Chekhov’s details throughout Anna and Gurov’s transformation do not clarify the personality of the hero they have no “characterological” (Chudakov 551) significance. However, this is not the case in Chekhov’s writing. Chudakov states that in order to communicate this, authors use select tangible details in their texts that can serve as “reliable and expedient means of characterization” (551). In an artistic situation like this, in which characters experience a dynamic process of realization and change, they are also, at a literary level, undergoing a process of characterization. Therefore, Chekhov uses this juxtaposition in “The Lady with the Little Dog” as an opportunity to suggest that intimate ideas like spirituality and love should not be solely defined by their conventional meanings or codified by their societal constructions, but interpreted though a more private and personal meaning that is relative to the individual, making Chekhov revolutionary in not only his innovative literary style, but also his redefinition of the purpose of literature.Ĭhekhov’s, “The Lady with the Little Dog” follows an initially fleeting relationship between two married people, Anna Sergeevna and Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, which later turns into a painful and difficult affair, ending with the realization that the two characters are in love with each other. John Hagan’s “Chekhov’s Fiction and the Ideal of ‘Objectivity’” claims that Chekhov believed it was a writer’s duty to maintain an “artist’s impartiality and disinterestedness” (411) towards external views and conventions when presenting such questions. This can especially be seen in one of the author’s more mature works, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” in which Chekhov often creates a juxtaposition between the material and the abstract in order to question whether ideas such as spirituality and love are only-as they are commonly portrayed in literature-responses to a higher abstract sphere, or also-as Chekhov suggests-sense-based reactions to the more immediate tangible world. Chekhov, on the other hand, breaks many of these formulated rules, creating “a totally different method” (Chudakov 551) of writing, in which his “portrayal of the spiritual world is frequently interrupted by representations of the tangible world” (Chudakov 555).

Literary critic Alexander Chudakov notes in his “Randomness: Chekhov’s Incidental Detail” that these larger ideas would, more often than not, belong to an abstract and “high spiritual plane does not permit the intrusion of material things” (554).

During Anton Chekhov’s time, nineteenth century Russian literature often followed common formulaic literary techniques, which created a logical development of thought that moved towards a larger idea.

A Russian Affair by Anton Chekhov