SOURCE: Winner, Thomas. “Early Social Stories.” In Chekhov and His Prose, pp. 81–8. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966.

In the following essay, Winner dilates upon Chekhov's serious stories of the 1890s.

In 1890, after Chekhov's visit to the Russian penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, he became increasingly concerned with a search for a more clearly defined world view and for an answer to the question of the moral responsibility of the writer. He also began to think more seriously of social problems, and his writings voiced a degree of social criticism previously unknown in his work. His observation of the sharp cleavages in Russian society brought about his final disenchantment with the Tolstoyan idealization of peasant life which had briefly attracted him. The only stories of 1890, “The Thieves” (Vory) and “Gusev,” both completed after the return from his voyage to Sakhalin in 1890, as well as “Peasant Wives...