”How do you know that the men of genius
whom all the world trusts have not also seen visions?"—Anton Chekhov (“The Black Monk”) In Russian Literature Tolstoy is the great
sociologist, Dostoevsky the astute psychologist and Turgenev a great artist, Gogol a comic
genius, Pushkin and Lermontov great romantic poets. But what about Anton Chekhov, the
father of short stories? He didn’t moralise like Tolstoy. He didn’t psychoanalyse
like Dostoevsky. He didn’t talk of nihilism like Turgenev. He was an artist of the
mundane. He captured life as it is, not as it ought to be. His storytelling style has given us
the term “Chekhov’s gun” a storytelling device. His influence on writers who came
after him was immense. For example, you can see Chekhov’s pessimism in the works
by Albert Camus and Franz Kafka. As a doctor, Chekhov saw the brutal reality of existence,
people battling with terrible illnesses to survive for another day. So to escape this harsh
reality he took refuge in literature. He says, quote: "Medicine is my lawful wife and
literature is my mistress.”—Anton Chekhov. So today, I will discuss his life, tell you
about some of his stories and discuss his genius writing style. I will tell you how and why Chekhov
revolutionised Russian Literature and storytelling in general. I will also make a comparison between
Chekhov and Camus, specifically on their life’s philosophy that we are no driven by will to life,
nor power and nor happiness, but something else. So get yourself some Russian
vodka and let’s talk Chekhov. Life Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog in
the South of Russia, just one year before the Emancipation of Serfs. Also 1860s is one of the
most important decades in Russian literature that produced Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. So baby Chekhov was growing up
while Russia was waking up as a literary giant. Unlike most Russians writers, Chekhov was born
into a merchant family close to the peasantry, and his grandpa was a serf, so he understood life
at the bottom. Like Kafka, Chekhov’s father plays a lot of negative male roles in his short
stories. His mother told him many stories, which must have inspired Chekhov to do
the same: tell stories. Chekhov says of his parents: ”Our talents we got from
our father, but our soul from our mother.” He attended a Greek school, where he ironically
failed the main subject, Greek. Greek is not an easy language. But things were not looking up in
the Chekhov family. When he was 16, his father went bankrupt in 1876. To avoid jail which Charles
Dickens’s father and Cervantes’s father had to endure, Chekhov’s father was smart so he fled
to Moscow, leaving the little Chekhov to deal with the money issues by selling the household
stuff and talking to the bailiffs. Not only that, he managed to work by drawing, writing funny
stories for newspapers and tutoring children so he could send money to his family in Moscow.
Not just that, he also wrote funny letters to his family to cheer everyone up. What a son! Kudos to
the teenage Chekhov. But on the positive side, not having his parents in his teenage years, he must
have enjoyed the freedom. Most teenagers dream of having such freedom, but little we know that it
always comes with responsibility. The teenager Chekhov had to help his family financially and
keep their morale by telling great stories. To pass the time, Chekhov also read a lot of
fiction, like Don Quixote, Oblomov, Fathers and Sons, and philosophical books like Schopenhauer’s
Will and Representation. He was also busy chasing women, having affairs with older women, including
the wife of one of his teachers. He really was walking in the shoes of a grown up man. In
1879, when he was 19, he managed to join his family in Moscow. Not only that, he managed to
enter Moscow State Medical University. The man was a genius. Without help from his parents, he
did all of that. It took him four years to get his doctor’s qualification from university,
so in 1884 he started working for little or no money treating the poor. He had come from
poverty and he wanted to give something back. But it all had come at a cost to his own health.
