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The following passages focus mainly on Chekhov's fiction.
Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels oneself in a
melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is transparent
and the outline of naked trees, narrow houses, greyish people,
is sharp. Everything is strange, lonely, motionless, helpless.
The horizon, blue and empty, melts into the pale sky, and its
breath is terribly cold upon the earth, which is covered with
frozen mud. The author's mind, like autumn sun, shows up
in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the
little squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled
by boredom and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible,
drowsy bustle. ... There passes before one a long file of men and
women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity and idleness, of
their greed for the good things of life; there walk the slaves of
the dark fear of life; they straggle anxiously along, filling life
with incoherent words about the future, feeling that in the
present there is no place for them. ... In front of that dreary,
gray crowd of helpless people there passed
a great, wise, and observant man: he looked at all these dreary
inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad smile, with a tone of
gentle but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart,
in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: "You live badly,
my friends. It is shameful to live like that." — Maxim Gorky,
Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov (BW Huebsch, 1921)
His genius lies above all in his
creative gifts as a writer
of short stories. ... In fact, his plays derive directly
from his stories, in which, it seems to me, the texture is far richer.
— VS Pritchett
a master of understatement, of
concealed meaning, of twilight scenes and of prose as compressed
as poetry, whose heroes don't want what they want? —
Andrei Voznesensky
The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen
and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov's soul, so often beyond
the reach of mere consciousness. — Constantin Stanislavski,
My Life in Art (Theatre Arts Books, 1924)
When I had read this story ["Ward No 6"], I was filled with awe.
I could not remain in my room and went out of doors. I felt as if
I were locked up in a ward too. — Nikolai Lenin
Tolstoy is reported to have said that Tchekov was a photographer,
a very talented photographer, it is true, but still only a photographer.
But Tchekov has one quality which is difficult to find among
photographers, and that is humour. His stories are frequently
deliciously droll. They are also often full of pathos, and they
invariably possess the peculiarly Russian quality of simplicity
and unaffectedness. He never underlines his effects, he never
nudges the reader's elbow. — Maurice Baring, Landmarks
in Russian Literature (Methuen, 1916)
Tchekov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly,
monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity,
nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekov was doing one
thing alone: by one means or another he was killing
human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his
creation. — Lev Shestov, Anton Tchekov and Other
Essays (Maunsel & Co, 1916)
His stories raise over and over again that oldest of questions
about realism. For Tchehov, as Mrs [Constance] Garnett and
many others have remarked, belongs most obviously to the
Maupassant school of "unflinching realists." But that after all
does not take us very far, and we may and do legitimately ask
about the realist what he is attempting to do with this unflinching
realism. The answer is easy in the case of the old photographic
and cinematographic realist. Carefully and accurately to convey
a piece of bleak and naked life into the covers of a book was to
him enough: that was the object of his art and Art. ... But
if Tchehov is an unflinching realist, his object is most certainly
not unflinching realism. It is true that many of his shortest short
stories seem at first sight to be the work of a man who has delicately
fastidiously, and ironically picked up with the extreme tips of his
fingers a little piece of real life, and then with minute care and skill
pinned it by means of words into a book. — Leonard Woolf,
"Miscellany: Tchehov," New Statesman, IX, 227, August
11, 1917
Chekhov is essentially a humorist. His is not the quiet, genial
humor of an Addison or a Washington Irving nor the more subtle,
often boisterous humor of a Mark Twain. His is rather the cynical
chuckle of a grown-up watching a child assume grimaces of deep
earnestness and self-importance. In his earlier stories the laughable,
and it is a more or less cheerful laugh, with little of the serious behind
it, often predominates. But as the stories grow more in volume, the
undercurrent of gloom and a stifled groan of pain become more and
more audible, until, in the later volumes, his laugh quite eloquently
suggest the ominous combination of submission to Fate and
Mephistophelian despair. — N Bryllion Fagin, "Anton Chekhov:
The Master of the Gray Short-Story," Poet Lore, XXXII,
Autumn 1921
How did he do it? Not by dispensing with plot, but by using a
totally different kind of plot, the tissues of which, as in life, lie
below the surface of events, and, unobtrusive, shape our destiny.
