By Bergotte
After Homer’s wars, Ovid’s metamorphoses, Dante’s cosmology, Shakespeare’s kingdoms, and Dostoevsky’s metaphysical detonations, Anton Chekhov arrives with a doctor’s bag and a short story about a man who cannot sleep. The reduction in scale is not a diminishment. It is an argument. What Chekhov understood — and what makes him the most quietly revolutionary writer in this series — is that the human condition is not most truthfully expressed in the extremity of suffering or the grandeur of cosmic struggle, but in the ordinary, half-articulated, largely unexamined texture of daily life: in the conversation that almost happened, the love that was never declared, the life that was not quite lived. His method is compression and omission. What he leaves out is what the work is about.
The Doctor Who Wrote
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia, the third of six children of a grocer and former serf. His father, Pavel, was a religious zealot and a domestic tyrant who beat his children and eventually went bankrupt, fleeing to Moscow to escape his creditors and leaving sixteen-year-old Anton behind to finish his schooling alone. Chekhov would later say that his childhood squeezed the serf out of him drop by drop — a famous phrase that has sometimes been taken as simple autobiography and is also, more precisely, a description of a lifelong project of self-formation, the deliberate construction of a character that his origins had not provided.
He followed his family to Moscow, entered medical school, and began writing comic sketches for the popular press to support himself and, increasingly, his entire family. He was a good doctor. He was a great writer. He understood from the beginning that these were not separate vocations, that medicine had given him a relationship to the human body and the human tendency toward self-deception that his fiction required, and that fiction had given him the capacity for attentiveness — the disciplined, unsentimental observation of what is actually happening in a room, as opposed to what the people in the room believe is happening — that made him a better doctor. He said, in different formulations throughout his life, that medicine was his wife and literature his mistress. He practiced both until his body would not allow it.
He died of tuberculosis in 1904 at forty-four, in a hotel room in the German spa town of Badenweiler. The story of his death has the quality of something he might have written: the doctor arriving, the champagne ordered because there was nothing else to do, Chekhov saying he was dying, drinking the glass, lying on his side, and within minutes the rattle of breath stopping. The large moth that flew in through the open window and beat against the lamp until the flame went out. His body was brought back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car labelled Oysters, and a military band playing for a general in the same station inadvertently accompanied him to his grave.
He would have appreciated that.
The Art of Omission
The early comic sketches that Chekhov produced in enormous quantities through the 1880s — hundreds of them, signed with the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte, dashed off to meet weekly deadlines — are not what the world remembers him for, but they are where the method was formed. The compression required by comic journalism — the economy of means, the precision of observation, the understanding that a single detail could do the work of a paragraph — became, in the mature stories, the instrument of something far more ambiguous and far more lasting.
The great stories of the late 1880s and 1890s — The Steppe, A Dreary Story, Ward No. 6, The Black Monk, The Lady with the Dog, The Bishop, The Student, In the Ravine, Gooseberries, About Love — establish a set of formal principles so distinctive and so influential that they effectively redefined what a short story could be. The most important of these principles is what has come to be called the Chekhov method, or the iceberg principle before Hemingway gave it that name: the understanding that the emotional content of a story is generated not by what is said but by the relationship between what is said and what is withheld.
In Chekhov’s stories, the most important things almost never happen on the page. Characters approach declarations of love and retreat into discussions of the weather. Conversations that appear to be about practical matters are actually about loneliness. Silences carry more weight than speeches. A woman in a story will rearrange the objects on a table, and the gesture will contain a marriage in its full complexity and failure. Chekhov trusts the reader with the gap between the surface and the depth, and in doing so creates a form of reading that is itself a kind of intimacy: you lean in, you supply what is missing, you become a collaborator in the making of meaning.
This method carries an implicit claim about human beings: that the most important things in our lives are precisely the ones we cannot say directly — that desire and grief and longing and the hunger for connection circulate beneath the surface of ordinary speech and ordinary days, finding expression only in the accidental gesture or the half-finished sentence. Dostoevsky’s characters speak their innermost thoughts at maximum volume. Chekhov’s characters cannot say what they mean, and the gap between intention and expression is where the stories live.
