Russian Tsar Era Classics — The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog" (1899) — the most beloved love story in Russian literature — in a fresh in-house English translation, performed by the KacheliTV cast.
Dmitri Gurov, a Moscow banker not yet forty, is holidaying alone in Yalta when a new face appears on the embankment: a young lady in a beret, walking a white spitz. He sets out to make her acquaintance as one more easy, fleeting adventure of the kind his bitter experience has taught him to expect. Anna Sergeyevna, married at twenty to a man she calls a lackey, has come to Yalta burning with curiosity for another life. What begins between them as a seaside romance neither of them takes seriously becomes, back in Moscow, under the first snow, the one true thing in Gurov's double life — and the story of how a man who called women "the lower race" learned, with his hair already turning grey, to love for the first time. Chekhov ends the tale where it truly begins: with the end still far, far away, and the most complicated and difficult part only just starting.
The parts:
0:39 — Part One: Yalta — a new face on the embankment, the little white dog, and a holiday romance neither of them takes seriously
9:09 — Part Two: Moscow under the first snow — the double life, the secret journey, and the theatre
23:35 — Part Three: the Moscow meetings — a love confessed, and a life split in two
39:34 — Part Four: Anna's visits, two grey heads in the mirror, and the most difficult part only just beginning
Source: Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), «Дама с собачкой» ("The Lady with the Dog"), first published in the journal Russkaya Mysl, No. 12, 1899 — public domain. Russian text via ilibrary.ru. Fresh in-house English translation made for this performance; no existing translation used.
Dramatized performance by the KacheliTV cast: narrated by Silas, with Felix as Dmitri Gurov, Violetta as Anna Sergeyevna, Magnolia as Gurov's wife, Orson as the Official, and Lulu as Gurov's daughter.
Music: the theme (Falling Leaves at the Ice Cliffs) opens the tale, returns briefly between the parts, and closes it. No music plays under the narration.
Season 147 — Russian Tsar Era Classics, Episode 5. The shelf so far: Lefty, by Nikolai Leskov · The Queen of Spades, by Alexander Pushkin · The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol · The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy · The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
