Anton Pavlovich Chekhov embodies a great figure in the history of Russian literature. Tragic and satirical, he revealed, sometimes with touching tenderness and sometimes with a humorous disposition, the darkest and most sensitive corners of the human soul. He exposed, sometimes with gentle fingers, sometimes with mockery, the horrific aspects of life, social wounds, and masked wretchedness. His work portrays pre-revolutionary Russia not in grand compositions like Tolstoy, but in countless small images, revealing documents of a harsh era. In Tolstoy, we see a broad view of life, like an eye that gazes from afar. In Chekhov, on the contrary, we discern the anatomist of everyday life, the observer who delves into alleys and courtyards, the creator who holds the heart of man in his palm.
Chekhov's life was a path of suffering. He was born into serfdom and died at the age of 44 from tuberculosis. In the village where he was born, on the steppe that stretches above the Azov Sea, little Antosha was a simple "soul," a number, a possession of the estate. The abolition of serfdom came a year later, in 1861. Chekhov took his first steps in that nightmarish world that Nikolai Gogol brings to life in the journey of Chichikov.
"I did not live the life of a child," Chekhov recounts. His early years passed in the terrible ferment of intellectual upheavals, in the bustling movement of the masses in the vast country with its primitive economy. With the reform of Alexander II, the landowners could no longer sell or gamble away their "souls." But the land remained in the same hands, and impoverishment took a new path. With the development of industry in the urban centers, there began the mass migration of the hungry to the major Russian cities. From the swamps of Taganrog, Chekhov's family found themselves in Moscow. The trial continued in a different form. Parents and children slept in cramped quarters, emaciated from hunger, blackened by the snow. Antosha is now twenty years old and has been soaked in the most depressing experience. From this nightmarish apprenticeship, he will soon reap the fruits of his work as a great creator.
He lived intensely the impoverished life of rural Russia, the ignorance and stagnation of the peasantry, and witnessed up close the tragedies of the lives of the peasants. He grew up amidst decay, in an era when serfdom had been abolished, but not the serfs. In Moscow, he felt on his own body the anxiety of the masses, the hunger and despair in the dark narrow streets. In his father's grocery store, he saw people up close, and it was there that he distinguished the characters he would later paint in his immortal stories.