The Bishop and the Student
Two stories serve as a doorway into what is most characteristic and most mysterious in Chekhov’s art. The first is The Student, written in 1894, which Chekhov himself considered his finest — a judgement that has puzzled readers ever since, given that it is only four pages long and appears, on the surface, to be almost nothing: a seminary student walking home on a cold Good Friday evening, stopping at a widow’s fire, telling her and her daughter the story of Peter’s denial of Christ, and noticing that the widow is weeping. In the student’s perception of her weeping, something shifts. He understands — or feels, rather, understands coming later — that the widow’s tears mean that what happened on that night two thousand years ago is not past but present, that the continuity of pain and the continuity of love connect all times into a single fabric, that the past is not gone and the truth is not perishable and life therefore has meaning and purpose. He walks on in the dark feeling a strange, inexplicable joy.
The story is not making a theological argument. It is not asking the reader to share the student’s Christianity. It is doing something stranger and more fundamental: it is recording the structure of a moment of sudden, unexpected meaningfulness — the moment in which the isolated individual consciousness feels itself to be part of something larger, and the feeling is not earned by argument or faith but arrives unbidden, through empathy, through the recognition that another person’s grief is both hers and yours and everyone’s simultaneously. Chekhov, who was not a Christian and was not in the conventional sense a believer, nonetheless understood that these moments are real, that they happen, and that any honest account of the human condition must include them alongside the suffering and the waste.
The Bishop, written in 1902, two years before his death, returns to this territory with more personal urgency. A bishop in a provincial Russian town, exhausted and ill — dying, as Chekhov was dying — conducts the Holy Week services and at one point sees in the congregation a woman he thinks is his mother, whom he has not seen for nine years and whom he misses with a longing that has no adequate expression. He is not certain it is her. The doubt persists throughout the story, and the story does not resolve it. What it records instead is the emotional texture of the days that follow — the bishop’s nostalgia, his dreams of the village where he grew up, his growing weakness, his tenderness toward the small boy Katya who visits him, his strange, gentle dying. When his mother arrives and sits beside him it is mentioned briefly, almost in passing, and the reunion — which the whole story has been building toward — is described in a single sentence, because Chekhov understood that the reunion is not the story. The longing was the story.
The Plays
The four great plays — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard — were written between 1895 and 1903, and they represent, collectively, the most radical revision of dramatic form since Shakespeare. Chekhov insisted they were comedies. His first director, Konstantin Stanislavski, staged them as tragedies. Both were right, and the tension between the two readings is part of what makes them inexhaustible.
The plays are about people who are waiting — for life to begin, for the past to return, for something to happen that will make the present intelligible — and the comedy lies in the gap between the scale of what they are waiting for and the smallness of what actually occurs, and the tragedy lies in the fact that the waiting is the life they are consuming. Vanya, in Uncle Vanya, has spent twenty-five years managing the estate and supporting the career of his brother-in-law Serebryakov, whom he now realises is a fraud, a mediocrity who has wasted his life and stolen his. Vanya’s rage is real and his grievance is legitimate and his one act of resistance — two shots fired at Serebryakov at close range, both of which miss — is the most perfectly calibrated image of impotent fury in dramatic literature. He cannot even do this properly. He goes back to the accounts.
The three sisters of the title play — Olga, Masha, Irina — live in a provincial garrison town and dream of Moscow, where they grew up, which has come to represent for all of them the life they should have had and still might have. Moscow is the word that returns throughout the play like a refrain, acquiring with each repetition more of the quality of a symbol and less of the quality of a destination. By the final act, when the garrison has departed and the last chance of rescue is gone and the sisters stand together in the autumn garden listening to the military band fade into the distance, it is clear that Moscow was never really Moscow — that it was the name they gave to the unlived life, to the future that was always just about to begin.
The famous final speech of the play, in which Olga says that in time they will know why they suffered, that their suffering will become joy for those who come after them, that life is beautiful and they must go on — this speech is either the plays deepest truth or its most painful irony, and Chekhov, characteristically, will not say which. It can be played as genuine consolation or as self-deception of the most heart-breaking kind, and both readings are supported by the text, and the fact that both are supported is the formal expression of Chekhov’s most fundamental belief: that life is not either meaningful or meaningless, that the question cannot be settled by argument, that the honest position is to hold both possibilities simultaneously and to keep going.
