![]() ![]() An accidental tête-à-tête in a café leads to a week-long courtship. One day, while on vacation alone in Yalta, he spies a woman walking along an embankment, behind her runs a white spitz. ![]() ![]() He is, from a certain vantage point, contemptible. Prior to his chance encounter with Anna, Dmitri is (other than his habitual unfaithfulness) utterly conventional in appearance he has a good job, passable children, diverting hobbies with friends. This is a story about an affair, but that, in my opinion, is of secondary interest when reckoned against the subtle feeling with which Chekhov describes, and later implicitly questions, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov’s transformation from a man for whom “bitter experience” taught that “every intimacy … grows into a major task” to one who loved Anna Sergeevna “as one ought to-for the first time in his life.” The one thing Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) – better known these days for theatrical works like Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard – perfectly captures here is that bright, brief moment when everything with one’s new beloved expands outward with rosy promise. ![]()
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