Public vs. Private Life
A major conflict throughout the text is between public and private life. At the start of the text, Gurov's interest is piqued by the "stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta. " Thus he views the possibility of an affair with Anna through the lens of public society. The attention paid by Gurov to society's rumors corresponds to the emphasis the narrator places on public gatherings and crowds of strangers. For example, while in Yalta, Gurov and Anna watch the well-dressed crowds that gather on the Yalta seafront. The narrator notes the activities, the dress, and the "peculiarities" of the crowd, establishing the strength of their presence in the backdrop of this scene. Just after Gurov kisses her for the first time, "he immediately looked round him, anxiously wondering whether anyone had seen them." Thus both for the narrator and for Gurov, public life is very important at the start of the story.
As the text continues, public life becomes less important than private life, and Gurov's preoccupation with the opinions of society is much reduced. In fact, social pressures and expectations are part of what begins to repel him from Moscow. While he once "felt flattered at entertaining distinguished" members of Moscow society, he now finds activities such as these to be "useless pursuits" that created a life "groveling and curtailed." Similarly, the influence of the public gaze on Gurov lessens: at his reunion with Anna in the theater, the presence of schoolboys looking on "was nothing to Gurov," and he kissed Anna anyway. By the end of the text, Gurov firmly lands on the side of private life. His secret affair with Anna convinces him that “everything that was essential... everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people."
Love
Love is a core theme of "The Lady with the Dog." At first, the protagonist, Gurov, is very skeptical of the power of love. "Bitter experience," he muses at the start of the story, has taught him that intimate relationships become complicated and even "unbearable" over time. His pursuit of Anna is purely cynical; he desires a "simple and amusing" pastime with which to amuse himself.
Over the course of the text, Gurov falls in love with Anna. The experience of falling in love is depicted as a transcendent event. While sitting with Anna one early morning, overlooking the Yalta coast, Gurov marvels at how "everything is beautiful in this world." The former cynic has been transformed by the experience of sitting next to the woman he loves. Later in the text, he realizes that Anna has become the central figure in his world. She is "his sorrow and his joy, the one happiness he desired for himself." By depicting such a dramatic transformation in the protagonist of his story, Chekhov argues that love has the power to render the ordinary sublime and to make everything beautiful.
Youth
Youth is a central theme in "The Lady with the Dog." First, Gurov considers Anna's youth to be a desirable attribute. One of the first things he notices about Anna is that she is a "young lady." Only a paragraph later, the narrator notes that Gurov's wife, "by now... seemed half as old again as he;" listing this as a reason for Gurov's estrangement from her.
As the affair continues, however, Gurov becomes more self-conscious about the age difference between himself and Anna. He ruminates on the fact that not too long ago, Anna would have been the same age as his own daughter. When they make love, Anna possesses "the angularity of inexperienced youth." Her reservations about their affair, Gurov thinks, are "naive." Her youth, the narrator suggests, is a reason for Gurov's cynicism about the affair.
Morality
In "The Lady with the Dog," Chekhov paints a complex pictures of our psychological relationships to the moral world. At the start of the story, Gurov and Anna view their infidelity as something to be ashamed of and thus hidden. After they make love, Anna's sense of shame and regret drives her to tears. She fears that Gurov will "despise" her as a result. Gurov is less concerned with personal shame than Anna, but he still feels the need to keep the affair secret. Before and after kissing her in public, for example, he looks around furtively to see if anyone is watching.
Yet as the story progresses, this moral compass begins to invert. Gurov and Anna's extramarital love affair—once shameful and best kept secret—becomes the most "sincere [and] essential" part of their lives. Anna no longer cries at the thought of her sins; instead, her tears now revolve around the hardship of keeping their love secret from the world. At the end of the text, the narrator even observes that Anna and Gurov forgive "everything in the present." To them, their love is no longer a source of shame, but rather something beautiful and tender.
Thus, Chekhov's characters start out believing their affair is immoral and sinful, yet the story concludes with them believing that it is the most beautiful part of their lives. In this way, he demonstrates how the passage of time and the evolution of relationships can impact people's perspectives on the moral universe.