A year after starting work as a physician, he contracted TB, but he kept it hidden from his
family despite coughing blood. All the while, he wrote short stories like crazy to make enough
money for his family to move to a better place. Just like Franz Kafka, it was his writing that
kept him going. Things were looking up as his stories were appreciated by many readers. It’s
amazing how readers can help keep an artist alive, simply by appreciating the art. Not just readers,
he also became well-known among the intellectuals and writers. In 1888, Chekhov’s book, At
Dusk, a collection of his short stories, won the prestigious Pushkin Prize. Now Russia
had a new 26 year old artistic genius in the making. Dostoevsky had died in 1881 and Tolstoy
was getting old, so Russia needed younger blood and Chekhov announced himself, not by writing
big brick-like novels, but short stories. In 1887, while travelling through the steppes
of Ukraine, Chekhov was inspired to write a short story titled Steppe that was
published in a literary journal, not some cheap newspaper. That same year,
he was commissioned to write a play titled Ivanov which became a huge success due to its
realism. Chekhov became the painter of reality like no one else. He painted the mundane
and the everyday. This was revolutionary. But most crucially by writing a play, he learnt
that he couldn’t afford to write more or less, but what was needed to tell the story. This became
known as Chekhov’s gun. What does it mean? It basically boils down to this that everything in
the story should have a purpose. Quote: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second
or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be
hanging there.”— Anton Chekhov. In other words, every object in the story is required. Nothing
extra or superfluous should be mentioned. He invented the art of tidy storytelling
that has become mainstream today. In 1890, Chekhov took his gun— just kidding,
no gun—and headed east to a penal colony on the Island of Sakhalin, just north of
Japan. This trip was an eye-opener for him. He witnessed so many horror stories
of how cruel humans can be. He wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the
extreme limits of man's degradation.”—Chekhov. He even witnessed the children as young as six
following their chained convicted fathers and sleeping in the same room with other criminals.
Just like Dostoevsky, Chekhov understood how complex humanity was. Despite their gruesome
crimes, he wanted the authorities to treat the convicts more humanely. His Sakhalin writing
has been incredibly influential, not only on the issue of human rights but also on other writers
including Haruki Murakami and Seamus Heaney, both of whom has dedicated something in their own
works. Also I should make comparison between him and Orwell’s writing while a homeless in Paris
and London as well his travels to Wigan Pier. So to become a writer with depth one must
see harsh reality of life. Tolstoy fought in the Crimean war of 1850s while Dostoevsky spent
years in the Siberian labour camp as a prisoner. On his return from Sakhalin, Chekhov became
serious in his medical practice. Quote: "If I am a doctor, then I need sick people and a
hospital; if I am a writer, then I need to live among people, and not on Malaya Dimotrovka
[a posh street in Moscow.]... I need a piece of social and political life.” —Chekhov. So he
moved to a village some 80 km south of Moscow, a place called Melikhovo, where he spent about
6 years practising as a doctor but also writing some of his best works. For example in 1894,
he wrote The Seagull, one of his greatest plays. Two years later he wrote Uncle Vanya. Also
around this time, Chekhov said goodbye to god and religion to become an atheist. He had seen so
much suffering, especially among children that shook his faith in god almighty sitting pretty
while all these kids were dying for no reason. His own health was also getting worse, so
he made a move to a warmer place. In 1898, he bought a house and moved to Crimea, where he
would entertain giant guests like Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. Here he also wrote some of his best
plays like The Cherry Orchard. Not just that, he also married Olga but they lived
somewhat independent lives, Chekhov in Crimea and Olga in Moscow. The long-distance
relationship must have been good and bad, but around this time Chekhov wrote one of his
most famous short stories, the Lady with the Dog, about the love affair between two married people,
so who knows, he might have had something going. Everything starts with a casual encounter
and soon gets very serious very quickly. Life, however, is very cruel. Chekhov’s health
continued to deteriorate. He made a trip to a spa town in Germany. He wouldn’t return to Russia
alive. He died on July 15, 1904, aged 44. His body was taken to Russia and buried in Moscow, next to
his father. He was one of the most famous writers in Russia at the time, perhaps only second
to Tolstoy. But what’s remarkable is that Tolstoy didn’t have to work a day in his life.
