The lady with the puppy

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Anton Chekhov

The Lady with the Dog ( Russian Дама с собачкой Dama s sobatschkoi ) is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , which - written down in autumn 1899 - was published in the December 1899 issue of the Russkaja Mysl magazine. Eugen Diederichs published the first translation into German in 1902. The little story of adultery is one of the most famous in world literature.

shape

The lady and her lover Gurow are married, but each with a different partner. Chekhov treats this double adultery in his own way: indirectly. At most, the reader learns a little bit more direct from Gurow's sexual past: “From earlier he had retained the memory of carefree, good-natured women who made love happy, who were grateful to him for happiness, even for a short time; And he also remembered those like his wife, for example, who loved without sincerity, with unnecessary conversations, mannered, hysterical, with an expression as if it were not about love and passion but about something more important; but he also thought of two or three very beautiful and cold women, whose faces suddenly had a predatory expression, triggered by the desire to take possession, to wrest more from life than it could give; They were already through their first youth, they were capricious, unreasonable, domineering and not very clever women, and when Gurow's feeling for them grew cold, their beauty only aroused hatred in him, and the tips of their clothes seemed like dandruff to him . ”But everything is different with that lady with the dog, because in this case - in contrast to all of Gurow's previous relationships - it is about love. Towards the end of the text, we briefly speak of the love between the lady and Gurow in the context of “that their love would not end so soon”. Otherwise the reader has to recognize for himself what is going on between the lady and Gurow: more than just sex .

plot

Ivan Aivazovsky in 1858: View of Oreanda near Yalta

The Moscow bank clerk and homeowner Dmitri Dmitritsch Gurow, a trained philologist , has left his family at home and is luring the white spitz of a young lady on the Yalta promenade . Gurow is almost twice as old as Anna Sergejewna von Diederitz, the lady with the dog. The Petersburg native Anna married at the age of twenty in the provincial town of S. Although Anna's husband, a civil servant, also needs recovery, he is currently unable to work. Anna calls her husband a lackey. After a week of acquaintance, the timid, inexperienced Anna - as the narrator only suggests, of course - goes to bed with Gurow. Kurzweil dominates from now on. The lovers can be driven to the neighboring Oreanda.

Anna's spouse falls ill. She has to leave for S. as soon as possible. Ultimately, Gurov also has to return to his Moscow bank. At the turn of the year he lies to his wife; fakes a trip to Petersburg with a business background. But S. is actually his travel destination. The hotel porter knows the address of the von Diederitz house. Gurow goes there, but doesn't allow any mistakes there. The lover can wait for chance. The latter actually occurs during a visit to the theater. Happy Anna, after digesting her surprise, promises a visit to Moscow.

Anna lies to her husband - accuses her of suffering from women; goes to Moscow and stays in the Slavic Bazaar . There, in Anna's room, the lovers meet secretly. Chekhov writes: “And only now, when his head was gray, ... did he actually make love - for the first time in his life ... and they found it incomprehensible that he was married to another woman and she to another man. "

Film adaptations

reception

  • In January 1900, Gorky generalized in a letter to the author about the text: “Your stories are finely polished bottles with all the aromas of life in them.” Continuing in his admiration, he continues to observe that Chekhov has overcome realism in the sense that no one can write as simply as Chekhov.
  • 16 January 1900. After Tolstoy stand Nietzsche behind the text.
  • Nabokov names seven characteristics. First, the narrator dispenses with far-fetched framing and delivers "as naturally as possible". Second, the narrator prefers to use highlights when characterizing the characters. Third, the narrator does not want to lecture or convey any message. Fourth, the text appears less static than dynamic and swinging. Fifth, the lowlands and heights of the real world are treated equally. Sixth, the end was kept open because the two protagonists want to live and love. Seventh, the reader should pay attention as soon as the narrator goes astray. Because then sometimes something significant is communicated indirectly.
  • The lady with the puppy is one of the books that Michael records on cassette for Hanna in Der Vorleser .

German-language editions

  • The lady with the puppy. Drawings by Richard Scheibe . Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1946. 54 pages
  • The lady with the puppy. Late stories 1893 - 1903. Translated from the Russian by Gerhard Dick and others. Winkler, Munich 1977, 790 pages, ISBN 3-538-05226-3 , table of contents of the 2015 edition
  • The lady with the puppy dog ​​and other stories. With drawings by András Karakas. Selected and with an afterword by Werner Berthel. From the Russian by Reinhold Trautmann . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1976 (1st edition), ISBN 3-458-01874-3
  • The lady with the puppy. Translated by Kay Borowsky . Notes and afterword by Hans Walter Poll. Reclam, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 978-3-15-005290-7
  • The lady with the puppy. Translated from the Russian by Barbara Conrad. With an essay by Bernhard Schlink and pictures by Hans Traxler . Insel-Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-458-20005-5

Used edition

literature

  • Vladimir Nabokov: The Art of Reading: Masterpieces of Russian Literature . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-10-051503-X .
  • Peter Urban (Ed.): About Čechov . 487 pages. Diogenes, Zurich 1988 (Diogenes-Taschenbuch 21244). ISBN 3-257-21244-5

Web links

annotation

  1. If Nabokov passes over Turgenev's and Maupassant's awkward framing under the first feature, as it were, smiling good-naturedly, under the third feature he makes no secret of his contempt for the schoolmaster's tone in Thomas Mann and Maxim Gorky. In the context of the fourth feature, the Nabokov reader registers with amusement how Nabokov himself is a schoolmaster when he uses Schrödinger's wave mechanics of light propagation as an analogue for Chekhov's writing technique in the present case. In addition, the seventh characteristic could be taken as a copy of the second.

Individual evidence

  1. Düwel in the follow-up to the edition used, pp. 599–600
  2. Edition used, p. 466, 5th Zvu
  3. Edition used, p. 480, 16. Zvu
  4. Nabokov, p. 341, 7. Zvo
  5. Russian Oreanda
  6. Russian Slavonic Bazaar
  7. Edition used, p. 481, 11. Zvo
  8. The Lady with the Dog (film) , entry in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
  9. Black eyes , entry in the IMDb
  10. Düwel quotes Gorki in the follow-up to the edition used, p. 600, 14. Zvo
  11. ^ Urban cited Gorki, p. 205, 10. Zvo
  12. Urban quotes Tolstoy, p. 206, middle
  13. Nabokov, p. 349 middle to p. 350