Anton Chekhov is remembered as one of the leading short story writers in world literature. He is considered the founder of the modern short story and has influenced many modern writers. He is one of the major literary figures of all time. Chekhov was a playwright as well and is known in English speaking world mainly for his plays.
He was a prolific writer and produced a great bulk of quality works. In his works, he has touched the depths of nature. He has explored everyday events that make either comedy or tragedy and the hidden significance of these events. He had personal experience of hard times in his life, and this is expressed in his works.
He presented a realist depiction of life in his works. His initial plays were farces, but he changed this soon. He wrote plays that were a mix of comedy and tragedy, and this shows how life is. He knew that ordinary life is special, and the events taking place in it carry special meanings. Like some other contemporary successful fiction writers, his focus remained on character development and mood instead of plot.
He has shown the inner conflict of the characters to the world, and through this, the pre-revolution Russian society is portrayed. He goes beyond the surface, and through this, he shows the root causes of happenings.
His precision was laconic, and he describes a complex issue neatly in a few words. His short stories and plays don’t have complex plots and conclude in neat solutions. In his work, he has provided portraits of people hailing from different classes of society. These vary from the intelligentsia to the working labor in factories.
He had a non-conventional approach towards peasantry in contrast to his contemporary writers. His works can be called a panoramic study of the then Russia. Some scholars suggest that this can be even used as an accurate sociological source.
He developed internal drama in the characters’ minds, and this is the essence of his short stories. He is considered a master of psychological realism. His plays are also the subject of innovation in his corpus. He has changed the conventions of dramatic speech.
Sometimes characters stay silent for long; sometimes there are interruptions by characters in each other’s speech. Changes brought by him into drama and short stories are substantial and seminal.
Chekhov’s works proved influential for his contemporary writers because they taught the writers about the use of mood, apparent trivialities, the inaction of characters. His profession, work as a physician, has immense impacts on his writing, and the most evident manifestation is his objective style.
He followed great writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his initial days but later changed his course. Instead of having a grand stage and universal truths like them in his works, he preferred to portray the everyday life of common people.
Due to his outstanding work, Chekhov was widely hailed by readers and theatergoers. He received several distinctions, and one of them is the Academy of Sciences’ Pushkin Prize.
A Short Biography of Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29th, 1860 in Taganrog, southern Russia. His father was Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov while his mother was Yevgeniya Morozova. He was the third of their surviving six children. His father was a former serf whose father had liberated his family by paying for their freedom. Pavel was a religious fanatic and did often beat his children and wife.
He worked as a grocer in the town where they lived and was the director of the local parish choir. His mother was a brilliant storyteller, and Chekhov inherited this talent from her. Chekhov’s childhood life wasn’t in any sense normal, but it later became the backdrop for his great works.
He was enrolled at Greek school in Taganrog and then at Taganrog Gymnasium. He remained there until the age of sixteen. His father was declared bankrupt in 1876 due to the spending of finances on building their house. He fled their native town to avoid being imprisoned by the debtor. They settled in Moscow while Chekhov remained in the town.
He continued his education and joined them when his education at Gymnasium completed. He remained there with a fake name and worked to pay for his education. He also maintained love affairs with different women during this period, and one was with the wife of a teacher.
He was admitted to I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University in 1879, and then he joined his family in Moscow. He had well-read classic writers during his stay at Gymnasium, and he used it now to earn a livelihood for his family. He wrote comic sketches and sold them to help his family and continue his studies.
He wrote these with different pseudonyms and became a famous chronicler of Russian street life, satirizing it. He completed his medical education in 1884 and qualified as a physician. He made it his principal profession and used the income to support his family.
He had contracted tuberculosis from a patient and worsened in 1886. Though he noticed blood in his cough, he didn’t admit it to his family. By this time, he had earned enough money that could meet the financial needs of his family. He looked for better accommodation and changed houses. He joined the famous paper New Times in 1886 as a writer.
The owner of this paper, Alexey Suvorin, was a millionaire and remained Chekhov’s best friend for long. He visited Sakhalin in 1890 and wrote a reportage of his journey and the conditions of the inhabitants of the island.
In 1892 he bought an estate in Melikhovo and started spending his time managing it. During this period he continued his medical practice and had first-hand experience of Russian life. He suffered a hemorrhage in his lungs and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He then moved to Yalta with his family and built a villa there for residence. He met Olga Knipper in 1903 and married her quietly.
They didn’t have any children and lived apart for most of the time. Chekhov fell terminally ill from tuberculosis in May 1904. He left for the German spa town of Badenweiler with his wife where he showed signs of recovery but died on July 15th, 1904. His body was brought back to Russia for burial.
Anton Chekhov’s Writing Style
Chekhov was interested in writing about the ordinary lives and their interests in rural Russia. He has employed a number of techniques in his works. These include words and their pacing that portray the images in a reader’s mind, the creation of round characters and their moods, etc. He built a new literary form which many of his contemporaries called impressionistically.
His works lack lengthy verbiage and this he advised other writers as well. He was totally objective about his characters and provided truthful descriptions of objects and characters in his works. Brevity is characteristic of Chekhov’s work. He has fled stereotypes and used original characters.
He is essentially a dramatist, and this is evident even in his short stories. Like his plays, in which action is subtle and ineluctable, his stories have the same dramatic features. His characters have individuality and their own way of speaking. His language doesn’t have raciness and verve. For this reason, his work is easy to translate. There are exceptions to it, which include occasional catchwords, allusions, and technical terms.
