“Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.”
ANTON CHEKHOV
If you like Chekhov’s realistic stories, you will find this a good one as in this story, the intricacies of an out-of-marriage relationship between a man and a lady (with the dog) are depicted in a very alluring manner.
Even Nabokov, who criticized Chekhov many times, had declared this as one of the greatest stories ever written on such a complicated theme.
This story shows how useless pursuits and conversations about the same things all the time absorb the better part of one’s time and the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life groveling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse.
A beautifully written story published in 1888 with a beginning ….. But without an end!
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