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The Color Gray
The color gray is mentioned eight separate times throughout “The Lady with the Dog” to describe five different things. It’s first mentioned towards the beginning of the text when Dmitri describes the hue of Anna’s eyes. The color gray then returns during the episode in Anna’s hometown, because both the quilt on Dmitri’s hotel bed and the fence that surrounds Anna’s house are gray. The remaining two examples occur in the final section of the text after Anna and Dmitri have decided to continue their affair. First, Dmitri rushes to Anna’s hotel as soon as he learns that she is in Moscow and a tearful but passionate Anna greets Dmitri at the door to her room wearing Dmitri’s favorite gray dress. But why are there so many references to the color gray in a story about love and deception? The answer lies in one of the text’s final moments in which Dmitri glances in the mirror in Anna’s hotel room and is startled to see that his hair has turned gray. Dmitri is so distressed by the sight because his graying hair is a physical manifestation of his own mortality. Such tangible proof of his advanced years upsets Dmitri because he found happiness and love so late in life. This is a pivotal realization for Dmitri, one to which all of the textual references to the color gray have been leading. Each mention of the color gray represents the passage of time, culminating in Dmitri’s mournful epiphany that he wasted so much of his existence.
Anna Crying
Anna cries many times throughout “The Lady with the Dog.” She cries for the first time in the story while she and Dmitri are still in Yalta. After an evening spent by the sea, Anna and Dmitri return to Anna’s hotel room where she immediately bursts into tears because she feels guilty for having an affair and believes that Dmitri cannot possibly respect her after she has committed such an outrageous sin. Anna does not weep when she and Dmitri are caught in an embrace by a Yalta watchman but she does break away from Dmitri while mentioning the dew on the grass, which could symbolize the tears that she is barely keeping at bay. Finally, at the very end of the story, Anna greets Dmitri in a Moscow hotel room and immediately bursts into tears because she is so pained that the two of them cannot simply be together.
Chekhov’s repeated emphasis on Anna’s tears highlights Anna’s transformation. When the reader first meets Anna, she is so ashamed of hers and Dmitri’s affair that she cannot stop herself from weeping over their transgressions. However, by the end of the text, Anna’s tears are shed over the “sadness of their life” because she and Dmitri can only see each other in secret every few months instead of loving each other openly. She even mournfully asks Dmitri “[is] not [our] life a broken one?” This transformation suggests that Anna’s love for Dmitri is so strong that she no longer feels guilty for the affair. This motif is one of many examples that highlight the transformative power of love, one of the text’s key themes.
