So I was talking to a recently acquired friend about my love affair with Chekhov. God help us all when I get to talking about Chekhov.
I don’t even know a whole lot about Anton Chekhov. I only know “Lady with the Pet Dog.”
Actually we were talking about what I would consider “good literature,” but even that was after the point of origin. We were talking about passion. Yes, that was it, indeed.
We were talking about passion, about living a passionate life, about what made one passionate.
So I started discussing literature, which, is as far as I’m concerned, started for me with Anton Checkhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog.”
Anton Checkhov’s story is all about passion, or rather, it culminates in what I consider to be the perfect example of passion. It’s a rather unoriginal story when reduced to its plot: man meets girl, man gets girl, man loses girl, man summons courage to get her back, and the end is left open, while optimistic (at least in the mind of the lovers) it is open ended and ambiguous.
Lyrical Fool 