The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), 1899
★ 4.09 from 11.7k ratings on Goodreads
Quiet stories of doctors, bored lovers and tired idealists in which little happens and everything shifts: a whole life felt in twenty pages. The mood is melancholy and tender, the voice plain, and the pace unhurried, with longing running under ordinary conversations.
Feels like melancholy, longing and tenderness. About love, society and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy quiet, character-driven stories about love, boredom and social unease. Some pieces are so low-key that they can feel uneventful, and the prevailing melancholy may not suit every mood.
Why read it
These stories show how a whole life can turn on a small, ordinary moment, and they reward the attention you give to what is left unsaid.
Pages from the book
Two people on a bench hear what will outlast them.
At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. The evening you realise small talk is the whole of your life.
What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison. A civilisation that saves broken glass lets its best feelings rot.
Even useless rubbish is collected in the courtyards nowadays and used for some purpose, even broken glass is considered a useful commodity, but something so precious, so rare, as the love of a refined, young, intelligent, and good woman is utterly thrown away and wasted. One of the early sociologists regarded every evil passion as a force which might by judicious management be turned to good, while among us even a fine, noble passion springs up and dies away in impotence, turned to no account, misunderstood or vulgarised. Why is it? Anton Chekhov.Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his writing life, and joked that medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress.
Books that feel like this
More by Anton Chekhov
The Darling and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov, 1899
Chekhov's men and women, loving badly and well: a widow who pours herself into whoever needs her, a liar in Italy, a student's silent mistress.
The Duel
Anton Chekhov, 1891
A clever, idle Russian runs off with another man's wife, brings her to a hot coast town, and slowly discovers that the problem has travelled with him.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy quiet, character-driven stories about love, boredom and social unease. Some pieces are so low-key that they can feel uneventful, and the prevailing melancholy may not suit every mood.
- What is The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories like?
- The mood is melancholy and tender, the voice plain, and the pace unhurried, with longing running under ordinary conversations. Feels like melancholy, longing and tenderness. About love, society and time.
- What should I read after The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories?
- If you liked The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories, try Dubliners (James Joyce), Lady Chatterley's lover (D. H. Lawrence) and Agnes Grey (Anne Brontë).
A taste of the feed
What it is to love someone you have barely spoken to.
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Dubliners · James Joyce
How hard it is to believe that other people are as real as you are.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
Middlemarch · George Eliot
The night before a child leaves, a father rehearses the loss.
Jan moved quietly away from the door, where he had been standing a moment, listening, and sat down on the step. He never thought for an instant that Glory Goldie would remain at home. Indeed he knew better than did anyone else that she must go away. All the same it was to him as if the soft little bundle had again been laid in his arms. His heart had been set going once more. Now it was beating away in his breast as if trying to make up for lost time. With that he felt that his armour of defence was gone.
The Emperor of Portugallia · Selma Lagerlöf
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