I mean to earn a living because he was a count, meaning he had a lot of disposable income passed
onto him from his family. Chekhov had to work his arse off to feed his family even as a teenager.
Even as a doctor, he worked among the poorest of the poor. But despite all the hardship and
suffering he encountered, he made the most of his life by writing some of the most beautiful
stories you will ever read. Dark, humorous, pessimistic but they are all real. Genuine stories
of genuine people. He was writing about people who had no voice in literature to the point that
his writing was laughed at in some circles as unattractive and unappealing as human waste
as one British journalist put it. But slowly, he found his readers in the west, especially among
the new breed of writers, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf , George Bernard Shaw, Ernest
Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and later Raymond Carver. Today, Chekhov is recognised as a one
of the geniuses of Russia who revolutionised storytelling by focusing on the ordinary and
turning them into extraordinary stories. Today Chekhov is considered the father of short stories
and one of the finest Russian writers of all time.
Short Stories For the summary of some of Chekhov’s stories, I
reached out to Chekhov and Chill on instagram who kindly read and summarised 2 of Chekhov’s
best short stories and 2 plays here for you to see and judge the genius of the Russian
doctor-turned-artist. I will leave her instagram link in the description so go and follow her
for great content on Russian Literature. Man in a Case
Chekhov wrote Man in a Case in 1898. Some say it was written in response to Tolstoy’s short story,
How Much Land Does A Man Need, in which a man so greedy that he perishes in his pursuit of owning
more land. Tolstoy finally buries his character in a tiny grave as an ironic answer to the
question: how much land does a man really need. What is the story of A Man in a Case? A teacher
narrates to his friend the story of one of his former colleagues; an absurdly reclusive
Greek teacher named Belikov. Belikov is someone who takes every effort not only to
remove himself from any kind of community, progress, and joy, but ensures that those
around him do the same. He isolates himself physically – walking around in a constant shroud
of dark coats, hats, sunglasses, and umbrellas, but nevertheless imposes his presence on others,
coming to the apartments of his colleagues and sitting there for hours in complete silence.
His fear of change spreads to those around him, and the whole town is kept in dread
and stagnation by his presence. Things change when a new teacher, Kovalenko,
comes to town with his sister Varenka; these newcomers are cheerful and charming, and
even Belikov finds himself gravitating towards Varenka. The townspeople start bringing Belikov
and Varenka together, hoping for a marriage, but Belikov hesitates to take this major step.
One day, Belikov sees Varenka riding a bicycle with her brother; he is scandalised by this
and comes to Kovalenko to complain. Kovalenko, however, takes none of his nonsense and throws him
down the stairs; Varenka witnesses the end of this scene and laughs at Belikov. This is too much for
Belikov to bear; he falls ill and dies soon after, looking happier than ever in his coffin. The
townspeople are momentarily relieved to be free of his oppressing presence, but soon find themselves
reverting back to the same stagnation that they lived in before – proving that, while Belikov took
“living in a case” to the extreme, people confine themselves to “cases” all on their own.
Gooseberries
Published in 1898, Gooseberries is a short story by Anton Chekhov. What’s the story? A veterinarian
narrates to his friend the story of his younger brother, Nikolai. Nikolai devoted his whole life
to one goal: to buy the estate of his dreams, one with gooseberry bushes. As Nikolai works
towards his goal, he becomes twisted and corrupt, even starving his elderly wife to save money
for the estate. Eventually, he does purchase the estate, and the narrator recounts visiting
him there. Nikolai’s estate is a twisted version of his idealised dream; it is polluted, bare, and
corrupt, reflecting the soul of its owner. Still, Nikolai fools himself into thinking that his goals
have been achieved, and the narrator finds himself repulsed by his brother’s greed, apathy, and
delusional sense of self-importance. Disturbed and disgusted by the encounter, the narrator muses on
how easy it is for those who achieve positions of privilege to remain in self-satisfied complacency
and ignore the suffering that occurs around them. Here is a quote from the story: "And such a state
of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy
ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be
impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought
to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there
are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and
trouble will come to him-illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now
he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his
ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind-and all is
well.”—Anton Chekhov (Gooseberries).
