Nebraska Center for Writers
What the Critics Say
About Anton Chekhov
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 selfimportance. 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 eventplot; 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)