Editor’s note He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. —Anton Chekhov
I remember reading this Chekhov passage—from “The Lady with the Dog”—as a teenager, and underlining it, realizing it meant something, though not, at the age of seventeen, prepared to fully understand what that meaning might be. I had a sense by then that not everything was quite what it seemed, that the adults around me were concealing more complicated inner lives than they were willing to let on. But I didn’t yet know what strange combinations of public and private life could occupy a person. In the case of this character, Gurov, a married man who has become entangled with a mistress, the real scandal isn’t that his eye has turned toward another—this would be much too simple an emotion for Chekhov to explore—but that he has at last found himself capable of real love. It is a perfect bind: at the very moment Gurov is first consumed with true inner feeling, he is unable to speak of it, as the trappings of his public life prevent him. Reading these lines now, what strikes me is how layered the work being done here by Chekhov is—in this passage, he is not only describing what is going on in the mind of Gurov, but also curing the problem he speaks of in the very writing. These few sentences