SOURCE: Vinogradov, V. V. “On Čexov's Style.¹” In Anton Čexov as a Master of Story-Writing, edited by Leo Hulanicki and David Savignac, pp. 169–84. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton & Co. B. V., 1976.

In the following essay, originally published in 1963, Vinogradov remarks upon speech characterization in Chekhov's short stories.

In Čexov, the devices of socio-professional speech characterization reached great depth and stylistic subtlety.² Commenting on the style of A. M. Fedorov's play An Ordinary Woman, he wrote the following in a letter to the author: “Volodja is good … but, he should be a mechanic or have been one. Then such expressions as ‘The steam is released’, and ‘The wheels will start to move now’, will not be empty, but will flow, as it were, from a depth.”³

It is obvious that even in a work of artistic realism there is no complete and direct correlation between the literary reproduction of...