The Case against Happiness - Essay Example

The paper shall seek to highlight the social and philosophical sides of the problem that are highlighted in the story through the story of Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna. The climax of the story, or the lack of it, is what has attracted most critics to the story. The lack of resolution that it provides, at the end of the story, is at once disconcerting and thought- provoking. This is in line with what Donald Rayfield says about him, when he writes that Chekhov let his readers react to his stories “as they wish, draw their own conclusions” (Rayfield xv).

Chekhov insists on the ceaseless changeability of life as the only permanent feature of it. This enables the abrupt ending of the story without it seeming contrived. Through this, Chekhov also seeks to demystify the ideas of happiness and contentment as the ultimate goals of life. On a reading of The Lady with the Dog, one understands this, since the lack of change produces emotional and intellectual stagnation in the protagonists and it is only when they are in a state of change that they are able to arise from their states of daily drudgery.

This might also have something to do with the political affiliations of the author, since Chekhov was an ardent communist, who believed in the potency of change in restoring Russia to its former states of glory. The state of nihilistic ennui that the protagonists feel is slightly similar to that of Anna of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), who ends her life through suicide, to cause suffering to her lover. This feeling of ennui is, says Victor Emeljanow, a sense of “spiritual dissatisfaction” rather than “shallow boredom” (Emeljanow 119).

This ennui is present in the relationship between Gurov and his wife. He is in awe of his wife and is unhappy with his marriage; yet he is unable to move out of the marriage. This is partially a result of the nihilistic tendencies of writers of Russia and also due to the modernist tendencies that had begun to exert it influence on European writers. The glimmerings of modernism and the accompanying lack of concern for happiness that was characteristic of the modernist movement. The impossibility and the undesirability of the quest for happiness that one finds in Chekhov is also to be found in the modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both of whom greatly admired Chekhov’s work.

It is this ennui that prevents the characters of Chekhov’s stories and especially The Lady with the Dog from attaining a state of permanent happiness, since they are unable to even begin a process that may culminate in happiness and contentment. Gurov and Anna are unable to begin a process whereby they may finally be able to think about a future that may result in happiness for either party. In the absence of such a process, it is impossible for marital love and happiness to take shape. Therefore it is that the love that they feel for each other stays at the level of a love that does not go beyond a recognition of those feelings.

They merely create in the minds of the lovers’ doubts and an ennui that prevents them from taking any action. The state of inaction that characterises them is what makes the story and its concerns akin to those professed by modernism. Harold Bloom characterizes the work of Chekhov as that one that teaches his readers that “literature is a form of desire and wonder and not a form of the good”