About Love and Other Stories

by Chekhov, Anton; Bartlett, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History Rosamund ;

  ‘Each time I came into town, I could see from her eyes that she had been expecting me; and she herself would confess that she had felt something special all day, and had guessed that I was going to come. We would talk for a long time, and be silent for a long time, but we never confessed our love to each other, always hiding it shyly and jealously. We were frightened of everything that might betray our secret to each other. My love was tender and deep, but I tried to be rational, and wondered what might happen to our love if we didn’t have the strength to contain it; it seemed impossible that my quiet, sad love could suddenly crudely destroy the happy flow of life of her husband, her children, and the whole household, where everyone was so fond of me, and trusted me. Would it be honest? She would have gone with me, but where would we go? Where could I take her? It would have been different if my life had been glamorous and interesting, if I had been fighting for the liberation of my country, for example, or was a famous scholar, an actor or an artist, but I would just be taking her from one tedious and ordinary way of life to another one exactly the same, or one that was even more tedious. And how long would our love last? What would happen if I got ill, or died, or if we simply stopped loving each other?

  ‘She had clearly thought about everything in a similar way. She thought about her husband, about her children, and about her mother, who loved her husband like a son. If she gave in to her feelings, she would have to lie or tell the truth, and both options seemed equally terrible and awkward in her position. And she was tormented by the question of whether her love would bring me happiness, and whether it would only complicate my life, which was already difficult and full of misfortune. She felt that she was not young enough for me, and not hardworking or dynamic enough to begin a new life, and she often told her husband that I should get married to an intelligent, reliable girl, who would be a good housewife and helper to me, immediately adding that it would be practically impossible to find anyone like that in the town.

  ‘Meanwhile, the years went by. Anna Alexeyevna now had two children. When I arrived at the Luganoviches, the maid would smile warmly, the children would shout that their Uncle Pavel Konstantinovich had come and would throw themselves round my neck; everyone was glad to see me. They did not understand what was going on in my heart, and they thought I was glad too. Everyone saw me as a noble being. Both the adults and the children in the household felt that a noble being had entered their house when I arrived, and this added a particular charm to their relationships with me; it was as if their lives became somehow purer and more beautiful in my presence. Anna Alexeyevna and I would go to the theatre, always on foot; we would sit next to each other, with our shoulders touching, and I would silently take the opera glasses from her hands and feel during that time that she was close to me, that she was mine, and that we could not live without each other, but through some misunderstanding we would always say goodbye and part like strangers whenever we left the theatre. Goodness knows what people in town were saying about us, but there was never a grain of truth in anything they said.

  ‘In the last years Anna Alexeyevna started to go to visit either her mother or her sister more often. She was in a bad state by this time; there were times when she felt dissatisfied, and thought that her life was ruined, when she did not want to see either her husband or her children. She had begun to be treated for her nerves.

  ‘We continued, tight-lipped, to maintain our silence, and when others were present she started to experience a strange irritation with me; whatever I said she would disagree with, and if I got into an argument, she would always side with whoever I was arguing with. Whenever I dropped something, she would say coldly:

  ‘“Well done.”

  ‘If I forgot the opera glasses when we were going to the theatre she would say:

  ‘“I knew you would forget them.”

  ‘Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives which does not come to an end sooner or later. The time for separation came when Luganovich was appointed to be a judge in one of the western provinces. They had to sell their furniture, their horses, and their dacha. We were all sad on the day we went out to the dacha, and looked around one last time at the garden and the green roof before returning home, and I realized that the time had come to part not just with the dacha. It was decided that at the end of August we would send Anna Alexeyevna off on her journey to the Crimea, where her doctors were sending her, and then a little while later the children would accompany Luganovich to his western province.

  ‘A great crowd of us went to see Anna Alexeyevna off. When she had already said goodbye to her husband and her children, and there was a minute left before they rang the third bell, I ran into her carriage to put up on the rack a basket she had almost left behind, and then we had to say goodbye. As soon as our eyes met while we were standing there in the compartment, our emotional strength left us and I embraced her; she pressed her face to my chest, and tears ran down her face; as I kissed her face, her shoulders, and her hands, which were wet with tears—oh, we were so unhappy!—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, petty, and deceptive everything which had got in the way of our love had been. I realized that when you love someone, your reasoning about that love should be based on what is supreme, on what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue, in the way that they are usually understood, otherwise it is not worth reasoning at all.

  ‘I kissed her for the last time, shook her hand, and we parted— forever. The train was already moving. I went and sat in the next compartment—it was empty—and sat there and cried until we got to the next station. Then I went back home to Sofyino on foot.’

  While Alyokhin had been talking the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych went out on to the balcony, from where there was a wonderful view onto the garden and the river, which was now gleaming in the sun like a mirror. They enjoyed the view, but they also felt sad that this man with the kind, intelligent eyes, who had told them such a heartfelt story, really was just going round and round here on this huge estate, like a hamster in a wheel, instead of being engaged in scholarship or something else which would have made his life more enjoyable; and they thought about how sorrowful the young lady must have looked when he was saying goodbye to her in the train and was kissing her face and shoulders. They had both met her in town from time to time; Burkin was even aquainted with her and thought she was beautiful.

  THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG

  I

  People were saying that someone new had appeared on the seafront: a lady with a little dog. Dmitry Dmitriyevich Gurov had been staying in Yalta for two weeks now, and had settled into its rhythm, so he too had begun to take an interest in new faces. As he was sitting in the pavilion at Vernet’s * he watched the young lady walking along the seafront; she was not very tall, fair-haired, and she was wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian dog scampered after her.

  Then he started bumping into her several times a day in the municipal garden and in the tree-lined square. She always walked by herself with the white Pomeranian, wearing the same beret. No one knew who she was and so she was simply called the lady with the little dog.

  ‘If she is here without her husband and without friends,’ reasoned Gurov, ‘it would not be a bad thing to get to know her.’

  He was not yet forty but he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons at the gymnasium. He had been married off early, when he was still in his second year at university, and now his wife seemed one-and-a-half times older than he was. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows: very upright, pretentious, and worthy, and, as she put it herself, intellectual. She read a lot, dispensed with the old-fashioned hard sign * from words when she wrote letters, and called her husband Dimitry rather than Dmitry, while he secretly thought she was rather dull, small-minded, and graceless; he was afraid of her and did not like being at home. He had started being unfaithful to her a long time ago, had been unfaithful to her often, and it w
as probably for that reason that he almost always spoke negatively about women; when they were being talked about in his presence, he would always refer to them as ‘the lesser species!’

  He felt he had accrued enough bitter experience to call them whatever he wanted, but all the same he could not live without ‘the lesser species’ for more than a couple of days. In the company of men he was bored and did not feel comfortable; he was taciturn and cold, but when he was with women he felt relaxed and knew what to talk to them about and how to behave; even remaining silent with them was easy. There was something attractive and elusive in his appearance, in his character, and in his whole nature which predisposed women to him and drew them to him; he knew it, and some kind of power drew him to them as well.

  Repeated experience, bitter experience, had long ago taught him that however much intimate relationships seem like a nice, light-hearted little adventure at first, adding a welcome bit of spice to one’s life, they will eventually always turn into an excessively complex and intractable dilemma for respectable people—particularly Muscovites, who are phlegmatic and tend to vacillate; the situation always ends up becoming burdensome. But every time he met an interesting new woman, that experience somehow managed to vanish from his memory; he wanted to live, and everything just seemed straightforward and enjoyable.

  One day in the late afternoon he was having dinner in the municipal garden, and who should walk up unhurriedly to sit down at the next table but the lady in the beret. Her expression, her bearing, her dress, and her hairstyle all told him that she was from a respectable background, was married, was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and was bored here… There was a great deal of untruth in the stories about local morals; he despised them and knew that they were mostly made up by people who would sin themselves given half the chance, but when the lady was sitting down at the neighbouring table three feet away from him, he recalled all those stories about easy conquests and trips into the mountains and was suddenly gripped by the seductive thought of a swift and brief relationship—a romance with an unknown woman whose name he did not even know.

  He beckoned the Pomeranian over in a friendly fashion and then shook his finger at it when it came close. The Pomeranian started growling. Gurov again shook his finger.

  The lady looked at him then immediately lowered her eyes.

  ‘He doesn’t bite,’ she said, blushing.

  ‘Can I give him a bone?’ When she nodded her head, he asked: ‘Have you been in Yalta long?’ ‘About five days.’

  ‘And I’m already sitting out my second week.’

  They were silent for a little while.

  ‘Time passes quickly, but it’s also so dull here!’ she said, without looking at him.

  ‘That’s just because it’s the done thing to say it’s dull here. Your average inhabitant of some town like Belyov or Zhizdra * isn’t usually bored, but as soon as he comes here, it’s “Oh, it’s so dull! Oh, the dust!” You would think he had come from Grenada.’

  She laughed. Then they both continued to eat in silence, like strangers. But after dinner they walked off side by side and a playful, easygoing conversation started up—the sort of conversation between contented people who are at leisure, and who do not mind where they go or what they talk about. As they walked, they talked about how strangely the sea was lit: the water was a lilac colour, incredibly soft and warm, with a golden strip of moonlight running along it. They spoke about how humid it was after the day’s heat. Gurov said that he was a Muscovite, who had studied literature but worked in a bank; he had at one time trained to sing at the private opera, but had given it up; he had two houses in Moscow… And from her he found out that she had grown up in St Petersburg, but had married in S., where she had been living for two years, that she would be in Yalta for a month, and that maybe her husband would come and join her here, as he also wanted a holiday. She could not explain where her husband worked—whether it was the regional government or the local government, and even she herself found that funny. Gurov also discovered that she was called Anna Sergeyevna.