The Cherry Orchard, the last play, strips the situation to its economic and historical bones. A family returns to its ancestral estate to find that the estate must be sold for debt. Lopakhin, the merchant son of former serfs, offers to save it: divide the cherry orchard into lots and rent them out as dachas, and the income will be sufficient. The family cannot quite bring themselves to do it. The orchard is too beautiful, too full of memory, too much the embodiment of the life they have had. They wait, and talk, and do not decide, and the estate is sold at auction, and Lopakhin buys it himself — the son of serfs, buying the estate where his father was a serf — and the play ends with the sound of the axes beginning to fall on the trees, and Firs, the ancient servant who has been accidentally locked in the abandoned house, lying down to wait for death.
The sound of the axes. The locked-in servant. These are images so precise and so complete that commentary on them feels impertinent. All that need be said is that Chekhov is not mourning the passing of the aristocracy or celebrating the rise of the merchant class or making any programmatic political argument. He is recording, with perfect equanimity, the passing of a world, the indifference of time to human attachment, and the faint, persistent comedy of people who cannot quite manage to be adequate to the situations they find themselves in. He loved them all and judged none of them. That is his method and his morality simultaneously.
The Lady with the Dog
The Lady with the Dog, published in 1899, is perhaps the most nearly perfect short story ever written, and it is, at bottom, a love story — which is the last thing one expects from the most unsentimental of writers. Gurov, a Moscow banker with a wife he does not love and a history of affairs he has always treated with cynical detachment, meets Anna Sergeyevna at a resort in Yalta. They have a brief affair. He returns to Moscow expecting to forget her, in the way he has forgotten the others. He cannot forget her. What began as another conquest has become, without his choosing or even noticing, the central fact of his emotional life.
What Chekhov does with this situation — what makes the story a masterpiece rather than a respectable melodrama — is to refuse every available sentimentality without refusing the love itself. Gurov is not presented as a good man transformed by love into something better. He is the same man, the same banker, the same person who dismissed other women as of a lower race. What has changed is not his character but his awareness of what he has been missing, and the change is not presented as straightforwardly redemptive. He cannot leave his wife. He will not leave Anna. The story ends with the two of them in a hotel room in Moscow, facing a situation that is apparently just beginning — the hardest, most complicated phase of their lives, the one for which there is no solution, only continuation — and Chekhov writes that it seemed to them that they were within reach of a solution, and then would begin a new and glorious life, and they both knew that the end was still far, far away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.
The story ends there. In the irresolution, in the continuation without resolution, in the two people sitting together in a room facing something they cannot name and cannot escape. It is the most honest image of love that fiction has produced: not the declaration or the consummation or the sacrifice, but the morning after the night when everything changed, when you sit across from another person and feel the full weight of what you have and the full impossibility of what comes next, and there is nothing to do but continue.
The Method is the Morality
Chekhov had strong views about what literature was for, and he expressed them in his letters with more precision and more force than his fiction’s apparent reticence might suggest. He wrote to his editor Suvorin in 1888: the writer must not be a judge of his characters but an impartial witness. He must not solve the problem but state it correctly. It is the business of the court — that is, the reader — to evaluate the evidence and reach a verdict. The writer’s job is to make the evidence so precisely and so honestly observed that it carries its own significance without authorial commentary.
This is not, as it might superficially appear, a form of moral neutrality. It is a form of moral respect. By refusing to editorialise, by refusing to arrange his characters’ fates in patterns that reward virtue and punish vice, by declining to adjudicate the question of whether life is finally meaningful or finally empty, Chekhov is treating his readers as adults — as people capable of sitting with complexity, uncertainty, and the absence of resolution without demanding that the author rescue them. He is also, by extension, treating his characters as adults — as people whose lives have a value and a texture that cannot be reduced to the function they serve in an argument.
The consequence is a body of work that does something no other writer in this series does quite so completely: it makes you feel the full weight of ordinary life. Not the life of kings and heroes, not the life of metaphysical rebellion and theological crisis, but the life of the schoolteacher who wanted to be a professor, the professor who wanted to have been loved, the woman who married the wrong man and knows it and will not leave, the man who had one moment of beauty in his youth and has been living off it ever since. These are the people the great tradition, for all its magnificence, tends to pass over. They are Chekhov’s entire subject.
He wrote once that a man should be neither humiliated nor humiliating. It sounds like a modest ambition. As a description of what his fiction enacts — the absolute refusal to diminish any person in his work, the insistence on attending to each consciousness with the full gravity it deserves — it is a more demanding standard than almost any other writer has managed to meet.
