"About Chekhov" by Korney Chukovsky, summary

Korney Chukovsky’s literary biographical work is dedicated to the personality and artistic method of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. The author completed the final edition in 1967, based on years of research. The book dispels the ingrained myth of Chekhov as a powerless, melancholy writer of twilight. Chukovsky reveals to the reader the classic writer’s colossal creative energy, unwavering will, and rigorous self-discipline.

A man of indomitable energy

Chekhov was known for his exceptional hospitality and constant desire to socialize. Whether settling in the village or at his Melikhovo estate near Moscow, he would gather dozens of guests. Relatives, writers, doctors, zemstvo officials, and casual acquaintances would spend the night at his house. Regular visitors included Alexei Suvorin, Isaac Levitan, Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik, Nikolai Leykin, and Lika Mizinova. The writer persistently invited his friends to visit with humorous letters, promising them rest and health.

Chekhov’s phenomenal sociability allowed him to thoroughly explore the lives of all social classes in Russia. In his youth, he voraciously collected impressions: he attended court hearings, fairs, monasteries, factories, and hospitals. He mingled freely with peasants, officers, actors, merchants, and professors. His knowledge of human customs enabled him to create a grand panorama of Russian life in hundreds of short stories. Compared to Chekhov’s teeming population, the books of many of his contemporaries seem almost empty.

The writer’s zest for life constantly found outlet in sparkling mirth and practical jokes. Chekhov staged mock trials of the artist Levitan, dressed himself in a Bedouin robe, and entertained his loved ones with amusing impromptu performances. Once in Moscow, he handed a policeman a heavy, wrapped watermelon, saying, "Bomb! Take it to the police station, but be careful." On his travels, he staged impromptu performances, engaging his companions in the game.

Chekhov loved working with others and readily offered collaborations with writers. He invited Vladimir Korolenko to collaborate on a four-act drama, and he offered Viktor Bilibin a shared vaudeville. For the playwright Lazarev-Gruzinsky, Chekhov rewrote entire scenes from a play, generously incorporating his own characters. He revised nine stories for the aspiring writer Shavrova and asked her to submit twenty more. Chekhov later encouraged Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev to write plays for the Moscow Art Theater.

The writer’s love of nature was combined with a passion for transforming the earth. Chekhov hated desolation and deforestation. In Melikhovo, he planted about a thousand cherry trees and replanted forest wastelands with spruce, oak, pine, and larch. In Crimea, he cultivated a flourishing garden on a parched plot. The images of environmentalists in the plays "Leshy" and "Uncle Vanya" became poetic reflections of his own work.

Chekhov’s practical work required enormous perseverance. The writer built three model schools for peasant children in the Moscow region and a fourth in Crimea. He personally purchased bricks, lime, and stove tiles, managed payments to craftsmen, and overcame the inertia of the zemstvo. In his native Taganrog, Chekhov founded a public library, donating thousands of volumes, and organized the erection of a monument to Peter the Great. During the famine, he helped peasants, and during the cholera epidemic, he provided free medical treatment to residents of twenty-five villages.

Self-education and the cult of truth

Chekhov treated his own work with the utmost exactingness. He avoided grandiloquent words about literature, calling his works "trash," "junk," and "filthy little plays." The author concealed the colossal intensity of his work from the public, assuring friends of his incorrigible laziness. Upon receiving the Pushkin Prize for his collection "In the Twilight," he ironically remarked that the award was given for catching crayfish.

In 1888–1889, at the height of his literary fame, Chekhov was overcome by a profound dissatisfaction with fiction. A desire to do something truly useful led him to travel to the penal island of Sakhalin in 1890. After traveling eleven thousand miles through the spring thaw in a drafty cart, the ailing writer conducted a census of the island’s population. The collected materials formed the basis of the incriminating scholarly book "Sakhalin Island," which undermined his physical strength.

