A paragraph, a phrase, a sentence, sometimes only a word, has the effect of raising the story to another plane, one which we had never suspected and could hardly have hoped for. With that word, that paragraph, Chekhov isolates a fragment of experience and casts such a blinding light on it that the rest of the story shines in its light.

Chekhov was a conscious artist from the beginning. It amused him to say that he wrote easily, but the evidence of the surviving manuscripts suggests that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending, his quick mind working hurriedly to destroy any impression of speed. A few sketches and quips written in 1883 and 1884 when he was taking his final medical examinations seem to have been dashed off in a few minutes, but generally his stories are carefully worked over. “At the Post Office,” which has almost nothing to do with a post office, is a devilishly cunning evocation of an entire social landscape in two startling pages. There is not a word too many. Those odd and wonderful creatures attending the funeral feast are outrageously funny in the same way that the government clerk is funny: they are grotesque, but they are also desperately human. These stories written while he was studying at Moscow University are often dismissed as juvenilia, and until recently they were rarely included in collections of his works. But Chekhov was not a writer who developed in a normal tentative fashion. From “The Little Apples” onward we are aware of a constant and steady power, and a mind already formed. The light does not flicker or flare up: it is strong from the beginning.

Yet sometimes it happened that he produced in a single year so many stories of great and undeniable brilliance that he gives the impression of a man tapping unsuspected sources of strength. 1885 was the annus mirabilis. In that year he produced at least four masterpieces—“The Huntsman,” “The Malefactor,” “A Dead Body,” and “Sergeant Prishibeyev.” “The Huntsman” simply tells the story of a meeting along a forest pathway of a man and the wife he had discarded long ago. The man is sketched in lightly. His shoulders, his red shirt, his patched trousers, the white cap perched jauntily on the back of his head—this is all we are told, but it is enough. The woman is sketched in even more lightly. She is a pale peasant woman of thirty with a sickle in her hand. In a few pages the whole absurd, lamentable history of these people is revealed: the indifference of the husband, the yearning of the wife, the infinite spaces which separate them even when they are standing together. The wife is intoxicated with joy at the sight of her husband. In describing her happiness, Chekhov adds the simple sentence which is like the moment of truth, illuminating all that has gone before and all that comes afterward—Ashamed of her happiness, she hid her smiles with her hand. It is with such simple means that he succeeds in conveying a whole character. He gives us no indication of what she looked like, or what she was wearing, or what gestures she made. The color of her eyes and her hair are never mentioned. He is utterly uninterested in all the details of her physical appearance; instead, he is able to suggest the quivering life within her, and her human grandeur. At the end the husband thrusts a crumpled ruble in her hand and wanders down the forest path until his white cap is lost among the green of the trees.

Chekhov uses an astonishing economy of means. It is the same in “The Malefactor,” where the peasant Denis Grigoryev is put on trial for stealing nuts from railroad ties to use as sinkers for his fishing lines. Clearly the peasant has endangered the lives of hundread of people traveling on the trains. Chekhov tells the story without taking sides, amused by the confrontation of the baffled peasant and the armed might of justice, uninterested as always in the political implications of his stories. Gorky relates that a lawyer made a special visit to Chekhov to determine whether Denis Grigoryev was guilty or innocent in the eyes of his creator. The lawyer made a long speech about the necessity of punishing those who damaged state property and asked Chekhov what he would have done to the prisoner if he were the judge.

“I would have acquitted him,” Chekhov replied.