A century after "The Lady with the Pet Dog" was published in 1899, the short story's critical reputation has not diminished, a testament to the fact that this story was both of its time and ahead of its time, influencing much of the short fiction that has been written in the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest novelists of our time, author of the groundbreaking Lolita, asserts that in "The Lady with the Pet Dog" "all the traditional rules of story telling have been broken. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written."

In the Soviet era, Russian critics focused on the fact that Gurov and Anna are representatives of the common people, not aristocrats like Anna's namesake in Anna Karenina and her lover, Count Vronsky. Gurov and Anna, these critics...