There are incidental passages and details in his works which are not primarily related to the main theme. This incidental is the key feature of his writings. This is used to point to the broad context, open to discussion. Though it looks incidental, it is a source to look at the deeper meaning of the text.
Re-examination of Objective Point of View: Variations
Chekhov’s short stories are known for their objective point of view. They are made to appear as if these are snapshots from real life. They are written in the manner that there doesn’t appear any relationship between the reader and the characters. His works seem to lack any meddling, opinionated narrator who describes events from his ‘biased’ point of view.
These stories appear so that the narrator seems muted and in some cases, non-existent. In his short stories, A Trifle From Life and The Bet, there are narrators who are in disagreement with the protagonist. These stories are written from a particular moral perspective. Most often, Chekhov’s protagonists and narrators disagree.
Most of the readers think that The Bet is written from the banker’s point of view. Though this narrative doesn’t sympathize with the banker. In this story, the narrator’s stance is ironic though subtle. The more closely the narrative voice is examined, the more it becomes a blunt object, and we come to know how the narrator perceives the banker.
In Trifle, the author is inclined towards a dramatic narrative, and the story is written in dialogue. There is almost no narrator seen, and the readers feel if there is none. This short story is an example focused, objective narrative. In the first and final paragraphs, the narrator is given the opportunity to express himself.
From these paragraphs, it is apparent that the narrator is a third-person voice and refers to the protagonist as ‘my hero.’ The story seems to be narrated from the protagonist’s perspective, and the readers feel sympathy for him.
Later, when the story develops, and his actions are revealed, it is evident that the narrator’s reference to him was sarcastic. The tone is ironic in the end, and that shows the development from innocence to experience and loss of innocence.
Lyricism
Anton Chekhov was a lyrical playwright. He is the master of lyricism not only in the traditional sense where the writer touches the strings of the human soul. In a non-traditional sense, he is direct and precise. Like famous writers Goethe, Pushkin, and Byron, he was the master of representation of profundity in human reflection. He was an introspective writer.
This lyricism is related to reflections on his own life and his own situation in literature. An example is his play, The Cherry Orchard, and the reason for its lyricism lies in the fact that it has never been looked at from a single point of view. Another example is the Seagull, where the characters Trigorin and Treplev are the mirrors of Chekhov’s self-image.
The argument between these two characters represents the argument that is going on in Chekhov’s mind.
Modernist Short Story
Chekhov gave the short story a new literary form and set the aesthetic criteria for the short story. His short stories are marked by plotless-ness and the lack of conventional narrative organization. His fiction has the interrogative quality, and it questions even its own existence. His narratives advance towards irresolution and in some cases even misapprehension. His short stories resist the Victorian narrative convention.
His short stories resist being miniaturized novel form. His inconclusiveness and abandoning of formal closure make the reader melancholy. Through this, in conclusion, the meaning is multiplied. The brevity of his short stories leads to the co-productive capacity of the reader.
In the new kind of short story, the transaction between the reader and writer is decreased. The writer is free from the obligation to provide interpretative content. He uses the technique of creating an inner reality while focusing on outer details. The interrogative effect is achieved by the infiltration of character interiority. An example is his short story, The Bishop.
In this short story, the omniscient narrative is suppressed for a perspective filtered through a character. The essence of his realism was the personality that he refined and described in full detail.
The Paradox of Melancholy: Medical Subtext
In Chekhov’s novella A Boring Story, the fictional author is a professor of physiology, and he believes that he has symptoms of a disease and that will kill him. He believes that he has undergone changes in his personality with the onset of this disease. The plot of the novella is structured around the novel and uncharacteristic pessimism which leads to the protagonist’s search for identity.
There are several reasons for the change in his personality, which include illness, new insight, and the world around him. He deeply considers the questions which are behind his illness and how he can treat himself. This all is done from the medical point of view and shows the insight of the narrator.
He deals as either the symptoms of an illness or the actual problem that is lack of meaning in life. He believes that if these are not symptoms, then the sixty-two years of life he has lived is wasted. From this second view, some critics have inferred that Chekhov is the poet of hopelessness. This thinking also has traces of existential thinking.
Though the medical subtext is not directly visible in this novel, psychopathology plays a significant role in developing the argument of the novel. There are a lot of signs and symptoms, but the professor is unable to unite them to form a coherent picture. Thus these appear to be incidental and disconnected.
Two-timing Time
Chekhov’s play Three Sisters uses quotations that have more value than just being referential. This has subversive and even a destabilizing effect on the narrative. Here quotation is used as a device. Applying Derrida’s understanding of repetition it is clear that no two repetitions can have the same meaning.
From this, it can be inferred that the conclusion of the short story conveys the message that memory deceives and is often fallible. The same is the case with time in this play. There are various references to time in the text. From there, it can be inferred that these plays create a link between the plays and the author’s time.
This also links the characters’ responses to time. The aspect of the play goes beyond the fictional and functional levels. Though it may not present the philosophy of time, it may be at least a critique of existing concepts relevant to the time. Apart from the devices which are implied in this work, there is a discourse weaved around time. These include the ticking of the clock, the verbal device of the quotation, and the clock smashed on stage, etc.
There are references to the birth of children, change of seasons which add to the description. Chekhov tries to make the point that discussions about the future are futile. He allows the characters to either dwell in the past or future. This shows the dilemma of the instability and ever-changing nature of the present.
