My Life

Often seen as a rebuke against Tolstoy. But, as Donald Rayfield writes, “Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy, but strip his ideas of sacrimony.”

Tolstoy (who is my favourite Russian author, may I add) occasionally falls into the cliche (which he did not start, and indeed, still occurs to this very day) of this romanticisation of the working class / poorer people. The idea is that through their simpler lives, that they have tapped into a wisdom of the human spirit that even the most learned person could learn from. You see this today, in the fetishization of indigenous cultures, too. But sorry, back to Chekhov... first, the depiction of Tolstoy as this romanticist of the serfs isn't entirely accurate, but I don't have time to go into it here.

The hero is Misail, who a slow, passive and tolerant protagonist (tolerant against all but philistine deadness, and his search for an alternative way of life). He persists, in solitude, not in some rural Eden of saved humanity. He accepts the consequences of his choice.

Chekhov wrote to his friend Dr Orlov in 1899 “I have no faith in the intelligentsia. I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individuals here and there, all over Russia, for they're the ones who matter, though they are few.

Some think that Chekhov's refusal to force these contradictions into a resolution is a cop out - a vacuum, that leaves him vulnerable to accusations of moral relativism. But nothing could be further from the truth.