ABSTRACT
Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov is the most conspicuous transition figure between the great age of prose and the modernist wave. He was a commoner by birth and started writing while studying medicine in Moscow. His first stories were for the most part potboilers for humorous papers: amusing and ironical anecdotes, influenced by Gogol, and probably by Ivan F. Gorbunov. In Chekhov's stories, the monumental Russian realism began to disintegrate. Chekhov's genius is of a smaller caliber than the genius of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. His language, on the whole, is less racy than that of his great predecessors. Yet on his own ground and within his limits he is unique. Apart from being a notable playwright, he ranks, together with Maupassant, as one of the greatest short-story writers in world literature. And like Maupassant, he died at the early age of forty-four.
