Analysis of the Short Story “The Lady with the Dog”. Parallels in the Author-Character Relations in Mikhail Bakhtin and Anton Chekhov

Abstract

Bakhtin's early works point to the origins of his theory. The novelty of this article consists in presenting Bakhtin's early works, more precisely the essay “The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” written in the 1920s, and comparing it with Chekhov's views on the Author-Character-Reader relationship since we consider Chekhov a writer and a theorist of verbal creation, which we will evidence with excerpts from his letters. The article presents an analysis of Anton Chekhov's short story “The Lady with the Dog,” and the thesis that Chekhov had, right from the title, about the intention of relating his story to Alexandre Dumas' novel The Lady of the Camellias.