SOURCE: Golubkov, V. V. “Čexov's Lyrico-Dramatic Stories.¹” In Anton Čexov as a Master of Story-Writing, edited by Leo Hulanicki and David Savignac, pp. 135–67. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton & Co. B. V., 1976.

In the following essay, originally published in 1958, Golubkov inspects Chekhov's social consciousness, which continued to maturate throughout his life, and the lyricism so prevalent in his short fiction.

Remember that those writers whom we call immortal or simply good and who intoxicate us have one highly important feature in common: they go somewhere and beckon you, and you sense, not with your intellect, but with all your being, that they have some goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father which had a reason for coming and disturbing his imagination … The best of these writers are true to life and they present life as it is, but since their every line is saturated with the awareness of a...