all right let's get out of our private lives here crypto and get into the public space of youtube oh that makes me nervous can i have a best friend along wink wink all right welcome to the codex cantina where i am una and i'm crypto with a dog and if you are new to the codex cantina we take some of the most important literature that has influenced even today's authors and writers if you're down for a conversational approach to literature make sure you hit that subscribe button to join us and today we're looking at the lady of the dog by anton chekhov published in 1899 several years right before he dies of tuberculosis in 1904 and we'll leave a link down in the description where you can read for free our copy was translated by ivy litenoff n d and i will say that his translations has to be so on point because chekhov is one of those writers that has to be top five economy of word authors ever like in terms of like what's the right word to use in this sentence and i can see him just musing over words for hours to write like one sentence oh for sure yeah he is able to write the most tight stories it's very incredible i love it of how concise he is always in his stories so let's talk about some themes of deception in public and private life maybe a little bit of time and love maybe a little bit of morality and duty i don't know we'll see what we get into today right definitely the love all right so next we're going to go to plot just to make sure we're on the same page and then after that we're going to give our analysis and discussion on this so in yalta dimitri gorov sees an attractive young woman with a dog now guruf is married as is this woman as we will soon find out and they begin talking to kind of shoe away their bored little lives i guess is one way to put it they spend a day together at the docks where gorov kiss her and quickly checks to see around him who is watching and he reflects upon the previous woman he's been with but anna this woman oh she's different i tell ya now they head to a hotel room to hook up and continue to spend time together wary of the public of who sees them and eventually anna returns or anna depending on how russian you want to be to saint petersburg where her husband becomes sick in part three gorov tries to return to his married life routine he can't stop thinking of anna so he decides to head to st petersburg rent a room and find her he goes to a showing of the geisha and finds her with her husband and sneaks in when the husband is gone to try to talk to her and they step out for a private conversation part four you see all this private and public i'm sneaking in even into the moving into the plot summary your word choice is impressive i did not labor over it the way chekhov did in part four months later anna returns to visit gurov in moscow and her husband only half believes her gurov walks around his daughter to school but immediately rushes to anna's hotel room to see her and they agree they need out of their marriages cliffhanger ending um that's the only part that i got vexed with was the ending because you know me i hate cliffhangers yeah chekhov's not your guy if you're not into cliffhangers that's for sure well i just i guess in in stories i'm okay with cliff hangers but i guess it's movies and shows i struggle with i don't know the investment is the same but difference but so let's talk about inner and public lives inner and outer lies public private lives however you want to phrase it when i think about literature what i think is interesting is you know when i talk to you crypto i feel like you know you may give me a glimpse into your inner life but i don't know if i really know the true inner crypto right there's always parts of ourselves that we have hidden away but what's interesting about literature is is the author will typically go into that that dark private life that we don't even like to talk or address about ourselves and that's what we get to talk about in a piece of literature so in a sense there is no place to hide for characters if you're a character in a story you have no place to hide right we as the readers are thrust into this now why we hide those parts of ourselves i think you know we don't want to be judged right there's there's we all have skeletons in our closet or we all have things that are embarrassing and we don't like to talk about but characters have no places to hide when it comes to that and they have no inner our private life we get to kind of invade that a lot of times in literature and what that means is we get to more accurately i think judge characters in stories than maybe we do in real life but we always talk about how real life is more realistic it's very strange to me now i love stories like this where you're able to get into that inner monologue you're able to get to that omnipresent narrator that gives you so much information and i think that's why sometimes people most often in my experience anyways have that you know very similar feeling of books towards other media especially like movies and tv shows is because you get so much more out of the book because you feel this connection because you can see yourself in these characters with this inner monologue where a lot of times that doesn't translate well into a movie or a show and with gurov you see how complex of a character is and you can identify with parts and then be disgusted by other parts and it is really exposing that inner demon and the beautiful blessed angel at the same time and chekhov just his ability to pinpoint the perfect word is really remarkable and we're reading a translation so i can't even imagine how beautiful this must be in its native tongue but like listen to this when he's talking about women being inferior right so we're jumping into the the dark parts of people's minds that you know usually they would have hidden away and just the word choice listen to this he secretly considered her shallow right like he he made sure to sneak that word secretly in there narrow-minded and doubty he stood in all of her and disliked being at home it was long since he had first begun deceiving her so again sneaks in that that deceiving part you know the private verse public life and he was now constantly unfaithful to her and this was no doubt why he spoke slightly of women to whom he referred as the lower race which again we're going into that deep dark part of like okay this is not really clean character but even the character is secretly hiding away these thoughts he's he's deceiving even his wife in these moments and i think this speaks to that private verse public life that we are talking about how characters can't hide in a piece of literature