As part of my Russian course, we've been translating one of Chekhov's short stories,
The lady with a dog. Below is my loosish translation of the first part. The picture to the side is of Chekhov with his wife, Olga. They look, I must say, surprisingly cheery and wry.
I
It was said that someone new had appeared on the promenade: a lady with a dog. Dmitry Dmitrych Gurov, who had already been in Yalta two weeks and who was settling in there, also took an interest in the new arrivals. Sitting in Vernet's Pavilion, he saw as a young lady, a diminutive blond in a beret, passed along the promenade; behind her ran a white Pomeranian dog.
And then he would meet her in the municipal park and the urban gardens several times a day. She would stroll alone—always, however, in that beret, with the white Pomeranian; no-one knew who she was, and they would call her simply “the lady with a dog”.
“If she is here without her husband and without friends,” mused Gurov, “then there wouldn’t be any harm in making her acquaintance.”
He was not yet 40, but had a daughter aged 12 and two boys in grammar school. He had married early, when he was still an undergraduate, in the second year, and now his wife seemed to be half as old as him again. A tall woman with dark eyebrows, she was upright, important, solid and—as she herself put it—intellectual. She read a great deal, in letters did not use the hard sign, and articulated her husband’s name “Di-mi-try” rather than “Dmitry”—while he secretly considered her shallow, limited, graceless, was afraid of her, and loathed to stay home. Long ago he had started to cheat on her; he cheated often, which is probably the reason that he almost always spoke about women derisively, and when they came up in conversation in his presence, he referred to them thusly:
“ A low race!”
It seemed to him that he had learned enough from bitter experience to name them as he pleased, but all the same, without the “low race” he would have been unable to survive even two days. In the company of men, he was bored, not himself; with them he was taciturn, cold, but when he found himself among women, then he felt free, and he knew what to talk about—with them, it was even easy to be silent. In his appearance, character, in his whole nature there was something attractive, indefinable, which predisposed women to him, lured them; he knew of this, and he was also drawn to them by some sort of power.
Repeated experience, in fact bitter experience, had taught him long ago that any attachment, which initially so pleasantly relieves the monotony of life and appears to be a precious and carefree adventure, for respectable people—especially for Muscovites, who are sluggish and irresolute—inevitably turns into the whole problem, extraordinarily complex, and in the end the situation becomes burdensome.
At any new meeting with an interesting woman, however, this experience somehow slipped his mind—he wanted to live, and everything seemed so simple and amusing.
And so one day, towards evening, he was dining in the garden when the lady in the beret, without rushing, approached to take the adjacent table. Her appearance, gait, dress and hairstyle told him that she was from respectable society, married, in Yalta for the first time and alone, that she was bored here…
In the tales of the immorality of local mores, much was untrue: he hated them and knew that such tales in the main are invented by people who themselves would willingly have sinned, if they could; but when the lady sat down at the next table, no more than three steps from him, he recalled these stories of easy victory, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting notion of a quick and fleeting liaison, of an affair with an anonymous woman whom you did not know by first or family name, suddenly gripped him.
Softly, he beckoned the dog to him, and when it came he wagged a finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gurov wagged again.
The lady glanced at him and instantly lowered her eyes.
"He doesn't bite," she said, and blushed.
"Can he have a bone?" And when she nodded in assent, he asked politely:
"May I ask if you've been in Yalta long?"
"About five days."
"And I've been here two weeks already."
They remained silent for a while.
"Time flies, and yet it is so boring here," she said, not looking at him.
"That's just what people say, that it is boring here. Your average fellow lives in his anywhere in Belyov or Zhizdra—and he is not bored, but arrives here, and it's: 'O, it is boring! O, the dust!' You'd think that he'd come from Grenada."
She burst into laughter. Then they both continued to eat in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked side-by-side—and began the playful, easy conversation of people who are free, happy, with whom it is all the same where they go and what they talk about. They strolled and talked about how strangely lit the sea was; the water was of such a soft, warm lilac colour, and along it from the moon ran a golden strip. They talked about how stuffy it was after a hot day. Gurov said that he was a Muscovite, a philologist by education, although he worked in a bank; that he had once trained as a singer in a private opera, but had given up, that he had two houses in Moscow…And from her he found out that she grew up in St Petersburg, but left to marry in Saratov, where she had already lived for two years; that she was to stay in Yalta another month, and that possibly her husband, who was also in need of a rest, would come for her. She couldn't for the life of her explain where her husband worked—in the provincial government or in the provincial district council, and this was comical to her. Gurov found out further that her name was Anna Sergeievna.
