We hear it at the end of “Gusev,” where an old soldier dies at sea and his body is tossed overboard with hardly more ceremony than if he were a dead fish, and suddenly Chekhov summons a full orcestra to describe the perfect majesty of sunset as it impassively offers its benediction on the dead soldier. It is a passage very close in feeling and texture to the concluding words of Melville’s Billy Budd, written in the same year. Such passages are marked by an intensity which betrays the author’s deepest feelings, and usually they come at the very end of a story with a sudden flowering into another and more permanent world, into another dispensation of time altogether. When Billy Budd is lifted into the rosy dawn light, he is utterly transformed, and his death is an intimation of immortality: he becomes the accomplice of the serene and beautiful heavens. So it is with the dead soldier in Chekhov’s story, as the indifferent heavens gaze down on him.

We know how the story “Gusev” came to him from a wonderful letter he wrote on his return from the Far East:

When we left Hong Kong our steamer began to roll. She was sailing without ballast, and sometimes she had a list of 38°, so that we were afraid she would capsize. I was not seasick, and this discovery came as a pleasant surprise. On the way to Singapore we threw two bodies into the sea. When you watch a dead man, wrapped in sailcloth, flying head over heals into the water, and when you realize that the sea is a couple of miles deep, you are overwhelmed with fear, and for some reason you begin to think that you, yourself, will die and be cast into the sea.

I remember very little about Singapore, for when we passed it I felt sad and was close to weeping. Then we arrived in Ceylon, and Ceylon was Paradise, and here I traveled more than seventy miles by train and had my fill of palm groves and bronze-hued women. When I have children I’ll say to them, not without pride: “You sons of dogs, in my day I made love to a dark-eyed Indian girl, and where? In a forest of coconut palms, in moonlight.” From Ceylon we sailed for thirteen days and nights without a single stop and grew dazed with boredom. I stand the heat well. The Red Sea is dismal. Looking at Mount Sinai, I was deeply moved.

The Lord’s earth is beautiful. Only one thing is not beautiful, and that is us. How little there is in us of justice and humility, and how poorly we understand the meaning of patriotism. A drunken, worn-out, good-for-nothing husband loves his wife and children, but what good is this love? The newspapers tell us we love our great country, but how does this love express itself? Instead of knowledge—immeasurable arrogance and conceit; instead of hard work—laziness and filth. There is no justice, and the conception of honor does not go beyond “the honor of the uniform,” a uniform which is too often seen in the prisoners’ dock. What is needed is work: everything else can go to the devil. The main thing is to be just, for if we are just all the rest will come of itself.

In this extraordinary letter written to his friend Suvorin, a man whom Lenin later characterized as “the running dog of the Tzar,” Chekhov came closer than ever again to defining his ultimate beliefs. His attitude toward life was poetic and practical, as a child is poetic and practical, but at the same time he spoke with a strange authority which came from his vast knowledge of suffering. Sometimes he seems to be talking like those old peasants who sit round the campfires in his stories, but his voice remained young and vibrant to the end.

His last years were spent at Yalta in the white house he built facing the sea. He had mellowed a little, and the stories tended to become longer and slower, as though he took even greater enjoyment in mulling them over, sipping them like wine. Now at last he could afford to write without any sense of being dogged by time. For fifteen years he had been dreaming of writing “The Bishop,” and in March 1901 he began writing it, but it was not finished until a year later. It is one of the most autobiographical of his stories, though he liked to say that it came about after he had seen a photograph of a certain Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky in a bookshop in Yalta. He bought the picture, made a few discreet inquiries about the bishop’s life, and sat down to write the story. But in fact the photograph was no more than the catalytic agent. In the portrait of the dying bishop he painted himself.

“The Bishop,” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and “The Bride” were all written in Yalta. There is no falling off of strength: there is the same calm, the same mastery, the same flickering gaiety.