no and i think that it speaks to what we have said many times and many other stories that we put these masks on and i go to work and i have my work mask and then i come home and i have my home mask i have my dad mask you know they put all these different roles these different hats of how you have to behave around certain people but nobody truly knows our inner self except for our self and i think that's what makes gurov such a paradox in this story and kind of follow up with that i have a quote to really you know hit home your point of how he thinks of this woman specifically that you know he's fantasizing about her but he's also demeaning her inside of his head where he says quote she had the slender delicate neck her lovely gray eyes he sees her as pathetic in his mind but he still wants her and he can only admit that to himself how he truly feels about her even then he's kind of lying to himself so it's it's so complex and i love how chekhov has written uh gurov and how we get to go inside of his mind all right so two things about that one thing that i think is interesting is the usage of time and morality in this too you talked about how this was written towards the end of his life or you know the actual author anton shekhoff knew he was dying right he was a doctor he diagnosed his tuberculosis he knew that it was a matter of time before his life was ending and even even these limited moments that we have here on earth are even injected into these characters when he talks about you know how his hair is turning gray i just noticed i didn't notice it when i was reading about how you talked about her eyes were gray too almost kind of like reminding him of his own mortality as he gets older in a sense but also the fact that he's leaving living this double life and it's called out in the narrative where he says he led a double life one in public in the sight of all whom it concerned full of conventional truth and conventional deception exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances and another which flowed in secret and i think to me this was the most interesting part of the story to me is he knew that his life was coming to an end and and i don't take it as you know there's anything going on with the daughter but it's worth pointing out he specifically made gurov closer to 40 right than 20 and he made anna closer to 20 and she was what 20 or 22 and then his daughter was either 20 or 22. so he made his daughter and her you know a younger age i don't think it was meant to be incestuous comet but to me i took that as kind of a nod towards this mortality that he's reminded of and how he's kind of looking to back on his life of all these girls that were the same but but ana you know the one that's reminding him of this and and one that he can kind of at least he tells us he connects with uh is the one that's different and it's the fact that she's different compared about this past experience and lies that uh really stands out to him at least i think the key word there that i pick up on that you said is deception and i feel like that gurav through the whole story is struggling with whether he wants to be authentic with this woman or in this affair or if he's going to be deceitful to both women in his lives ana and his wife and that's something that makes him such a complex character and you're gonna love and hate him almost the same time because at certain times he is authentic and he is genuine with anna but then at other times he's being deceitful to both himself her and his wife it's very very complex and i mean you describe him as a womanizer right but he is overcome with emotion many times throughout the story where you almost start to feel sorry for him and i think that's the brilliance of chekhov's writing is that he can make somebody that you kind of despise likeable at the same time and that's very difficult for an author to do well i think it's interesting the way he puts these characters in these positions like the characters choose to be in this position they weren't forced into this position but they look at their problems almost like as mirrors of each other where gurov is like this one of all of my experiences this girl is different right and only an experienced person would be able to have that perspective but you flip it to anna's perspective and you'll notice that she had guilt almost from being married too soon did i choose the right guy was should i have waited and looked or had more experience before choosing to get married which don't get me wrong there's people that are like you know they get married young and they have no problem with it but there are people out there that get married young and they have that private inkling that they never bring out of did i make the right choice here should i have waited was this a bad idea and they don't necessarily regret it but there's something about that private regret that is eating away at them inside not necessarily in a bad way but it's worth acknowledging that it exists sometimes yeah and that happens to girl throughout the story right we see him evolving through this story becoming more compassionate caring more for anna and even though as this affair continues on he's still dismissive of anna at certain times as well and when she breaks down emotionally he he reacts negatively and almost malicious towards her and it's just like ah he takes two steps forward and then one step back because you feel like he's going to be this sensitive individual and he's going to have this breakthrough and become the person you hope to him to be you're projecting on him probably you know most often i think that's what chekhov wants you to do about gurov and then he's just he's gonna turn around and he's going to pull the rug from underneath your hopes and dreams and crash it down and then to leave with you with that almost heartbreaking cliffhanger it really sums up kind of how relationships are so complex and i think that at the end of his life that was one thing that chekhov is trying to portray to his his own family is life is complex you need to be honest not only with yourself but the relationships that you forge as well and i think to your point about how his word choice can be interpreted different ways that's part of what makes it so precise you have authors that attempt to make the perfect word choice that i will make my reader think this exact thing but i feel like readers can take this specific story lots of different ways right you have the romantics you know doing what they think is what feels good what's emotionally right that are like yeah i can't wait for for anna and gurov to get together and of course you're gonna have