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.
I'm new to Chekhov and am glad I found your Substack.