Thus he all but overlooks the event-plot; more, he deliberately lets
it be as casual as it is in real life. ... To Chehov literature is life
made
intelligible by the discovery of form — the form that is invisible in
life but which is seen when, mentally, you step aside to get a better
view of life. Life, because it has aspects innumerable, seems blurred
and devoid of all form. And since literature must have form, and life
has none, realists of the past thought that they could not paint life in
the aggregate and preserve form, and thus saw fit to express one
aspect of life at a time. Until a wholly new aspect occurred to
Chehov — that of life in the aggregate: which aspect, in truth, is his
form. — William Gerhardi, Anton Chehov: A Critical Study
(Duffield & Co, 1923)
Our first impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of
bewilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he make
a story out of this? we ask as we read story after story. A man
falls in love with a married woman, and they part and meet,
and in the end are left talking about their position and by what
means they can be free from "this intolerable bondage."
"‘How? How?' he asked, clutching his head. ... And it seemed
as though in a little while the solution would be found and
then a new and splendid life would begin." That is the end.
A postman drives a student to the station and all the way the
student tries to make the postman talk, but he remains silent.
Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly, "It's against the
regulations to take any one with the post." And he walks up
and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. "With
whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with
the autumn nights?" Again, that story ends.
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 Tchekov, 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,
The Common Reader (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925)
For he is a poet of atmosphere, of the vague thing they called in
Russian nastroenie and in German Stimmung,
but for which there is no adequate word in English, except
this meteorological metaphor. — DS Mirsky, Modern
Russian Literature (Oxford UP, 1925)
Now, of Tchehov I would say that his stories have apparently
neither head nor tail, they seem to be all middle like a tortoise.
Many who have tried to imitate him however have failed to
realise that the heads and tails are only tucked in. ... I should say
that Tchehov has been the most potent magnet to young writers in
several countries for the last twenty years. He was a very great
writer, but his influence has been almost wholly dissolvent. For
he worked naturally in a method which seems easy, but which is
very hard for Westerners, and his works became accessible to
Western Europe at a time when writers were restless, and eager
to make good without hard labour ... — John Galsworthy,
Selected Essays and Addresses (Heinemann, 1932)
But when we read a story like "My Life" we are bound to
notice that by the end of the tale none of the characters has
changed. They spend their time going round in circles. The
same can be said of "The Darling" or "The Lady with the Dog."
There is essential change in neither character nor situation. ... One
feels they are caught not in the toils of a story but in the wayward
meshes of a mood. The things which occur to the two chief characters
[in "My Life"] are like the wind soughing in the branches of two trees
in winter. The branches bend and sway; they toss and struggle; but once
the wind has died away they come to rest and form once more their
familiar pattern against the sky. Life is something which passes
through them like a sigh; it does not grow out of them. —
VS Pritchett,
"Books in General: ‘My Life,'" New Statesman, XXV, 631,
March 27, 1943
Chekhov raised the portrayal of banality to the level of world
literature. He developed the short story as a form of literary
art to one of its highest peaks, and the translation of his stories
into English has constituted one of the greatest single literary
influences at work in the short story of America, England, and
Ireland. This influence has been one of the factors encouraging
the short-story writers of these nations to revolt against the
conventional plot story and seek in simple and realistic terms
to make of the story a form that more seriously reflects
life. — James T Farrell, The League of Frightened
Philistines and Other Papers (Vanguard, 1952)
If we follow his line of development, we see that, beginning with
satirical jokes, Chekhov goes on to master the art of the ironic anecdote,
so often pathetic or tragic (it would hardly, one would think, be
