<P> "Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages . They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both ." </P> <P> While living in Yalta in the winter of 1898 - 99, "Chekhov had also fallen in love with Olga Knipper, the actress whom he would marry in 1901 . It is tempting to view the tender relationship of Gurov and Anna in the light of Chekhov's own newfound love ." </P> <P> "Like Anna and Dmitry, Olga and Anton had strolled along the promenade and admired the ocean from the vista at Oreanda that summer; like Anna, Olga Knipper had a German last name; and like Anna and Dmitry, Olga and Anton had to live apart ." Both Anna and Olga are much younger than their male counterparts . </P> <P> "Just as Chekhov was beginning a relationship with a woman he would soon marry...he wrote a story about people who fall in love at the wrong time...Perhaps this thirty - nine year old writer--who had been exiled to his' warm Siberia' for his health and who would die in less than five years in a German spa with Olga Knipper at his side--perhaps this man also sensed that he had fallen in love too late, and that the most complicated, difficult part was yet to come ." </P>

The lady with the pet dog short story