Stories Read Free

conceptions I form about everything, something general is lackingthat would unite it all into a single whole. Each feeling and thought lives separately in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theater, literature, students, and in all the pictures drawn by my imagination, even the most skillful analyst would be unable to find what is known as a general idea or the god of the living man.
    The professor’s dilemma amounts to a commentary on Chekhov’s artistic method. Like his hero, Chekhov refused to substitute a false god for the absent “god of the living man.” In his revolt against general ideas, according to the philosopher Lev Shestov, he “finally frees himself from ideas of every kind, and loses even the notion of connection between the happenings of life. Herein lies the most important and original characteristic of his creation.” Shestov’s essay “Creation from the Void,” written in 1908 and still one of the most penetrating discussions of Chekhov’s art, contains the following description of the spiritual condition of that time:
    To calculate beforehand is impossible. Impossible even to hope. Man has entered that stage of his existence wherein the cheerful and foreseeing mind refuses its service. It is impossible for him to present to himself a clear and distinct notion of what is going on. Everything takes on a tinge of fantastical absurdity. One believes and disbelieves—everything.
    This was the condition within which, and against which, Chekhov worked. He was more acutely aware of it than most of his contemporaries, which is why we still read him with a sense of immediacy.
    Chekhov came to literature by an unlikely path. He was born in 1860, in the town of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather was a serf, but bought freedom for himself and his family even before the emancipation of 1861. His father was a grocer. The family— there were three more brothers and a sister—was a very close one, and Chekhov always had the greatest respect for his parents, who were simple people, pious and not very educated. When he was seventeen, he wrote to his younger brother Mikhail: “Our parents are the onlypersons in the world for whom I will never stint in anything. If something becomes of me, it will be the work of their hands. The unlimited love they bear for their children is enough to put them beyond all praise and to cover up the faults provoked in them by a thankless life.” He never separated from them, supported them as soon as he could, and in 1892, when he bought the small estate of Melikhovo, south of Moscow, brought them there to live with him, together with his sister and younger brother. Such family closeness was rare (“extremely rare,” according to D. S. Mirsky) among the intelligentsia, but not among the peasants from whom Chekhov came.
    From 1867 to 1879, he attended the Greek school in Taganrog, where he received an Orthodox religious education. His upbringing was also religious; he and his brothers sang in the church choir, conducted by their father; they read the Epistles and Psalms in church, served as altar boys and bell ringers. He looked back on the experience as rather gloomy, and later lost his faith, but his familiarity with church life shows in many of his stories, and his knowledge of the services and prayers was probably more precise than that of any other Russian writer. His work is also imbued witha Christian understanding of suffering. The critic Leonid Grossman has described him as “a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature.” *
    In 1876 Chekhov’s father lost his business and to escape debtor’s prison had to flee to Moscow, where his eldest son, Alexander, was studying. The rest of the family went with him, leaving the sixteen-year-old Anton to finish high school alone in Taganrog. He gave lessons to support himself, lived very poorly, but completed his studies in 1879, after which he joined his family in