I don’t think it’s ridiculous to say that no art form is more defined by one artist than short story writing is by Anton Chekhov. There is no writer who has come since that is not influenced by him in some way.
Short fiction is a weird genre in many ways. I would usually define it in the most abstract sense as stories that are designed to be consumed in one sitting. Obviously this gets blurred slightly when it begins to approach around 10,000 words, but the idea remains the same. The idea(s) being shared in the story are limited, and the whole thing works in harmony to deliver them. A short story is a unified thing, usually (but not always) in time and place, and always unified in effect. Unlike a novel, the raw materials are sparse; every phrase, every word, overy omission matters. At its most basic structural level, a story is like an extended joke, building up to a payoff or punchline. This is why the genre is so affiliated with horror, which relies on building atmosphere. It is much harder to keep a reader in that atmosphere when it takes them multiple hours and sittings to get through. Before Chekhov, this is how the majority of stories worked. They would usually build up to one revelation, one ‘event’, that changes the rest of the story, and this event would be an external one. In Irving Washington’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, the event is Brom Bones disguising himself as the Headless Horseman and driving Ichabod Crane from the village over their romantic competition. While there are deeper ideas at work, the story itself functions as a vehicle for this to take place, setting up the characters and the town and eventually reaching this ending.
Chekhov doesn’t do this. His events are internal, so much so that in many stories there are no material changes to the real world. One of my favourites, 1894’s ‘The Student’, covers a man telling a story around a fire, at which point some women cry, and he leaves to continue his journey. There is no difference in the world at the end, but the internal lives of all the characters have been transformed, no matter how minutely. He has often been criticised because so little actually happens in his stories, but that is the point. His events are more powerful than anything on the macro level can ever be, because they focus on people and their deepest fears and motivations.
His style is remarkable partly because of his context. The Russian literary canon is a weird one, especially the pre-1900 works. Big name critics like Vissarion Belinsky and other, worse, writers, essentially controlled publishing in the mid-19th Century (along with the Tsar’s censors), and they deemed that literature should be a vehicle for social commentary and change. Pushkin got published because he was the best, but also because he wrote about the world as it was. ‘Eugene Onegin’ is a character study on the repressed intelligentsia, the ‘superfluous man’ who was deprived of meaning in the wake of the Golden Generation of 1812 and the brutal crackdowns on social mobility following the Decembrists revolt. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev became so famous and highly paid because their works interacted with big ideas. Raskolnikov spends half of ‘Crime and Punishment’ in his room obsessing over nihilism and Levin (spoilers) literally discovers the meaning of life in ‘Anna Karenina’. These authors were philosophers as much as they were fiction writers, and the canon reflects this. (Disclaimer: they are also all really very good, so if anyone is actually reading this, they should go and read the big names. Volokhonsky and Pevear are the best translators for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, by the way).
Chekhov saw things differently. He was a doctor by trade, and he carried the same attitude to his writing as he did to his practice. He was interested in individual cases, the same way he treated his patients. If someone comes into his office with symptoms, he finds out what is wrong with that one person and treats them; he doesn’t proclaim a cure for the entire populace. In the same way, he creates characters who are real people, dissects their situation, and then develops them, without resorting (so much) to philosophising. His writing is compassionate, empathetic; he seeks to understand his characters and through them to understand people, rather than preaching to them, and he was criticised heavily for it. Critics called his writing empty and useless, but he was very successful and has had a huge effect on the genre, perhaps greater than his two most significant contemporaries. 20th Century short stories became thoughtful and internal, because his influence was so powerful. He was, and is, popular because of how he engages. Tolstoy will get on his soapbox and rant at you, Chekhov will buy you a drink and talk.
So read the stories, and read them critically. The subtext is deep and rich, and the stories are subtle. Everything is deliberate, down to the last comma. And everything he writes drips with empathy. Every character is deep and understood (especially in the more mature stories). He makes you want to understand people in a way that no other artist does. His characters suffer greatly, yes; he is dark, darker than most. He explores some heavy themes, from suffering and suicide to love and loss, but does so at all times with a light touch. Nobody suffers without a reason, and conversely nobody suffers so he can make a point. Anna Karenina suffers so Tolstoy can tell us the way to live, while Chekhov’s characters go through hell because, well, that was (and is) life.
We will start with something light(ish), with 1883’s ‘The Death of a Government Clerk’, written for a humorous magazine when he was in his early 20s. I will write something about how it is essentially the nail in the coffin of one of the more pervasive tropes of Russian literature, and I will also explore the event in this story, and how it is more subtle than it appears. In the meantime, enjoy it, leave me some notes in the comments about the story, my format, literature as a whole, Russia, whatever. If anyone is reading this, ‘let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit’. Thank you, and enjoy the show.
I'm new to Chekhov and am glad I found your Substack.