traditionalists or people that are more into honor and being bound to oaths that are like i can't believe these people are cheating on each other this is so wrong and and almost pass judgment on them when the dirty secrets come out and there's even some that are rebellious that are just like you know looking for that fantasy because this is a story it's a fantasy it's not real of of living through these characters of getting outside of their marriage in a sense it's in the word choice that he puts on it isn't to specifically make you judge them a specific way but to pull out what your judgments are of yeah what does it mean to have your private life being put out in the public right it's when it's when these two are meeting you'll notice that they're stealing away kisses at the docks or you know they're in public but trying to be private right he's he's at the the movie theater where first of all it's called the geisha which if you didn't know is a play about uh i believe people marrying the wrong people a little small nod there right but then it's when the husband disappears and kind of walks away he tries to in public kind of steal away these private moments and remember she like walks them to the staircase and they they try and have this private moment why and i can't help but feel it's because you know check off is inviting us to almost pass judgment on these characters maybe in different ways when we can get you know a public or private view on them i think it brings back to your point at the very beginning of our talk is that we all have these different perceptions of ourselves and of each other and this is a way to express beauty and it's all these little potentials in life that you could have that you don't take advantage of to express your romantic love and gurov is trying to do that and be damned his you know honor his relationship his vows to his wife he wants to feel that love in this immediate moment and that's something that you're probably going to agree or disagree with as una pointed out so are these bad people i don't think so i think that they're people that are making impulsive choices based on desire and i think that he wrote them that way on purpose to try to teach us that that might not necessarily always be a bad thing because in russia you know you're very restricted of how you live your life because of social and cultural norms for them that sometimes love a word that we try to use to express how we feel when you can't really put a word to love this emotion it almost feels watered down he's trying to say hey it's okay to be vulnerable yeah i would agree with that statement and i love the way you you skirted around my because my next question was going to be are they making bad choices just to see where you fall and i noticed you kind of skirted it with they're making impulsive just choices right you're not passing judgment on it is what i've gathered from that and i can guarantee there's people out there that are like rooting for them to get together because it's true love there's people that are judging them because like oh my gosh they're violating their their marriage vows i think it's an interesting story for what what shikov has you know accomplished here to have passed a very interesting deep dark secret part of ourselves and put it out there for us to judge when we usually hide those things away so perfectly in our own lives so very well done i i would say we're going to leave a link down below for other chekhov related talks this is probably our fifth check off story and this is you know i know this is one of his most highly regarded stories and we didn't even talk about how um i think you said you read some articles about how this could be a response to you know anna karenina and i think i saw some articles out there about how this is a response to his own he had a big love life you know interest in his own personal life that this could have been a love letter to the woman that he'd never loved a lot of different ways that you can take the story yeah unfortunately i've never read anna karenina so i don't know that exactly but i have read that critics said that this was his response to that story and after i've read it i think that we'll be able to make you know a more accurate assessment of whether that's true or not and what does that even entail and really mean of his response to that story because i don't know a lot about that well great literature is the the ability to visit it over and over again at different parts of your life and see different things anna karenina is something that's kind of like it's a young girl making decisions that she's probably not equipped to handle maybe similar to the story too we'll get more into that but let's talk about our subjective ratings which you know we're just hey how did it hit us it's not a quality or you know what's the overall objective rating just how did this story hit you krypto uh this one was just solid uh i could see how if you get into it for the romantic and the love and you know the unbridled expectations and the forbidden love uh you can see this is very positive i see you can see it very negative that it's an older guy taking advantage of a younger girl she's very naive uh and as to your point you know if this is a response to another story where it's more female based and this i feel like is more gurov based it's a very complex story i enjoyed it i don't know if there's a lot here on the the teaching side of it i think there's a lot of meat and bones for dissecting you know the point of what chekhov was trying to get across for relationships and identifying ourselves and what we want out of relationships so i'm just gonna give it a good solid seven nothing too spectacular but definitely worth a read at some point sure and i know that might hurt some people's feelings because i think this might be a lot of people's favorite check-off story but remember this isn't a quality rating this is just how did it hit us and i think for me it's going to be very similar probably like a 7. around there just didn't uh it didn't it didn't knock my socks off the way a lot of other chekhov stories have but i did enjoy it and i do recommend it and i fully appreciate why some people could say that this is his greatest story yeah again not necessarily for everybody i think it's a good solid story all right guys thank you so much for joining us on the discussion today we hope you had a great time make sure you check out our other check off talks down below you know we post videos at least every monday and thursday with a bonus video on tuesdays hit that subscribe button if you want to join us on the journey huna out peace