Great Themes in World Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the themes of love, death and memory in these three great pieces of literature, explaining that all three stories show the effects of a love that cannot or should not be and that these effects are interconnected with memory and even death.

From the Paper:

"In "The Lady with the Pet Dog," Anton Chekhov portrays the illicit love affair between Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna von Dideritz. It is a love that ultimately cannot succeed, since both are married to other people. Both the intensity and ultimate doomed nature of the love in "The Lady with the Pet Dog" are reinforced by Chekhov's use of both the motives of memory and of death. Thus, when Gurov and von Dideritz first part, Anna speaks of the importance of memory: "'I shall be thinking of you - remembering you...Don't remember evil against me'" (Chekhov 421). At this point, she thinks the love between the two of them is over, What has replaced love is memory. Love and memory are thus intertwined in "The Lady with the Pet Dog." The interconnectedness of doomed love and memory is also reinforced by Gurov's thoughts. At first, he expects to think of von Dideritz less frequently as time goes on, yet "more than a month went by, winter came into its own, and everything was still clear in his memory as though he had parted from Anna Sergeyevna only yesterday" (Chekhov 423). It is Gurov's persistent remembering of Anna that causes him to seek her out. Love cannot be separated from love in "The Lady with the Pet Dog," since it is remembering which keeps the two protagonists from forgetting each other, and in so doing, they remain in love, even if that love is ultimately doomed."

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