingway had one eye on the critics when he sat down at the typewriter. His choice of topic for the story—a young couple arguing over whether the woman should have an abortion—had significant shock value in the late 1920s when abortion was universally illegal and a taboo subject. And shocking the respectable (“épater la bourgeoisie“) had been a strategy for establishing artistic credibility since Baudelaire and Rimbaud, one Hemingway clearly wasn’t above employing.

The iceberg principle

“Hills Like White Elephants” is well-crafted: Hemingway’s bare prose and taut dialogue pull us into the story, and he shares just enough about the couple to keep us interested. This omission of detail represents a deliberate literary technique, as Hemingway once acknowledged in Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

His somewhat mystical view that “the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” could perhaps be more accurately phrased as “the reader, if the writer is leaving enough clues and hints, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” (That readers would recognize “hollow places” in the writing when the writer was omitting out of ignorance is, plainly put, nonsense.)

Throughout “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway provides plenty of clues while deliberately withholding key details. We never learn the name or occupation of the male protagonist. There are no physical descriptions of the couple. We must piece together the facts of their predicament from their disjointed conversation.

Yet there is enough of the iceberg showing to give us a good sense of what is going on: the girl, Jig, is resisting the American’s pressure for the abortion. She has begun to question the emptiness of their lifestyle (“That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?”) and the sincerity of his feelings for her. It’s clear that Jig can envision a different, happier future (prefigured by the natural beauty around them), but she realizes her lover doesn’t share that vision.

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

The resolution of “Hills Like White Elephants” is famously ambiguous. Literary critics have argued over whether Jig agrees to the American’s demands and takes the train to Madrid for the abortion, whether he will leave her after the operation, or whether, in the end, she will resist his entreaties and bear the child to term (the most unlikely outcome). (Nilofer Hashmi has an excellent summary of the varying theories in her essay “‘Hills Like White Elephants’: The Jilting of Jig“).

Plain or raisin?

Unlike some of Hemingway’s more naturalistic stories (for example, “Fifty Grand” or “The Killers”), “Hills Like White Elephants” is more overtly reliant on symbolism. Later in his career, Hemingway talked about the question of symbolism in a Time magazine interview in 1954:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.”

No doubt Hemingway’s intent in “Hills Like White Elephants” was to offer “plain bread” symbolism—in practice, however, the result feels more like “raisin bread.” Hemingway starts the story with a stripped-down description of the Ebro valley’s landscape and has Jig introduce her poetic simile about the “line of hills” that “were white in the sun”—with its heavy symbolic freight— in the ninth paragraph.

“They look like white elephants,” she said.

“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”

Hemingway makes extended use of the simile, explicitly linking this conceit to the underlying conflict between the American and the girl. The hills, of course, can be read as symbolic of fertility and the Jig’s unborn baby can be regarded as a white elephant—a valuable but too costly possession that is hard to dispose of. Her lover’s irritation with her repeated references to the “white elephants” reflects his rejection of any alternative to what he wants her to do. When Jig abandons the simile, it signals that she will comply with his wishes.

“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.”

Some critics have focused on additional symbols in the story—from the meaning of Jig’s name to the symbolism of the beaded curtain to the significance of the hotel stickers on the couple’s baggage. While some of these readings are far-fetched, Hemingway did, consciously or unconsciously, provide plenty of ambiguous “raisins” with room for interpretation.

Too clever by half?

It’s possible to admire the technical craft involved in “Hills Like White Elephants” and still find the story wanting on several levels. There’s a certain flatness in this vignette of a love affair gone bad; for an author often criticized for his weakly-portrayed female, Jig is—ironically enough—the more human and rounded character, while the American comes across as a narcissistic lout.

Hemingway’s writerly cleverness—the shock value of writing about abortion, the deliberate omission of detail, the heavy-handed symbolism–is too much on display in “Hills Like White Elephants.” In the end, it’s “too clever by half” and these tricks lend the story an overly calculated and mechanical feel—an irony, indeed, for a writer who prided himself on authenticity.

