SOURCE: Rayfield, Donald. “Peasants.” In Understanding Chekhov, pp. 183–97. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Rayfield scrutinizes the peasant tales of Chekhov.

The narrator's chief preoccupation both in “The House with the Mezzanine” and “My Life” is with the degradation of the peasantry and the gulf between what the peasant should be, and is, as well as between the narrator and the peasant. Both narrators argue, with more or less sincerity, that civilisation in Russia will be worthless until the peasant has been liberated from want and can grow spiritually. Transferring the setting of The Wood Demon to the grimmer Muscovite countryside of Uncle Vania, Chekhov now showed the peasantry in stench, disease and degradation, and for the first time in his drama their sufferings become a background against which the private life of the main characters seems trivial. For the next three years, in Chekhov's...