SOURCE: Lynd, Robert. “Tchehov: The Perfect Story-Teller.” In Old and New Masters, pp. 171–77. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919.

In the following essay, Lynd discusses Chekhov's talent for portraying ordinary people as the basis of a tragic realism.

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the rivals of the god of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, no doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.

Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is Tchehov. He is so obviously not a god. He does not deliver messages to us from the mountaintop...