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the world of work

November 18, 2008 / admin

Herman Melville knew not only how to tell a straightforward story, but also how to slyly include enough different elements, literary references, and symbols to add several layers of meaning to his tales; this ability to fuse narrative and symbolism is on full display in “Bartleby The Scrivener,” a longish short story first published in 1853.

Melville understood the value of ambiguity. By making the character of Bartleby, a legal scrivener (or copyist), so strange, so opaque, and so memorable, Melville insured the story’s lasting appeal. We never learn why Bartleby “prefers not” to tackle his office duties, and the underlying reasons for his stubborn resistance remain unexplained. As “Bartleby the Scrivener” begins, its narrator, the Wall Street lawyer who employs Bartleby, emphasizes the man’s mysteriousness:

Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him…

Brown University’s Arnold Weinstein has noted that this “blank Bartleby” has encouraged multiple readings of the character. Who is Bartleby? Who is he meant to represent? Some critics have viewed Bartleby as a stand-in for many of Melville’s sometimes difficult contemporaries (Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne) or for Melville himself. Was Bartleby a response to the negative reviews and flagging sales of Melville’s novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), a suggestion that Melville “preferred not” to produce more accessible and less metaphorical fiction, even if readers preferred it? A different interpretation casts Bartleby as a Christ-like figure, misunderstood and persecuted by the world; those of a Marxist bent see him as the archetype of the office worker resisting the mind-numbing demands of exploitative capitalism.

Not every reader of Melville appreciates his fondness for the baroque and not all critics have delighted in his literary tricks. The English novelist D.H. Lawrence, in a critique of Moby-Dick, disapproved of what he called Melville’s attempt to “square himself with the intellectual world by dragging in deliberate transcendentalism, deliberate symbols and ‘deeper meanings.’ All this is insufferably clumsy and in clownish bad taste: self-conscious and amateurish to a degree, the worst side of American behavior.” In contrast, Lawrence writes, when Melville “renders us his sheer apprehension of the world…” then “he is wonderful” and his writing commands “a stillness in the soul, an awe.”

“Bartleby the Scrivener” does give us more “sheer apprehension of the world” and it can be read in simpler terms, as a story highlighting the tensions and contradictions in relationships at work. Melville caught some of the absurdity and alienation of office work at a time when most Americans made their living on farms. Bartleby’s eccentric office-mates—Nipper, Turkey, Ginger Boy—would fit right into the hijinks at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company of the television sit-com “The Office.”

A prudent narrator

One entry point for the story is the narrator, Bartleby’s boss, whose dealings with his strange employee provide Melville’s narrative arc. The narrator/lawyer decribes himself as “rather elderly man,” one who is “eminently safe,” and he is sure to note that he has been praised by the famous financier John Jacob Aster as prudent and methodical. Yet the narrator has been living an “unexamined life” (to borrow a phrase from the transcendentalists). Proud of his commercial success and prudence, with a “natural expectancy of instant compliance” from his employees, he is totally unprepared for Bartleby’s resistance (“I would prefer not to”) and rejection of convention. Bartleby’s response puts the narrator strangely on the defensive. The lawyer regards himself as a decent, Christian man and we sense that he is not completely comfortable with wielding authority over his “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” employee. He cannot bring himself to confront Bartleby directly, and becomes profoundly linked to this strange employee:

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom.

The lawyer tries to cope with the situation rationally: he attempts to reason with Bartleby, to negotiate with him, and, finally, to pay him to go away. He finds that he cannot alter Bartleby’s insistence on withdrawing from work and from life. It is only the fear that “the strange creature I kept at my office” will damage his reputation, and hurt his law practice, that leads him to end their relationship, but even then he cannot do it directly, instead moving his office to escape Bartleby, this “intolerable incubus.”

