ABSTRACT
‘Chekhov’s English admirers’, D. S. Mirsky complained, think that everything is perfect in Chekhov. Chekhov is like the fictional Molotov a plebeian: the serf’s grandson who made a man of himself. Chekhov became a humanist in the tradition of Pushkin and Turgenev, like them valuing restraint, measure in all things; more concerned with perspective than hoping for any miracle of reformation. Chekhov began writing the humorous sketch for a public that never looked beyond journalism. Chekhov’s disengagement marks him off from his contemporaries and nearly all his successors. Chekhov never loses sight of the vast background to human incident: the sea watched by two lovers on a bench, the storm impervious to the hatreds of men, the steppe in its loneliness. He can achieve distance and relate: his impersonality rests on an awareness of physical space, and of the silence behind the discord.