possible to complain of a good many of these that one did not
understand the point); these, in turn, begin to expand into something
more rounded-out (the dense but concise study of character and situation)
and eventually — in what Mr Hingley calls Chekhov's Tolstoyan period
("A Nervous Breakdown," for example) — take on a new moral interest
or attain, as in his "clinical" one ("The Black Monk"), a new psychological
depth. These studies become more comprehensive — "The Steppe,"
"A Dreary Story," "Ward No 6" — in such a way as to cover a whole life
en raccourci or an experience in fuller detail. Such pieces are not
short stories but what Henry James called nouvelles. —
Edmund Wilson,
A Window on Russia (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1952)
Chekhov belonged to the age which followed the heroic generation
of Tolstoi and Dostoevski. At times his characters live, or think
that they live, in the world of his predecessors. One is tempted to
say that they all seem to have read Tolstoi and Dostoevski and are
trying to be Tolstoi and Dostoevski characters. But Chekhov has
lost the passion of his predessors because he has lost the faith
which sustains it. He and often his characters are skeptics rather
than believers. The soul searchings of his personages are not
terrible but, frequently, ridiculous, and it is their futility rather
than their tragedy which most impresses him. Whereas Tolstoi
and Dostoevski were prophets, he is a critic and a satirist. They
believed; he doubts. They saw tragedy; he sees, at most, pathos,
usually tinged with absurdity. — Joseph Wood Krutch, Modern
Drama: A Definition and an Estimate (Cornell UP, 1953)
I know enough about the business of storytelling to be able to
put my finger on certain devices that maintain the astonishing
freshness of [Chekhov's] stories. The devices are not unlike
those that [Toulouse Lautrec] and Degas used; ultimately, they
can all be traced to the naturalistic theory about describing what
you see — the simplest artistic theory in the world until you begin
to ask yourself what you do see. As in Degas' "L'Absinthe"
the figures are not placed solidly in the center of the picture and the
figure of the man trails off inexplicably behind the frame, so in
Chekhov there is always a deliberate artlessness of
composition — people walk on and off, and sometimes a fascinating
character is described and then dropped. Men are always being
caught buttoning their trousers and women pulling up their stockings,
and their outraged glances as we catch them at it are always part of
the total ironic effect. — Frank O'Connor, "A Writer Who Refused
to Pretend," New York Times Book Review, January 17, 1960
If one really wants to understand Chekhov, one must realize that he
was the moralist of the venial sin, the man who laid it down that a
soul is damned not for murder, adultery or embezzlement but for
the small, unrecognized sins of ill-temper, untruthfulness, stinginess
and disloyalty. ... As in Degas and Lautrec the whole beautiful theory
of the art schools is blown sky-high, so in Chekhov the whole
nineteenth-century conception of morals is blown sky-high.
This is not morality as anyone from Jane Austen or Trollope
would have recognized it, though I suspect that an orthodox
theologian might have something very interesting to say about
it. ... Sin to him is ultimately a lack of refinement, the inability to
get through a badly cooked meal without a scene. — Frank
O'Connor, "A Writer Who Refused
to Pretend," New York Times Book Review,
January 17, 1960
What becomes of the traditional division of a story — prologue,
exposition or development and finally dénouement or
conclusion — in Chekhov's work? The ‘prologue' or introduction
to the story is generally reduced to nil, or to a short sentence that
immediately goes to the heart of the matter. ... The Chekhov of the
final years ended his stories and plays abruptly, on a sort of musical
chord. There is, strictly speaking, no longer an ending at all. ... The
same form of ending is to be found in nearly all his works after
1894. — Sophie Laffitte, Chekhov, 1860-1904 (Angus
& Robertson, 1973)
His meticulous anatomies of complicated human impulse and response, his
view of what's funny and poignant, his clear-eyed observance of life as
lived — all somehow matches our experience. — Richard Ford
The most obvious feature of love as portrayed by Chekhov is that it
almost never works out to the satisfaction of either party. ... He seems
to have regarded young love as an illusion, but an illusion so beautiful
that he repeatedly used it for the evocation of atmosphere. His young
