ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Russian realist writer Anton Chekhov’s constructive reconsideration of the Romantic quest for meaning. In his stories and plays, Chekhov warned his readers against an implicit (and unlikely) alliance in modernist thought between popular forms of nihilism and Romanticism. Pushing back against the strong Nietzschean current in Russian modernism, Chekhov held that the willful creation of meaning represented not a deliverance from meaninglessness, but an escape from the meanings that were already present, even abundant, in the landscapes of daily life. Chekhov endeavoured to salvage and amend the Romantic project by injecting it with a robust ethical dimension, by insisting on the moral weight of meaning as the mark of its authenticity. He rejected the iteration of Romanticism that was gaining ground at the fin de siècle as all but indistinguishable from nihilism; both inclinations, the Romantic and the nihilistic, in his view, had become widely abused anesthetic drugs, ready-made paths of escape from the trials and demands of a meaningful life. He portrayed the discovery of meaning, by contrast, while vitalising and redemptive, as imposing extreme moral and emotional demands that required considerable inward resources both to see and to bear.