Yet the narrator remains haunted by Bartleby. What does he owe him? Where does his responsibility end? All of his attempts to help Bartleby are rebuffed, but the lawyer still feels guilty when Bartleby’s stubborn rejection of the conventional costs him his life.

Some of the lasting appeal of the story is that it reflects, in exaggerated form, the natural workplace tension between boss and employee. How does the manager exercise his or her authority? By command and control or through gentle persuasion? And who ends up with the real power in the relationship? After all, the worker is not without leverage—sabotage or deliberately shoddy work is always an option, or (as with Bartleby) passive-aggressive resistance.

The puzzle of Bartleby

The close to “Bartleby the Scrivener” (what the narrator calls a sequel), fails to solve the puzzle of Bartleby. We learn that Bartleby served as a clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington and had lost his job with a change in administration. (Some critics have argued that the Dead Letters represent Melville’s failed novels, and that Bartleby’s despair reflects Melville’s despondency over what he thought was a dead-end for his writing.) The narrator draws a connection between Bartleby’s prior occupation and his eventual breakdown: “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.”

But somehow Bartleby’s tacked-on past doesn’t seem enough to explain his bizarre behavior, his deadened affect, his anhedonia. His alienation and separation must have deeper and hidden psychic roots, but Melville deliberately leaves the mystery of this strange, ghostly scrivener unsolved.

Jefferson Flanders is author of the Cold War thriller Herald Square.

**C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and the literary lure of the “Good Fight”**

July 21, 2008 / admin

Both American presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, named Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls when asked recently by journalists to cite their favorite novel. McCain has said that during his captivity in North Vietnam as a POW he recited portions of the book to himself.

It’s intriguing that both McCain and Obama chose a novel set not in the United States, but in Spain during its fratricidal Civil War in the late 1930s.

The protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American, however, Robert Jordan, a leftist college professor and International Brigades volunteer who embarks on a dangerous mission to blow up a strategic bridge in the Iberian hill country. At least one conservative writer, Michael Knox Beran, has tartly suggested that McCain should find a different favorite, one that isn’t “a maudlin lament for a socialist bridge-bomber.”

There is some irony in Beran’s critique of the politics of Hemingway’s novel, because the hard Left in the United States, including some of the American Communists who served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (part of the International Brigades), ferociously attacked the book (and its author) after its publication in 1940. These critics, among them former Lincoln commander Milton Wolff, objected to Hemingway’s negative portrayal of Soviet motives and tactics in Spain and to his unsparing and harsh portraits of political commissar André Marty (known as the “Butcher of Albacete” for his purge of non-Communists in the International Brigades) and the Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, the Leftist icon also known as La Passionara. (Hemingway, never one to duck a fight, responded directly and profanely to those he called the “ideology boys.”)

Hemingway made a distinction between supporting the Loyalist cause, as did his fictional character Robert Jordan, and endorsing the Soviet strategy of deception and manipulation in dealing with the Republican government. Such an approach was anathema to the hardliners. There’s an amusing anecdote (recounted in Peter Carroll’s The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War) involving the actor Gary Cooper, Hemingway’s choice to play Robert Jordan in the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Alvah Bessie, a Lincoln veteran and screenwriter. During the filming, Bessie lectured Cooper about how the Spanish conflict hadn’t been a civil war, as Cooper believed, but instead was a German and Italian invasion designed to overthrow the legal government of Spain. Cooper’s laconic, and classic, response: “That so? That’s what so great about this country…a guy like you can fight in a war that’s none of his business.”

Art and the “Good Fight”

It’s not hard to see why the “Good Fight” (as the Spanish struggle was dubbed) inspired artists, poets, playwrights, novelists and short story writers from the start. The conflict was rich with dramatic, and tragic, elements. Writers have been drawn by the idealism of many of the defenders of the Republic, and by the idea that the Spanish hostilities represented a dress rehearsal for World War II. Some of the best works about the conflict, such as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s novel, have explored the tensions within the ranks of the Loyalists. This artistic and literary fascination with the “Good Fight” has continued into the 21st century as evidenced by a continuing stream of books (fiction and non-fiction) about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades, including English author C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid, a best-seller in Britain.