men in love are liable to meet with one of three different fates, none
of them enviable. Either their love is not returned, or they are separated
from their beloved by circumstances, or, finally, they get married and
the illusion ends in inevitable disillusion. All these experiences involve
emotions and memories which, however frustrating to the participants,
make ideal material for the construction of atmosphere. — Ronald
Hingley, Chekhov: A Biographical and Critical Study
(George Allen & Unwin, 1966)
The situation, indeed the entire plot of "The Lady with the Dog,"
is obvious, even banal, and its merit as a work of art lies in the
artistry with which Chekhov has preserved in the story a
balance between the poetic and the prosaic, and in the careful
characterization, dependent upon the use of half-tones. — Virginia
Llewellyn Smith, Anton Chekhov and "The Lady with the
Dog" (Oxford UP, 1973)
Among the most pervasive elements in the writing of Chekhov is
irony, especially the irony of unfulfillment. ... One form this irony
takes is the realization that achievement, arriving at one's goal,
seldom brings satisfaction. ... Irony is also experienced in the
failure to realize hopes, in the pursuit of what proves to be a
will-o'-the-wisp, and in lack of awareness of what the present
offers. — Ruth Davies, The Great Books of Russia
(U of Oklahoma P, 1973)
Chekhov's irony is not the self-satisfied amusement of an
author pulling his characters along on strings through a
labyrinth; it is not the cynical resignation to fate of Greek
tragedy; it is not just a manner that hints at gold reserves of
knowledge to back the paper currency of talk. Chekhov's
irony is much more modern, much closer to Samuel Beckett
than to the great tradition of the European novel. What he
knows and what his characters often ignore is that "les choses
sont contre nous" ["things are against us"]. His characters'
statements not only get them nowhere, they are not even possible
to complete, so insistent is the absurd importunacy of sand in the
speaker's boots, the compulsion to fiddle with a sleeve, the banging
of an iron rail outside the house. Not only the plays but also the
stories are full of extraneous noises, physical tics and silences which
give an ironic impotence to the sanest rationalisations. — Donald
Rayfield, Chekhov: The Evolution of His art
What happens in the course of the Chekhov play is that the characters
are shown responding and reacting to one another on the emotional
level: Chekhov creates among them what may be called an
emotional network, in which it is not the interplay of character
but the interplay of emotion that holds the attention of the
audience. ... A kind of electric field exists among all the persons
in a Chekhovian group. ... Emotional preoccupations in the
Chekhov play do not remain private and submerged, but are
brought to the surface as the characters intermingle and become
emotionally involved with one another. This as it were
activates the emotional network, and emotions may come to vibrate
between particular individuals. ... It is on occasions such as these,
when the emotional network is vibrating with an unusually high
degree of harmony or disharmony, that the characters'
emotional preoccupations are likely to be most clearly
revealed. — Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New
Interpretation (Chatto & Windus, 1973)
Anton Chekhov's late stories mark a pivotal moment in European fiction —
the point where nineteenth-century realist conventions of the short story begin
their transformation into the modern form. The Russian master, therefore, straddles
two traditions. On one side is the anti-Romantic realism of Maupassant with its sharp
observation of external social detail and human behavior conveyed within a tightly
drawn plot. On the other side is the modern psychological realism of early Joyce in
which the action is mostly internal and expressed in an associative narrative built
on epiphanic moments. Taking elements from both sides, Chekhov forged a powerful
individual style that prefigures modernism without losing most of the traditional
trappings of the form. If Maupassant excelled at creating credible narrative
surprise, Chekhov had a genius for conveying the astonishing possibilities of
human nature. His psychological insight was profound and dynamic. Joyce may have
more exactly captured the texture of human consciousness, but no short story writer
has better expressed its often invisible complexities. — Dana Gioia, Eclectic
Literary Review (Fall/Winter 1998)
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What the Critics Say
Chekhov on Writing
