SOURCE: Hahn, Beverly. “The Short Story—II.” In Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays, pp. 69–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Hahn investigates creative tension in Chekhov's stories.

Among the very finest stories of 1886 and 1887 are “Easter Eve” and the better-known “Enemies”. In their different ways they show Chekhov to be already a master of the short-story form. The limitations to which I have been pointing in the minor but serious stories up to this period—chiefly the over-dependence on a single landscape metaphor—are overcome here, and both stories make a positive value out of a creative tension now evident in Chekhov's artistic temperament. In “Misery”, the falling snow and the lights of the impersonal city, unheedful of Iona, insist imaginatively upon the transience of life and the loneliness of sorrow. That sense of things, and the images through which it is...