Sansom has set his fictional story in 1940 Madrid, a year after General Francisco Franco’s victory over the Loyalists, and Winter in Madrid shines brightest in its evocative portrayal of the grim life in Spain’s capital city: the compromises, and sacrifices, required for survival. The novel’s protagonist, Harry Brett, a veteran of Dunkirk, is recruited by British Intelligence to spy on a former schoolmate, Sandy Forsyth, who is involved in shady business dealings with the Spanish government. Brett’s mission exposes him to the corruption and venality of the Nationalist victors, and to the growing rivalry between the Royalist and Falange wings of Franco’s regime.

Sansom’s characters reflect the range of British attitudes toward the Spanish conflict. Harry Brett is a self-described liberal Tory (“As far as I am concerned, Spain before the Civil War was rotten with chaos, and the Fascists and Communists both took advantage”). The crypto-Fascist Forsyth is balanced by a British Communist, Bernie Piper, an internationalist who embraces the Republican cause as part of a broader struggle against Fascism. And there is an English Red Cross nurse, Barbara Clare, an idealistic, but fragile, fellow traveler who becomes romantically involved with both Piper and Forsyth. The three men—Brett, Piper and Forsyth—have all attended Rookwood, a traditional British public school, and Sansom intersperses flashbacks of their school days throughout the pages of Winter in Madrid, linking past and present friendships and rivalries. That’s a lot of baggage for any novel to carry, and Sansom struggles to pull off the dual narratives.

He also misses the mark in his characterization of Forsyth, a straight-from-Central-Casting sadist, exactly the sort of predictable Fascist bad guy found in innumerable World War II thrillers. Franco’s Spanish supporters are also uniformly portrayed by Sansom as grasping, or evil, or both. Yet, it is possible for a novelist to write about the complex human dimensions of those loyal to a twisted ideology. For example, Alan Furst has created a number of fully-rounded characters drawn to totalitarian creeds in novels like The World at Night, Kingdom of Shadows, and Dark Star, and David Downing’s Zoo Station and Silesian Station give us flesh-and-blood Germans struggling to retain their decency in Nazi Germany. Winter in Madrid would have been better served by grays instead of black-and-white, and it would have been a much better novel if Sansom had risked more by creating less predictable, and less cliched, villains.

To his credit, Sansom gets his history right. There’s no whitewashing of Comintern treachery during the Civil War, and also no shying away from the post-war reality of Nationalist brutality. At one level, Winter in Madrid can be read as an indictment of Britain’s accomodationist policy toward Franco and the Spanish Right in the 1930s and 1940s, and yet Sansom acknowledges that by the time of the Battle of Britain, Whitehall’s options had narrowed. No matter how distasteful the Franco regime might be, keeping Spain out of an alliance with the Germans had to shape British policy.

Sansom’s imaginative leap in setting Winter in Madrid after the end of the civil war deserves praise as well. We see Spain confronting not only the human costs of its ideological death struggle—the shattered veterans, the orphans, the despairing widows—but also the grim prospects of life under a dictatorship. It is a fascinating, and haunting, story and Winter in Madrid tells it well.

Anton Chekhov and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

August 30, 2007 / admin

I have come to appreciate Anton Chekhov’s stories more as I move deeper into middle age. Chekhov’s fiction explores the quiet drama in the lives of ordinary people, and the prolific Russian author often concludes his stories without much of a clear-cut resolution, something I found off-putting when I was younger but now, with the benefit of life-experience, recognize as closer to reality than the tidy and clever concluding epiphanies offered by more conventional writers.

