Chekhov, Anton - Dmitri Chizhevsky (essay date 1960)

Dmitri Chizhevsky (essay date 1960)

SOURCE: Chizhevsky, Dmitri. “Chekhov in the Development of Russian Literature.” In Chekhov, A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Louis Jackson, pp. 49–61 Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1960, Chizhevsky expatiates Chekhov's place in the history of Russian literature.]

Chekhov still has no firm place in the history of Russian literature. Of course, one often ranks him among the “realists”; thus one is compelled for chronological reasons to place him alongside such epigones of realism as V. Korolenko and D. Mamin-Sibiryak. Or should one identify him with such representatives of the new realistic trends as Maxim Gorky? Or find a place for him in the ranks of the modernists and early symbolists? This kind of classifying of a literary artist in a definite literary group, naturally, is not the most important problem of...

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