The Russian author Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) is among the major short-story writers and dramatists of modern times.

During the last half of the 19th century the old order in Russia was crumbling. Political institutions were out of line with actual developments, and the agrarian, aristocratic society was increasingly yielding to an urban bourgeoisie and a new capitalist class. Turgenev and Tolstoy, among other writers, had depicted the weakened social structure of the 1860s and 1870s; Dostoevsky had dramatically described the intellectual conflicts. Anton Chekhov, however, was the first to depict a world essentially without heroes and villains. A Chekhovian personage vacillates, often Hamlet-like, between what he should do and what he wants, meanwhile becoming ever more conscious of the wrongs he is helplessly suffering. Romantic illusion wars with disillusion. Time after time, the individual fails, almost fatalistically, but never without either discovering for himself or allowing the...