He is accepted as the father of modern short stories. Yet, Chekhov never even considered writing his first occupation. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” he said, “and literature is my mistress.”
Chekhov started writing short stories as a medical student. He wrote them for money, and most of them were comedies and farces. But even his absurd sketches challenged the short story structure of his era. He didn’t give them much thought and didn’t take his writing seriously until Dmitri Grigorovich, Dostoevsky’s roommate and friend, who also helped launch the author’s career, wrote him a scolding letter. Chekhov suddenly realized that he had to work more on his stories and write less. In the next succeeding years, he produced several masterpieces, among which is the well known The Lady with the Dog.Stories, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larrisa Volokhonsky, is a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s works. These pieces are merely a small selection of the immense amount of work Chekhov produced before his death at the age of 43. These stories are arranged chronologically, and as readers, we can gauge how Chekhov progressed from absurd sketch writer to writer of profound masterpieces. But even as a writer of absurd sketches, Chekhov created a form that set the artist’s role to that of an observer, who “observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes,” which became his hallmark, and later the guide by which short story writers stood.
Chekhov’s stories are about the people of Russia, ranging from the common peasant to old professors, child workers to doctors. His characters are varied, and his landscape is their surrounding and their minds. He remains distant as observer and rarely imposes his self as narrator. When opinions are sounded, they are done skillfully through the character. Take A Boring Story for example; it is perhaps the most interesting story from among the first few stories in the collection. Chekhov presents it from the point of view of an old professor who has few interests left in the world and who, having found all that he had wished for, realizes that they weren’t exactly what he had wanted. His family is alien to him, and his job has become a task. The story transitions from a monologue in his mind to the events that are taking place around him, the characters that fit in and out of his life, and the opinions he has formed from all that he has experienced. It might have been a bitter story or a tragic one, but Chekhov lets it hover between the two and brings into light the more mundane issues of life and living, the balance in which our thoughts hang.
In the introduction to Stories is a list of Chekhov’s six principles for a good story. These are guidelines by which he stood, and as we read his works, it is apparent that they prevail – but not always. Chekhov sidestepped his principles when the story called for it to make things possible. However, one principal quality that carries through his writing is that of compassion, for his characters.
In The Black Monk, Ward No. 6, and A Medical Case, this quality of compassion preserves the characters from being seen as lunatics by readers. Chekhov’s restraint on authorial commentary and focus on details that lend to the subtext create the mood of the stories. He creates trajectories not out of dramatic events but out of ordinary ones. The arc usually originates from the minds of the characters. The beginning and the end of the stories are marked by events that affect the mind of the characters and the change it brings about in them. And of the many topics that one may discuss in Chekhov’s writings are his beginnings and ends.
Chekhov’s beginning range from the theatrical one word sentence such as “Night” in Sleepy to a sentence that builds the setting and introduces the character simultaneously, like in The House with the Mezzanine. His endings are not definite closures but rather a point that mark new realizations in the characters. However, these are broad sweeping generalizations that would never be able to do justice to Chekhov’s craft as a writer of short stories. I definitely recommend picking up Stories to see how he exercises the art of restraint, observation, and synthesis through words, and what is it really that preserves his genius, even in post-translation.
Related story