The Seagull The Seagull is a play written in 1895 and
first performed in 1896. It tells the story of Konstantin, a young, sensitive man hoping
to become a playwright. He lives with his uncle on a country estate. His mother, Arkadina,
is an egotistical and overbearing actress, visiting the estate with her lover Trigorin, a
famous writer. Kosntantin is in love with Nina, a young girl who lives nearby and hopes to
become an actress herself. Other characters gather around the estate to watch Konstantin’s
attempt at a play, including the philosophical and detached doctor Dorn and the almost
comically gloomy Masha. Various love triangles and complex relationships form; notably,
Nina falls for Trigorin. Two years later, the same group gathers at the very same estate;
Nina’s life has been tragically marked by her romance with Trigorin (who abandoned her and
went back to Arkadina) and her failure as an actress. Konstantin, already depressed, is even
further devastated by the encounter with her. The play ends with Konstantin’s suicide. It
is here that Chehkov’s famous gun is at play. Also the play alludes to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet through various similarities.
Cherry Orchard The Cherry Orchard was written in 1903 and
published a year later. The play opens with Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya returning to her childhood
home from Paris. The Ranevsky estate used to be grand and prosperous, and their cherry orchard
was a point of fame and pride. But times have changed – the orchard no longer bears fruit, and
the family is broke. Lyubov Andreievna and most of her family are hopelessly stuck in the past,
unable to accept their imminent financial ruin, much less do anything to prevent it. The
family is offered a solution by Lopakhin, a wealthy merchant whose forefathers were
serfs on the estate, and who has been in love with Ranevskaya since childhood. However,
the family is ultimately unable to take action; Lopakhin ends up buying the estate, intending to
chop down the orchard to make room for cottages. On the scale of one family and estate, Chekhov
tells the story of an entire country on the verge of transformation.
Style
Nothing is resolved. One of the first things you notice when you read
Chekhov is that he never gives you an answer to life’s problems. It feels as though his stories
are abandoned. He just paints life as it is. This was in reaction to other Russian writers who came
before him. I would say, in particular in response to Tolstoy who never stopped moralising in his
books. Dostoevsky too had a political stance in his novels, especially his anti-western sentiment.
So naturally, Chekhov took a neutral stance towards morality, politics and religion. He just
looked at reality and reported how he saw it. And that made him very unique and distinct from other
Russian writers. In many ways he is a bit closer to Turgenev as both were genuinely artists first.
If you have read him and think Chekhov’s stories may seem inconclusive, you’re not alone. Here is
a quote from the English novelist Virginia Woolf: “But is it the end, we ask? We have rather
the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without
the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a
criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In
so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the
end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian
fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of
interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Chekhov, we need a
very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last
notes which complete the harmony.”—Virginia Woolf Basically Chekhov didn’t want to change the world
based on a particular value system. As a doctor, he couldn’t judge people and as an artist and
storyteller, he kept his tales as objective as possible. Here is a quote: “I think that it is
not for writers to solve such questions as the existence of God, pessimism, etc. The writer’s
function is only to describe by whom, how, and under what conditions the questions
of God and pessimism were discussed.” Minimalism Another important element of Chekhov’s
storytelling is his minimalistic description. Today, Chekhov’s gun simply means, only stick
to what’s important to the story. Do not introduce a gun in scene one, unless it goes
off by the end of the story. In other words, keep your stories as minimal and precise as
possible. Remove all the fluffs and keep it to its bare-bone so to speak. Why? Because
peasants don’t have time to fluff. Chekhov understood that to get someone’s attention, you
must stick to what’s important. Don’t digress and don’t talk about things that are related to
the story. In novels, you can get away with some fluff or digression but in the short story world,
things are much more brutal. It’s survival of the finest. So minimalism has become synonymous with
Chekhov’s style. Here is what Maxim Gorky talks about Chekhovian simplicity. Quote: “In the
presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful,
more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of
grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which
Russians, in their anxiety to appear Europeans, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves
with shells and fishes’ teeth.”—Maxim Gorky. Chekhov emphasises the unsaid, silence,