  He thought about her when he was back in his room, and about the probability of them meeting tomorrow. It was bound to happen. As he was going to bed he remembered that not so long ago she had been at the institute, studying just like his daughter; he remembered how timid and awkward her laughter still was in conversation with a stranger—it was no doubt the first time in her life that she was on her own in such surroundings, with people following her around, looking at her, and talking to her with a single hidden agenda, which she could not fail to divine. He remembered her slender, frail neck and her beautiful grey eyes.

  ‘All the same, there is something pitiful about her,’ he thought before falling asleep.

  II

  A week had gone by since they had become acquainted. It was the weekend. Inside it was stuffy, but outside there was a gale throwing up clouds of dust and blowing people’s hats off. They were thirsty all day and Gurov kept going to the pavilion to offer Anna Sergeyevna cordials and ice creams. They did not know what to do with themselves.

  In the evening, when the wind had dropped a little, they went down to the jetty to watch the steamer come in. There were a lot of people strolling about the quayside; they had come to meet someone, and were holding bunches of flowers. There were two particularities of the well-dressed Yalta crowd which immediately stood out: the elderly ladies were dressed like young girls, and there were a lot of generals.

  Because of the sea being rough, the boat came in late, when the sun had already set, and it took a long time turning round before mooring. Anna Sergeyevna looked through her lorgnette at the boat and at the passengers as if searching for people she knew, and her eyes shone when she turned to Gurov. She was talking a lot, her questions were disjointed, and she herself immediately kept forgetting what it was she had asked; then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.

  The throng of well-dressed people began to disperse until there was no longer anyone left; the wind had completely dropped, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna were still standing there as if they were waiting for someone to get off the boat. Anna Sergeyevna had fallen silent by now and was sniffing her flowers, not looking at Gurov.

  ‘The evening has brought better weather,’ he said. ‘So where shall we go now? Shall we take a trip somewhere?’

  She did not reply.

  Then he looked at her intently, put his arms round her suddenly, and kissed her on the lips, and was enveloped by the scent and moisture of her flowers; he immediately looked around warily to see if anyone was watching.

  ‘Let’s go to your place…’ he said quietly.

  They started walking quickly.

  Her room was stuffy and smelled of the perfume she had bought in a Japanese shop. As he looked at her now, Gurov was thinking: ‘Life certainly does throw up some strange encounters!’ He had memories from the past of good-natured, carefree women who enjoyed having love affairs, and were grateful to him for some happiness, even if it was very short-lived; he also had memories of women—such as his wife, for instance—who loved without sincerity and with needless conversations, who were affected and over-emotional, their expression implying that this was not love or passion, but something more significant; and he also had memories of a handful of very beautiful, cold women, on whose faces you would suddenly be able to detect a predatory expression and a wilful desire to take, to extract from life more than it is capable of giving; and these were women no longer in the first flush of youth, they were women who were capricious, irrational, overbearing, and unintelligent; and when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty would arouse hatred in him and the lace on their underwear would seem like fish-scales.

  But here was that timidity again, that youthful awkwardness, lack of experience, and a feeling of discomfort; his companion also seemed startled, as if someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, the ‘lady with the little dog’, seemed to regard what had happened in a particular and very serious wa
y, as if it was her downfall—or so it seemed, and this was strange and inappropriate. Her face drooped and became expressionless, her long hair hung sadly down the sides of her face, and she sat there in a dejected pose, just like the sinner in an old-world painting, lost in thought.

  ‘This is awful,’ she said. ‘You will be the first to lose respect for me.’

  There was a watermelon on the table in the room. Gurov cut himself a slice and took his time eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

  He found Anna Sergeyevna touching; she had the wholesome air of a respectable, naive woman with little experience of life; the solitary candle burning on the table barely illumined her face but it was clear that she felt terrible.

  ‘Why on earth would I stop respecting you?’ * asked Gurov. ‘You yourself don’t have any idea of what you are saying.’

  ‘May God forgive me!’ she said, as her eyes filled with tears. ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘You seem to want to justify yourself.’

  ‘How can I justify myself? I am a bad and wretched woman, I despise myself; justification is the last thing on my mind. It’s not my husband I’ve betrayed but myself. And not just now either: I’ve been betraying myself for a long time. Maybe my husband is a decent and good man, but he’s a flunkey! I don’t know what he does at the place where he works, or what the nature of his employment is, all I know is that he is a flunkey. I was twenty when I got married to him. I was bursting with curiosity, I wanted something better for myself—there has to be a better life, I kept telling myself. I wanted to live! I so wanted to live… I was consumed with curiosity… You won’t be able to understand this, but I swear to God, I couldn’t restrain myself any longer, something was happening to me; I couldn’t stop myself, so I told my husband that I was ill and came here… And I’ve been walking around here all the time in complete ecstasy, like a madwoman… and now I have just become cheap and worthless, a woman whom anyone might despise.’