The Chekhovian Turn

Tolstoy is quoted as saying: "Chekhov is an incomparable artist, an artist of life...Chekhov has created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the whole world, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere...Chekhov has hit his own special form, like the impressionists" from Richard Pevear's Introduction to Anton Chekhov: Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. viii.

"In fact, just as Chekhov created a new kind of story, he also created a new image of the writer: the writer as detached observer, sober, restrained, modest, a craftsman shaping the material of prose under the demands of authenticity and precision, avoiding ideological excesses, the temptations of moral judgment, and the vainglory of great ideas" (ibid., xi).

Chekhov's style owed something to his medical training: he admired Goethe for his ability to combine in a single, integrated personality, both poet and naturalist (ibid., xvi).

"The critic Leonid Grossman has described him as 'a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature'" (ibid., xv).

Unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov saw no need to preserve theological language while rejecting its supernaturalist assumptions (ibid., xx). As a consequence, his work is frequently derided as hopelessly pessimistic (ibid., xxi). And there is plenty hopelessness to be found in Chekhov, but there is also something else: the grim resolve of resistance and revolt. And this resistance and revolt is what Albert Schweitzer termed ethics: "a constant, living, and practical dispute with reality...resulting from reverence for life" (see post of 12/10/12).

The Chekhovian turn is Tolstoyan, but in a minor key.