pauses and everything in-between. Instead of adding more words, he focused on what was
unsaid and unverbalised. Human communication is often more non-verbal than verbal, so
Chekhov is good at articulating the full spectrum of human communication. And
often that means saying less is more. Follow intuition
Chekhov’s stories are tales of the mundane. He didn’t write about some
great wars like Tolstoy did or deep philosophical debates like Dostoevsky or Turgenev did , or
social change like Gogol or Pushkin did. Instead, Chekhov wrote about the ordinary. But how can
you turn ordinary or banal into a work of art? Here comes intuition. Intuition is often defined
as a quick, natural response we have to what we see or experience. It’s the immediate response, so
normally women claim to have a superior intuition than men because they notice smaller things while
men tend to focus on the bigger things. Chekhov moved away from philosophy and politics and
instead relied on his intuition to turn every-day people and experiences into great stories.
Ultimately we all, irrespective of our jobs or status, have an everyday life. We wake, eat
breakfast, put on our clothes, commute to work, sit in the office, talk to colleagues, go home,
watch telly and go to bed. There’s nothing magical in our lives. So Chekhov understood
the banality of life and made that his muse. What Chekhov saw was social paradoxes. He saw
the contradictions between doctor and patient, between men and women, and between rich and
poor. His stories are tales of juxtaposition between two opposites. We might not notice, the
power play between two people is always at play, but not alway obvious. Chekhov as a doctor
himself saw the powerlessness of patients but most crucially the powerlessness of doctors
in the face of immense human suffering. Here is an interesting fact. Chekhov was an
obsessive gardener. He looked after plants. His short stories are about people as if
they are plants. Humans are just plants in a garden we call society or country. Some
are weak and some are strong. They live in the same garden yet each one has a different
existence. Such is the nature of reality. This was revolutionary in Russia at the time.
People were used to novels being moralistic. So their novels were packed with ideas and
teachings. But Chekhov stripped his stories of any teaching. He wrote what he saw. He didn’t
judge them. He just depicted them as they were. Telling the truth
I have said this before that one of the most brilliant aspects of Russian
literature is its brutal honesty in revealing the darker side of life. While literature is
sometimes considered an escape from reality, Russian Literature for me is a massive punch in
the face that wakes you to the harsher truths of life. Chekhov is no different from Tolstoy
or Dostoevsky. He tells the truth as it is. But what’s different about Chekhov is that he tells
the truth from all sides. In Tolstoy’s writings and to some extent in Dostoevsky’s and Turgenev’s
writings, they idolise the Russian peasants as almost godly and the source of inspiration. This
makes sense because these writers came from an aristocratic background so they felt they had to
revere the peasant but also because the peasant lived a more honest lives compared to the nobility
who were pretentious and kept appearances. Now Chekhov doesn’t paint a rosy picture of
the peasants. He saw them just as flawed as the aristocrats. He saw them as dishonest at times
as the ruling elite. Chekhov saw human nature in action. He didn’t use his own preconception of
how people behave, he saw how people behave in real life. They lie, they steal, they do bad
things as well as great things. So unlike other Russian writers, Chekhov didn’t romanticise the
Russian peasants. Here is a quote:“A creed which teaches indifference to wealth, indifference
to the conveniences of life, and contempt for suffering is quite incomprehensible to the
great majority who never knew either wealth or the conveniences of life, and to whom contempt for
suffering would mean contempt for their own lives, which are made up of feelings of hunger, cold,
loss, insult, and a Hamlet-like terror of death. All life lies in these feelings, and life may
be hated or weary of, but never despised. Yes, I repeat it, the teachings of the Stoics can
never have a future; from the beginning of time, life has consisted in sensibility to pain and
response to irritation.”—Ward No. 6 Chekhov. Will to joy
Schopenhauer said we are driven by a blind will to life. We work and
struggle to continue on living. Nietzsche said we are driven by will to power. We all want to be
respected by our competence and power. Chekhov, however, says we are ultimately driven by
a will to joy. Chekhov’s stories are full of magical moments. He saw genuine joy in the
midst of misery and hardship. It’s these tiny moments that we really cherish in life. Yes
we love little moments of joys. That’s our energy and that motivates us. Happiness is
meaningless because it presupposes that we would be happy for a long period of life. But
joy is always temporary which is the truer goal of human existence. We live for these moments of
joy. No matter how high a mountain we conquer, it is the joyous moment that motivates
us and gives us enormous satisfaction. Chekhov’s comedy is always an awkward moment.
