SOURCE: Derman, A. “Structural Features in Čexov's Poetics¹.” In Anton Čexov as a Master of Story-Writing, edited by Leo Hulanicki and David Savignac, pp. 107–18. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton & Co. B. V., 1976.

In the following essay, originally published in 1959, Derman dilates upon Chekhov's technique for a story's beginning and ending.

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Čexov occupies one of the highest places among those literary artists who in their work not only use the resources allowed by scholarship—they all use them, even those who deny that they resort to them and state that they rely exclusively on their own intuition—but also among those who repeatedly express the principle of creative cooperation between the artist and the scholar …

There is something scholarly in his approach to the structure of a work; he divided it into distinct stages, and for each of them he had carefully reasoned methods for the creative embodiment of...