Ward Number Six
Ward No. 6, published in 1892, is the darkest and most directly political of the major stories, and it is the one in which Chekhov’s method achieves its most devastating effect. Dr Ragin is the physician in charge of a provincial hospital’s psychiatric ward, a man who has long since ceased to take his responsibilities seriously and has retreated into a Stoic philosophy that teaches him to be indifferent to suffering — his own and others’ — on the grounds that pain is merely a perception and the wise man is not troubled by perceptions. He begins visiting the ward not to treat the patients but to converse with one of them, Gromov, a man confined there after a breakdown who is one of the most articulate and clear-sighted characters in the story. Their conversations are an education in self-deception. Ragin talks about the irrelevance of external conditions to inner freedom, and Gromov, who is locked in a ward and beaten by the attendant, points out that freedom is rather easier to discuss from the outside.
The story’s turn — precise, terrible, inevitable — comes when Ragin is himself committed to the ward through the machinations of his successor. He is now inside, subject to the same conditions he had regarded with philosophic equanimity from outside, and his equanimity does not survive twenty-four hours of actual confinement. He is beaten by the attendant. He understands, for the first time, through the body rather than through the intellect, what the ward is. He dies of a stroke the following day.
Ward No. 6 is a story about the complacency of the privileged intellect, about the difference between theorising about suffering and experiencing it, about the ease with which intelligent people construct philosophical systems that allow them to remain comfortable in the face of injustice they have the power to address. It is also — and this is the Chekhovian complexity that prevents it from being merely a political fable — a story about a man who was not evil, who was not stupid, who was simply insufficiently attentive, and who paid for his inattention with everything. There is no villain. There is no hero. There is a ward, and the question of which side of its door you stand on, and the discovery that the answer to that question is not as stable as you believed.
Lenin read it and said it frightened him so much he could not stay in his room — that he felt he was personally confined in Ward No. 6. It is not a comfortable story. It was not meant to be.
The Persistent World
Chekhov died watching the large moth beat against the lamp. He left behind a body of work so compressed and so complete that its full dimensions are still being measured. He changed the short story and the theatre in ways that have not been reversed and cannot be — the contemporary short story is, in its dominant mode, a Chekhovian inheritance, and the theatre of Beckett and Pinter and much of the dramatic writing of the twentieth century is the theatre that Chekhov made possible by dismantling the theatre of plot and revelation in favour of a theatre of mood, atmosphere, and the vast subterranean life of the unsaid.
But the legacy matters less than the specific weight of the specific stories, which carry something that is difficult to name without sounding vague and easy to feel on any page. Chekhov’s world is a world in which ordinary people lead lives of considerable unexpressed inner richness, in which the gap between what is felt and what is said is the fundamental condition of human existence, in which nothing is resolved and everything is significant, in which the cherry orchard falls and Firs is locked in and the three sisters stand in the garden listening to the music fade, and life goes on. It does not offer consolation. It offers something rarer: the sense of being accurately seen.
He wrote to his brother once, in a letter that has become famous as a kind of secular credo: Do not tell lies, do not humiliate oneself, do not steal, do not swear, do not show off one’s learning. These are the negative commandments. The positive, life-affirming commandments are: love people, love your work, love God’s world, love beauty. Above all — be kind.
The works are the kindness made visible, story by story, in the light of a lamp that a moth is trying to extinguish, in a room where the people can almost say what they mean.
Sources and Further Reading
Chekhov, Anton. The Complete Short Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett. Ecco Press, 1985.
Chekhov, Anton. Stories. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Bantam Classics, 2000.
Chekhov, Anton. The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories. Translated by Ronald Wilks. Penguin Classics, 2002.
Chekhov, Anton. Five Plays. Translated by Ronald Hingley. Oxford World’s Classics, 1998.
Chekhov, Anton. A Life in Letters. Translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips. Penguin Classics, 2004.
Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. Northwestern University Press, 2000.
Bartlett, Rosamund. Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. Free Press, 2004.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Anton Chekhov.” In Lectures on Russian Literature. Harcourt, 1981.
Troyat, Henri. Chekhov. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Dutton, 1986.
Hahn, Beverly. Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays. Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Gilman, Richard. Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity. Yale University Press, 1995.
Magarshack, David. Chekhov the Dramatist. Hill and Wang, 1960.
Pritchett, V. S. “Chekhov: A Biography.” In The Myth Makers. Random House, 1979.
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