A significant theme in "The Lady with the Dog" is the pressure of public life. Throughout the text, Gurov feels weighed down by societal expectations. At first, he is in dialogue with the rumors of infidelity that swirl around Yalta, both repelled by and drawn towards their promise. Back in Moscow, he quickly tires of the social and class pressures of shallow city life, especially in comparison to the love he experiences with Anna. He muses about the contrast between his authentic private life and what he sees as his performative and false public life. Ultimately, the text suggests that he rejects these public pressures, hoping for a future in which he can live openly with Anna.
As a backdrop to these thematic elements, Chekhov's Russia was full of social and political turmoil. In the late nineteenth century, the country was still controlled by Tsars. Only a year after Chekhov's death in 1904, however, the first Russian revolution revealed the cracks in this essentially feudal society. By 1917, the Tsars were overthrown and communist rule was established. Yet at the time of writing, Russian society was deeply concerned with expectations and normative customs, a world that is also depicted in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Russian society at the time of both texts was oriented around the concept of public image. Life was performative, designed to maintain appearances rather than authenticity.
Importantly, the material constraints of this highly normative society were different for men and women, both legally and socially. The title character of this text, for example, would have had great difficulty leaving her husband even if she had decided to do so within the pages of the story. She was not legally entitled to rent an apartment or seek employment without support from her husband. Marital separation was frowned upon, and divorce was extremely rare in Imperial Russia. Thus in the reality of Chekhov's Russia, the weight of social constraints was severe yet different for Gurov, the man, and Anna, the woman.
