One of the sweet comforts in life is curling up in a favorite chair with a short story that will carry us away from our everyday lives for an hour or two. On rare occasions, we find a tale that mirrors real life in such a way that we are strangely comforted by the normalcy reflected in the words. A perfect example of a story about ordinary life that will soothe the soul in search for some insight on understanding human behavior is Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog.” This piece is definitive of the literary period of realism during the late nineteenth century that was influenced by this brilliant writer and others such as Guy de Maupassant and Kate Chopin. This style of writing has such a mass appeal because the “characters in [these] novels (and in short stories) wear recognizable social masks and reflect an everyday reality” (Charters 997). In his simple anecdote of a chance meeting between a middle-aged, chauvinistic, repeat-offender adulterer, unhappily married man, and a young, naïve, in-search-of-something-new, married woman, Chekhov paints a picture that gives a startling representation of how these two characters are influenced by the settings in which their chronicle takes place, especially with the budding of their relationship. The narrative takes place in Yalta, a vacation spot for Eastern Europeans and Russians on the northern coast of the Black Sea. We are given a brief description of the main character, Gurov, who is a man that describes his wife as a woman “none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless,” (Chekhov 144) and has used these human imperfections as reasons to be unfaithful. We learn only minute details about his children and his employment, with more emphasis being given to his views on women, “an inferior race” (Chekhov 144), which are no doubt due to the sour experiences he has had in his extramarital affairs.