Reading Journal: The Lady with the Dog

Ye Ji Park / 111053 / 12v1

Mr. Garrioch

World Literature

February 26 2013

Reading Journal: The Lady with the Dog
- “Love” and “Need” -

We sometimes have a problem distinguishing one emotion from another. We confuse love and admiration. Sometimes we do not clearly distinguish love and friendship. In some cases, we are not sure about the difference between love and hatred. In The Lady with the Dog, Chekhov suggests another pair of confusing emotions – “love” and “need”.

The Lady with the Dog, basically, is a story about one couple who just can’t stop committing adultery, despite of social blame and humiliation that would follow if divulged. In this sense, it reminds of Romeo and Juliet, the most famous love story of a couple who submits to all kinds of danger just for love. But any reader who reads The Lady with the Dog would hardly agree that this story is synonymous with Romeo and Juliet. Why?

The answer is simple: Romeo and Juliet “loved” each other, while Dmitri and Anna “needed” each other. 

Let’s go over Dmitri first. Chekhov introduces Dmitri’s wife as a “tall, erect woman … staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual”. She “read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri”. Dmitri, married to such a sophisticated, noble, and learned woman, “was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home”. This description indicates that Dmitri is, consciously or unconsciously, feeling inferior to his wife. Dmitri’s inferiority to his wife is again indicated in the later part of the story, when his wife "twitched her black eyebrows, and said: "The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri."” Dmitri has been cheating on his wife for years, and he believes that he is one of the “attractive and elusive” guys who “allured women and disposed them in his favour”; yet his wife’s remark shows her disregard for something her husband is proud of, thereby inferior-izing Dmitri.

Nobody wants to acknowledge his/her inferiority. Humiliated, indignant, one wants another chance to be superior instead. This is what Dmitri seeks for in his relationship with Anna. When he first meets Anna, he is attracted to her “diffidence, the angularity”, her “first time … alone in surroundings”. Dmitri knows that Anna is an inexperienced, weak, “pathetic” fellow who he can easily be superior to.

And this is why he meets Anna – he needs Anna to confirm the fact that he himself is a valuable, superior, powerful person. If Dmitri truly loved Anna, as Mr. Garrioch argued, “he would walk away from her, reflect on the affair as a cherished memory, and go home to his family and provide them with the love of a true father and husband”. But he does not leave her alone, and return to his wife, because he needs Anna, an inferior being, not his wife, a superior.

The reason Dmitri returns to Anna clearly reinforces his motive. Although he sometimes remembered Anna and missed her, he lived quite few years in Moscow without contacting her. Then, one day, he was insulted by his officer’s “degrading and unclean … savage manners”. He “did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation”. He realizes that without Anna, he is again the inferior – not only in family but also in his work now. This is why Dmitri decides to take a journey to Petersburg; he needs Anna more than he did in usual because he was severely insulted.

All these evidences clearly indicate the emotion that Dmitri possesses toward Anna – not “love”, but “need”. Then, how about Anna? Does she love Dmitri, or need Dmitri? Although described far more vaguely than Dmitri’s case, I believe that Anna’s emotion is also closer to need rather than love – need to run away from her dissatisfied life.

Chekhov illustrates Anna’s husband as “a good, honest man”, but Anna does not love him and defames him as a “flunkey”. When asked reason why she married her husband, then, she answers “I have been tormented by curiosity; I wanted something better. ‘There must be a different sort of life,’ I said to myself. I wanted to live! To live, to live!” This answer implies that Anna married in hope that marriage would bring her a new, exciting life. But her expectation was not accomplished; actually, her life became even duller. Her second life is “grey”, just like the “stretched long grey fence adorned with nails” across her house which drove her to “run away”.

This may be a good reason why Anna stays near Dmitri. Anna is a delicate, emotional young lady, and her sensitivity would have noticed that Dmitri is not truly in loved with her at least once. In fact, her continuous inquiry about “the same questions” that “he did not respect her sufficiently” implies that she does suspect of Dmitri’s sincerity. But despite these suspicions she has on Dmitri, and anxiety and fear she always feels of her adultery being divulged, Anna does not leave Dmitri because she “needs” him so badly as a source of pleasure that deviates from her ordinary mundane life.

It is the end of the story that “love” and “need” is distinguished. Dmitri, as always, was not paying attention to Anna, crying in guilt: “Let her have her cry out. I’ll sit down and wait,” thought Dmitri. Then he looked inside the mirror, and noticed that “his hair was already beginning to turn grey”. He suddenly seemed “so much older, so much plainer during the last few years”, and as he stared Anna, who had been with him for years, “still so warm and lovely”, he confessed that “he had fallen properly, really in love – for the first time in his life.” Grey hair is a clear indication of Dmitri’s inferiority to young Anna. This is the moment that Dmitri realizes that he, who actually is older (inferior) than Anna, was using Anna to fulfill his need for superiority. He feels gratitude to Anna, who has loved him for years despite his selfishness.

This realization is reflected in their following conversation about “how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception” and “how could they be free from this intolerable bondage”. Dmitri (and perhaps Anna, too) has been satisfied with temporary meetings up until now, because these were enough for him to satisfy his need of superiority. But now, he hopes to be with Anna all the time, publicly, because he loves her and love cannot be satisfied with few times of surreptitious trysts.

