the first quarter of the nineteenth century that it attempted to withdraw from the course of European progress, and to find a national path instead. The marvellous Dostoiévsky is always exotic to us, so (in a less degree, as his genius was less) is Turgéniev, so is Ostróvsky the dramatist, so are all the Russian authors of the middle and later nineteenth century, until Sáltikov, the satirist, and Chéhov. Griboyédov’s comedy Woe from Wit (1824), recently translated into English under the title “The Misfortune of Being Clever,” was the last of the early Russo-European masterpieces. The reader feels it might have been written less than twenty years ago; in the strict sense of literary chronology, it actually was written twenty years ago.
The function of Anton Pávlovich Chéhov—this transliteration has been preferred to the less correct forms, “Tschekhoff,” “Tchekhof,” “Chekhof,” etc.—has been to pioneer the return of Russian literature into the normal path of European civilization. He was born in 1860, at Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf and the son of a grocer. He was taught Greek at a church school and then
