Anton Chekhov - Research Paper Example

ANTON CHEKOV Anton Chekov was one of the great in Russian literature. He was very famous for his short, quiet stories that said so much about life. He also managed in his short life to write several plays, some of which had a better reception than other. Nevertheless, he has come to be seen as one of Russia’s great contributions to world literature, and his style is sometimes said to be inherited by Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who also writes similarly quiet but penetrating short stories about ordinary people in extraordinary moments.

In this assignment I will look at Chekov’s biography and then talk more about his contributions to literature. Chekov was born in 1860 in southern Russia and lived in a difficult family. Some say his father, who was physically abusive, became the main influence on later characters who were portrayed as hypocrites.1 Chekov did well in school and studied to become a physician. But a part of him wanted to write too, so he started to do this for a little money. He was recognized and people began to like his work and he took a more experimental approach to literature with this new confidence.

He was generally a modest man who was concerned with social issues. For several years he was concerned about prison reform. He even traveled over land a great distant to the island of Sakhalin off the coast of eastern Siberia where he interviewed prisoners about the conditions they lived under. Prisons in Russia have always been a problem, as seen in later years in the writer Solzhenitsyn work about the Russian gulags and the Siberian exiles. For Chekov this was all important to the Russian soul.

He covered many topics with aplomb and brought a clinical eye to the social relations he witnessed throughout his native land. When he died in 1904 he was praised all over Russia and statues were erected to him and prizes named after him. Two of Chekov’s most important contributions or innovations for contemporary literature are his use of stream-of-consciousness writing and also his refusal to declare a moral conclusion at the end of his stories, allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion.

In the first case, Chekov would often take the reader directly into the head of the character to show what they were really thinking about—often details not directly relevant to the plot or narrative pacing—and also how they saw and judged the things around them. This technique later became very popular with writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who used it to make a huge contribution to 20th century literature. The second technique also became very popular. In the past, stories were used to illustrate moral dilemmas and what people should do when face with them.

Chekov decided to do something different. He thought that literature should pose difficult problems and that it wasn’t the job of a writer to ask easy questions or solve easy issues—instead it was the job of a great writer to challenge people and make them examine the lives they were leading and the way people were living all around them in their time. Indeed, Chekov instead shows us how complex life really is, how hard it is to come to a decision about anything human. Work consultedRayfield, Donald.

Anton Chekhov: A Life. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1998.Wood, James. What Chekhov Meant by Life, in The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief. London: Pimlico, 2000.