Personally, I’m not yet certain about whether the emotion of “love” is stronger than that of “need”. But as a teenage romanticist, I hope that “love” is an I-will-always-be-next-to-you emotion, while “need” is an I-am-satisfied-with-few-purposed-meeting. I hope love to be stronger than need, so that Dmitri and Anna, despite of “a long, long road before them” with the “most complicated and difficult part … just beginning”, would finally find their way into love.

Reading Journal: The Student

Ye Ji Park / 111053 / 12v1

Mr. Garrioch

World Literature

February 13 2013

Reading Journal: The Student

- Universal Truth Of Empathy -

“I know this is so childish and immature, but I can’t stop envying my roommate. She looks so superior to me; she is pretty, she studies real hard, she knows so much about music…”

“Need to work harder. Stop sleeping until 11 a.m. Stop going to Sosa. And just stop doing computer!!!”

From my old diaries, I frequently find out the stories that reveal my failures and weaknesses. Thinking back, I realize why I used to keep those stories secretly in my diary and avoid telling even to my closest people; I was afraid that they would laugh at my dilemma. I was anxious that they might scorn my troubles, saying that it is not a worry-worthy problem, and not empathize with me.

Anton Chekhov
Author of The Student

People sometimes need someone who would understand and empathize with their concerns. Anton Chekhov points out such universal necessity of empathy in his short story The Student. Ivan Velikopolsky, a student of the clerical academy, stops by the garden of two widows on his way to home. He starts to narrate what happened to St. Peter at the night of the Last Supper to Vasilisa and Lukerya. As the student tells the story – St. Peter denying Jesus three times – Vasilisa “suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks”, and Lukerya’s face “became stained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain”. Returning from the garden to his house, Ivan realizes that the Vasilisa’s tears and Lukerya’s anger is not originated from his eloquent rhetoric but from their secret empathy with St. Peter’s betrayal.

Chekhov is renowned as one of the greatest realism writers; Maksim Gorky even claimed that Chekhov “[is] killing realism” by writing so realistic pieces that no one would be able to write an ever more accurate representation of reality. The Student is not an exception from Chekhov’s lists of realistic writings. Common characteristics of realism in literature, such as chronological plot development, third person narrative, or common imagery, are employed in The Student. Chekhov, however, uses two more special attributes to emphasize this work’s realism by underlining that empathy is a universal theme.

The first attribute is Chekhov’s comparison of widows and Peter. Vasilisa and Lukerya are widows, poor (that they need to "[wash] a caldron and spoons" by themselves), and not pretty (Vasilisa is “tall, fat old woman” and Lukerya is “a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face”). On the other hand, Peter is a Saint remembered and praised throughout history. At first gaze, this comparison – insignificant, impoverished widows understanding admired holy man – looks quite unrealistic. However, considering that one characteristic of realism is to convey universal truth, it may be explained that Chekhov intentionally uses this seemingly unreal comparison to emphasize that empathy is “universal”. Empathy occurs regardless of status, wealth, or other secular factors; the poor, vulgar women can indeed understand and empathize to the serene, respectable saint. In short, an apparently unnatural setting contributes in presenting the reality that empathy is achievable anywhere, anytime.

The second emphasis on university of empathy is revealed from Chekhov’s set-up of Ivan. Some people express their skepticism that the story is not realistic because Ivan’s emotional change is too dramatic. At the start of the story, Ivan feels “desolation”, “darkness”, and “oppression”. However, as he realizes that all people share some kind of experiences and thus empathize with each other, just as if one end of a chain quivers when the other side is touched, he feels “joy suddenly stirred in his soul” that he even "stopped for a minute to take breath". On the surface, such drastic emotional change seems unrealistic, especially because Ivan’s joy is from recognition of a "chain … that when he touch[es] one end the other quiver[es]", which seems very abstract and not directly related to him. However, this doubt is easily refutable when it is realized that to Ivan, the enlightenment is actually quite personal. Chekhov indicates that Ivan’s family background is not that rich; his father lies on the stove "coughing", his mother sits "barefoot" on the floor in the entry, and Ivan is "terribly hungry". Considering Ivan’s status as a student, he must have contemplated about serious issues, such as the omnipresent existence of "poverty and hunger, ... ignorance, misery”. But he would not be able to share his thoughts with his families who are suffering to prepare a day’s meal. Ivan, himself, lacks someone who can understand him. In this perspective, it is easily understandable why Ivan presents such extreme joy when he realizes that all people are related to each other somehow – in other words, that there must be someone who can empathize to him. To Ivan, universal empathy is not a far-distanced, abstract theory, but a hopeful promise that guarantees the existence of soul mate.

My Emotional FB Status :P 

Whenever I put somewhat emotional status on Facebook that reveals a bit of my personal story, I pretend not to pay attention but I must admit that I am satisfied when people click “Like”. “Like” in Facebook is a signal that there are some people who can understand my status, because they have somehow similar experience. Although it is sometimes hard to admit that one needs and secretly wants someone who “Like” my status – in fear that someone might scorn one’s worry and regard it trivial – we must admit that empathy is a universal theme that any man needs, as Chekhov tells in The Student.