Reading Chekhov

During a torpid passage in the Petersburg Carmen, my mind drifted to a small, odd detail in "The Lady with the Dog." As Gurov and Anna are strolling around Yalta after they have picked each other up in the restaurant, Gurov tells her "that he had taken his degree in Arts, but had a post in a bank; that he had trained as an opera singer, but had given it up." Trained as an opera singer! After Chekhov drops this arresting piece of information about his hero, he moves on so quickly that it scarcely registers. Chekhov never returns to it; few readers of the story will recall it. Chekhov is characteristically laconic about Gurov. He doesn't even tell us why he is in Yalta. He simply deposits him there. Chekhov was always admonishing writers who sent him manuscripts to trim down their work. "Abridge, brother, abridge! Begin on the second page," he advised his brother Alexander in 1893. He may have begun "The Lady with the Dog" on his own second page, preferring a lacuna to an overlong explanation of why a healthy, youngish married man would be alone for a month at a seaside resort peopled largely by consumptives and women with symptoms of hysteria. But he pauses to tell us that Gurov is a failed artist and a reluctant bank official, and goes on to speak of his womanizing as if it were a kind of natural by-product of his antipathy to the Philistine male business world. "In the society of men, he was bored and not himself; with them, he was cold and uncommunicative, but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent." Gurov speaks of women as "the lower race," but he doesn't mean it. Women represent the freedom and ease of art, as men stand for the constraint and anxiety of commerce.