Chekhov’s moral character was the result of methodical inner discipline. The writer admitted that he was naturally quick-tempered and abrupt, but he trained himself to maintain constant self-control. Raised in a despotic bourgeois family, he set himself the task from a young age of squeezing the slave out of himself, bit by bit. Chekhov methodically eradicated deference to rank, rudeness, and fear of the powerful.

Chekhov sacredly cherished his independence and human dignity. He refused to curry favor with influential publishers and officials. In his long-standing friendship with the wealthy publisher Suvorin, the writer consistently maintained his selflessness, rejecting any monetary favors. Chekhov had no patience for the arrogance of dignitaries and despised writers willing to endure humiliation for the sake of favorable reviews.

The writer also demanded self-respect and inner culture from his brothers Alexander and Nikolai. In a famous letter from 1886, Chekhov outlined the code of a well-mannered person. Well-mannered people respect the individual, show gentleness and leniency, empathize with others, and avoid boasting and lying. They cherish their talent, maintain good hygiene, and do not degrade themselves for the sake of cheap sympathy.

A particularly important element in Chekhov’s worldview was his implacable hatred of lies. The slightest hypocrisy and bombast disgusted him. He unhesitatingly cut off contact with people caught in deception, including Leikin, Grigorovich, and Suvorin. In his works "Name Day," "The Grasshopper," and "The Duel," the author vividly demonstrated that everyday lies inevitably lead to tragedy and destroy human souls.

Poetics and compassion

Critics have long misinterpreted Chekhov’s works. Publicist Nikolai Mikhailovsky accused the author of a lack of ideas and a cold indifference to social issues. Later, readers of the 1990s mistakenly proclaimed Chekhov a harbinger of hopeless melancholy. The liberal intelligentsia saw Chekhov’s melancholy as an excuse for their own passivity, overlooking the militant and creative pathos of his work.

Chekhov developed a distinctive artistic method based on the expressive power of concrete details. He avoided straightforward lectures and declarations, trusting the reader’s instincts. The characters’ thoughts and feelings are conveyed through gestures, glances, intonations, and clothing. In "The Lady with the Dog," the heroine’s mannerisms are expressed in a single sentence, while in "Ionych," the girl’s limited intelligence is revealed by her judgment of the novel she has read.

In his short stories, the author often employs a complex compositional form, combining the author’s speech with the character’s inner voice. The opening chapters of "Rothschild’s Violin," "The Grasshopper," and "Ionych" convey the characters’ own false judgments. The plot then gradually uncovers the characters’ vulgarity and delusions. The reader must pay close attention to separate the objective truth from the characters’ superficial assessments.

Chekhov rejected the schematic division of people into hardened villains and infallible righteous men. He sought the truth of life, balancing positive traits with negative ones. In the story "Rothschild’s Violin," the callous undertaker Yakov Ivanov emerges as a true musical genius. Before his death, Yakov rises to a lofty sorrow over universal hostility and the senseless waste of the nation’s wealth. In the drama "The Cherry Orchard," the merchant Lopakhin is endowed with a subtle, artistic soul.

The core of Chekhov’s poetry remained the author’s boundless compassion for humanity. The writer deeply empathized with weak, weak-willed, and tormented characters who fell victim to their own impotence or the cruelty of the system. In the stories "The Duel," "The House with a Mezzanine," and the short stories "In the Ravine" and "The Bishop," he depicts the characters’ suffering without the slightest saccharine sentimentality. Human conscience invariably serves as the stern measure of all actions on the pages of his books.

At the turn of the century, Chekhov undertook a titanic task of revising his early texts for the collected works of the publisher Marx. The writer eliminated over two hundred humorous pieces by Antosha Chekhonte and rewrote the remaining pieces. He eliminated the vaudevillian flamboyance, flashy titles, and student jargon, reducing the style to classical brevity. This intense work demonstrated that the purification of his literary style was a direct expression of the great master’s moral growth.