Chekhov is fascinated by people, by their contradictory behavior, by their elusive inner lives, and their capacity for cruelty, and pettiness, and, yes, love. There’s little in the way of enveloping action in Chekhov’s fiction—few Tolstoyian connections to the political and social issues of the day—but his characters are universally human in a way that transcends the 19th century bourgeois Russian setting.

Chekhov approaches his characters with a slightly ironic empathy—the legacy, no doubt, of his years as a physician—and with few illusions. That’s evident in his much-anthologized “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” where we learn of the flaws of the two main characters, an adulterous couple, as Chekhov introduces them in the first few pages of the story. (That Chekhov narrows his focus to the couple is deliberate; he once wrote: “Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.”)

A flawed couple

Dimitry Dmitrich Gurov is a Moscow banker, trapped in a loveless marriage (he is, Chekhov tells us, somewhat afraid of his severe and forbidding wife); the story traces his seduction of a young married woman while they are both vacationing in the seaside resort Yalta. His conquest, Anna Sergeyevna, has been raised in St. Petersburg but now lives in a remote provincial city with her husband, a government official she describes as “a flunkey.” Her vacation is a break from her stifling marriage; she is vulnerable, alone except for her white Pomeranian (the pet dog of the story’s title). Gurov is not, at first, a sympathetic character—Chekhov describes him as having a “coarse arrogance,” and Gurov treats women with a mixture of calculated charm and disdain.

Gurov admires Anna Sergeyevna’s “slim delicate throat, her lovely gray eyes” but beyond the sexual attraction, this jaded Moscuvite isn’t particularly impressed by his younger lover (” ‘There’s something pathetic about her, though,’ he thought…”); later we learn he is quickly “bored with her” and “irritated by her naive tone.” Anna Sergeyevna seems starved for attention and love, although she is guilty and anxious about their affair; it is easier to sympathize with her neediness than with Gurov’s selfish vanity.

And there, you might think, it would end: a brief dalliance far from home, a liaison carrying more significance for the naive Anna Sergeyevna than for the worldly Gurov. Yet that is not what happens. When Gurov returns to his daily routine he finds that rather than fading from memory, Anna Sergeyevna remains more and more on his mind (“And his memories glowed more and more vividly.”)

He has been somehow touched deeply by his connection with this fair-haired young woman; when he tries to verbalize his feelings, however, he finds he is blocked both by convention and by the emotional tone-deafness of those around him. There is a tragi-comic moment when he broaches the subject of Anna Sergeyevna and finds a friend more concerned with the freshness of the fish being served at their club than with hearing about Gurov’s “fascinating woman.”

Gurov, now obsessed, decides that he must see Anna Sergeyevna again, and so he concocts an excuse and heads off to her drab, provincial city. He attends the opening night at the local theater, hoping to see her, and he is in luck; she is there, with her husband, seated in the third row.

…when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that in the whole world there was no human being so neat, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little undistinguished woman, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, of the miserable local violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.

The passage captures Chekhov’s clinically ironic approach as a writer. Gurov’s sudden awareness of his romantic love for Anna, is balanced with the reality that she is a “little undistinguished woman” with a “vulgar lorgnette”; and this moment of passion has a musical accompaniment of “miserable local violins.”

“The Lady with the Pet Dog” does not end with this dramatic reunion; instead, Chekhov describes the continuation of the affair, as Anna Sergeyevna visits Gurov in Moscow and their relationship and secret life together becomes “…everything that constituted the core of his life.” Doctor Chekhov is sensitive to the contrast between the external and internal—what is truly going on with a person (their health, their feelings, their desires and needs), he suggests, is hidden from public view.

What will happen to the lovers? Chekhov does not tell us directly but hints that, while “the end is still far off,” there will be no conventional happy ending—that there are complications and difficulties ahead. It is a mark of Chekhov’s artistry that, by the end of “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” we very much want to know how it turns out for Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, ordinary people with an extraordinary love.

Excerpts from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s translation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog.”