In 1892 Chekhov buys a country estate at Melikhovo, about fifty miles south of Moscow, and embarks on the most fruitful period of his work as a short-story ^^rer—all but two of the items in this volume belong to his Melikhovo period. But he is increasingly incapacitated by tuberculosis. Compelled to winter in the south on doctors' orders, he builds a villa near the Crimean resort of Yalta in 1899 and abandons Melikhovo while continuing to return to Moscow as his health permits. His output of short stories declines, but he is now first making his mark as a dramatist with the successful production of his four-act plays The Seagull and Uncle Vanya by the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre. In 1901 Chekhov marries the actress Olga Knipper, a member of the Art Theatre Company. Between his marriage and his death in 1904 he writes two plays specially for the Art Theatre: Three Sisters and—his last work— The Cherry Orchard.
Chekhov did not belong to the heroic epoch of Russian fiction: that of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. With the grand age of the Russian novel—the reign of the Emperor Alexander II (1855-81)—he was involved only in the sense of witnessing it from afar as a provincial schoolboy.
Alexander Il's reign had begun with general optimism and sweeping social reforms sponsored by the Emperor himself, among which the Emancipation of the Serfs had been the most important—it was enacted in 1861, when Chekhov (whose paternal grandfather had actually been a serf) was a mere babe in arms. As a schoolboy Chekhov was made aware, without becoming keenly interested, of political opposition to the Russian autocracy such as was now first finding serious organized expression. It was now that oppositionists of a more modern type than had hitherto surfaced in Russia—whether termed liberals, radicals or revolutionaries—first made themselves felt as a collective force, albeit on a small scale. Resistance to the Reforming Tsar (and for not reforming fast enough) culminated in his assassination on I March 1881 by a group of extremists. This momentous event coincided fairly closely with the deaths ofDostoyevsky and Turgenev, as also with the end of Tolstoy's major period as a novelist. The assassination was, accordingly, a literary as well as a political landmark, simultaneously signalling the end of the old heroic era and the beginning of a new and less flamboyant period.
Chekhov's dйbut as a writer came at just this time: it was in the Reforming Tsar's last year of life, to be precise, that he first began to publish his work.
With Alexander II's sudden death the age of reform and generous hopes—already in sad decline—seemed to have ended for the foreseeable future, and the political police moved in to crush the small but virulent revolutionary movement. Meanwhile the assassinated Emperor's successor, Alexander III, was embarking on 'counter-reforms' designed to put the clock back and protect the autocracy against the activities of political terrorists such as those who had blownwn his father to pieces. Despite all curbs on political and social reform, however, Russia under the new Tsar never developed into the police state which the world still seems to insist on conceiving it. Admittedly the peasants' condition remained unenviable, and they were exposed to terrible famines and epidemics. Equally unenviable was the plight of the urban proletariat, which still remained comparatively small in numbers. Ofsuch sufferings Chekhov's own works provide eloquent illustration. But, as they also show, at least the professional section of sociery, to which he himself belonged as a doctor and author, suffered from few indeed of the disadvantages associated with a police state. Despite the existence of a literary censorship (a continual nuisance) and despite many another handicap, the Russian intellectual of the last two decades of the nineteenth century enjoyed—provided always that he did not belong to the rump of active revolutionary conspirators insignificant until the mid-1 89os—a degree of real freedom for which later generations and societies may well envy him.
Himself no admirer of the autocratic system and on occasion its outspoken critic, Chekhov was even less sympathetic to revolutionary conspiracy. Not that this issue loomed prominently in his consciousness. As is abundantly clear from his voluminous surviving letters (over four thousand), and also from the many memoirs of his contemporaries, the emphasis was on quite other matters. Here was a lively, vigorous society—not least in Moscow: Chekhov's spiritual home at times, and an exhilarating milieu in which to write, paint, carouse, make love, gossip and argue about the meaning of exhtence over a combination of oysters, champagne, sturgeon, vodka, beer or tea in one of the many traktiry (taverns) in which Muscovite intellectuals seemed to spend half their time. Nor did the continued espousal of reactionary policies by Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894, succeed in suppressing the general feeling of excitement.
In enjoying these amenities fairly extensively, until frustrated by ill health, Chekhov was a man of his age. Yet he was conscious all the time of those less fortunate than himself, and more effectively conscious than many a contemporary who posed as champion of the poor and downtrodden. Eloquent in words—as witness those numerous artistic works in which he depicts the plight of the unprivileged— Chekhov was also a man of action, working as doctor, health officer, builder of schools, patron of libraries and so on.
Though chosen (as noted in the Preface) for their excellence as short stories, the items in the present selection well typify Chekhov and his period by covering a wide spread of contemporary Russian settings. The Russian countryside provides the background for Neighbours and Ariadne, while provincial towns—characteristically anonymous— supply the stage for Ward Number Six and Doctor Startsev. In A Dreary Story and The Butterfly Moscow (loved and hated by Chekhov) appears to be the scene, though unavowedly so, while the capital, St. Petersburg, figures memorably as the setting of An Anonymous Story. Less typically, Chekhov permits himself an excursion outside Russian national territory in the last-named story, and also in Ariadne. In each case his description of foreign parts seems to accord with a formula evolved in another context: that 'abroad is a bloody place'. Such was, incidentally, Chekhov's o^n frequent but by no means invariable reaction to his travels outside the Russian Empire.
So much for the geographical background. As for the social setting, we have provided a less characteristic spread, since—as stated above— stories focused on the life of the peasants have been omitted, as have studies of merchants, the urban lower middle class and the industrial worker. The main emphasis in this volume is on the gentry and on the professional class which Chekhov himself entered as a young man by becoming a doctor and self-supporting writer. Within that category the range is fairly wide. In Ariadne and Neighbours the dramatis personae belong to the landownwning milieu, while high officialdom is unforgettably described in An Anonymous Story. The academic world dominates A Dreary Story, as do artistic circles The Butterfly and—on a pathetic provincial level—Doctor Startsev.
As these stories richly illustrate, Chekhov particularly liked to draw his heroes from the profession of medicine in which he himself had qualified but which he practised only occasionally (very rarely, incidentally, does he make a writer his hero). How little the mature Chekhov dealt in stereotypes, how rarely—if ever—he essentially repeated himself when creating new characters, the various doctors in the present volume richly illustrate. The saintly Dr. Dymov of The Butterfly becomes a victim of his own inability to assert himself and of his devotion to his profession. By contrast, Dr. Ragin of Ward Number Six is—ideologically speaking—a villain, or at least a non-approved figure. He is shown unavowedly espousing Tolstoy's doctrine of non-resistance to evil—a doctrine which Chekhov had briefly shared before rejecting it and embodying his changed attitude in this and other stories as well as in his correspondence. Between these two types falls Doctor Startsev, hero of the story of the same name, for he changes from hero to villain in the course of the narrative. But the fullest portrait of all—and the most remarkable of all Chekhov's innumerable fictional doctors—is the professor-hero whose litany of uninterrupted laments constitutes A Dreary Story. This is one of the most astonishing works ever penned by a Russian writer: on one level a hymn to the futility of existence, and yet a work which produces anything but the 'dreary' effect advertised in its title.