An inappropriate moment which is paradoxical. While reading him, you notice the little things
people do that bring a smile to your face. We all experience these things. In the midst
of our hectic lives, we often see a little moment of joy. For example a stranger smiling
at you. Someone keeping a door open for you. A cat walking past you. It makes sense because
Chekhov lived with with an illness himself—just like Camus who also suffered from TB for most
of his life— he knew death was looming large. What makes humans distinct from other animals
is that we anticipate our death. Other animals may understand when it comes to them, but we
know our demise from an early period of life. So Chekhov not only anticipated his own death,
he saw death on a daily basis as a doctor. As Martin Heidegger said, the true meaning of life
is understanding that we have a finite amount of time. This awareness gives our lives authenticity.
So Chekhov’s stories are a snapshot of life, moments of tragedy sprinkled with moments of joy.
That's real life. No matter who you are. We all live a mundane life and those moments of joy are
precious, no matter how miserable life can be. Chekhov and Camus had a lot in common.
Both suffered the same illness, TB. They also had a deep love for storytelling,
specially theatre. They also shared a philosophy that life is made of little moments of joy.
Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus is precisely that. Sisyphus is condemned to push a rock up the
mountain. Perhaps his only joy is the short interval between him getting to the top
before he has to go back down. It’s same for all of us. Our little moments of joy
is meeting a friend, having a nice meal, sharing a drink, talking to loved ones, getting
a nice comment from you beautiful people etc. A long, continuous state of happiness is a
myth pushed onto us by fairytales like Cinderella. Anton Chekhov was funny like Gogol, artistic
like Turgenev, profound like Dostoevsky, generous like Tolstoy, but he was different
from all of them. He rose from the bottom of the Russian society so he understood real
pain and real suffering. As a dutiful doctor and objective artist he removed himself from his
stories. His opinions or worldview didn’t matter. He made himself invisible in his stories.
His stories are all about the characters. He doesn’t care about how the world should be or
how we can make things better. All Chekhov was concerned with was to depict the world how it was.
Reality. That’s it. To the point that sometimes he appears heartless. Chekhov depicts nature and
reality without moral judgement. He was a doctor, educated in physical science therefore
everything had to be concretised. For example, a man falls in love with a woman for her
white teeth or her breasts. Shallow? Yes, but nature is deep and shallow. We all are. That’s
Chekhov’s intuition that saw the paradox of life. Dostoevsky wanted Russia to return to its olden
traditional values. Tolstoy wanted Russia to be more just towards the poor. Turgenev wanted
liberal values to take root in Russia. Maxim Gorky wanted a socialist society that prompted
equality for all. Chekhov however didn’t write about how society should be. He wrote about what
is. He wrote about life’s reality as it is. I will leave you with a quote by another
great Russian writer, Validmir Nabokov: “Chekhov’s genius almost involuntarily disclosed
more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude
of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession
of painted dummies. I shall go further, and say that the person who prefers Dostoevski
or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature
and Russian life.”—Vladimir Nabokov. Thank you for listening.
