"The Lady with the Dog" was written in 1899 by Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, and was first published in the journal Russian Idea. It has often been deemed by critics to be Chekhov's answer to Anna Karenina; Lyudmila Parts calls it an "intertextual dialogue" with Tolstoy's work.
Chekhov penned "The Lady with the Dog" while convalescing in Yalta, a port on the Russian coast. He had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis, which would kill him only several years later. Chekhov's illness, however, is not the only prominent influence on this text. After avoiding marriage for most of his life, Chekhov fell in love with actress Olga Knipper. This story was written two years before he would marry her. For this reason, critics have drawn parallels between Gurov, the protagonist, and Chekhov. Biographer Philip Callow comments on their similarity in age—Chekhov wrote "The Lady with the Dog" at age 39, and Gurov is approaching 40 in the text. Both men discovered a beautiful and tender love late in life—for Chekhov, almost too late.
