He could also observe it in his medical practice, which, as Leonid Grossman has written, “brought home to Chekhov with remarkable fullness the horror of life, the cruelty of nature, and the impotence of man.” Doctor-protagonists confront the same cruelty and impotence in scenes repeated throughout his work—with the brutality and indifference of human beings added to it, or simply making one with it.

Nikolai Stepanovich, the old professor in “A Boring Story,” likes reading the current French authors, because “not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don’t have.” Chekhov also preferred Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, who, along with Tolstoy, were his acknowledged masters. Zola’s notion of the writer-scientist and his concept of the “experimental novel” interested him, but formally speaking it was Maupassant who influenced him most. He learned much from Maupassant’s handling of the short story, in which artistic refinement is hidden behind an apparent casualness and superficiality As Leonid Grossman notes, Maupassant also “reinforced Chekhov’s convictions about the colorlessness of life, the horror of death, the animal nature of man. Life in its basic nature is much simpler, shallower, and more insignificant than we are accustomed to think it—here is the hard core of Maupassant’s work.” But the contradictions in Chekhov were more profound and more fruitful than in the French naturalists. He absorbed their “dark tenets,” but at the same time he rebelled against them with all his strength.

Andrei Yefimych, the doctor-protagonist of “Ward No. 6,” meditating one night on the “life cycle,” the naturalists’ final solution to the question of human immortality, thinks to himself: “Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad … To see one’s own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.” In a letter of April 16, 1897, Chekhov rejected Tolstoy’s idealist notion of immortality in almost the same terms: “He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individuality, my consciousness would merge with this mass—and I feel no need for this kind of immortality …”

Here we touch on the paradox that Lev Shestov finds at the heart of Chekhov’s work:

Idealism of every kind, whether open or concealed, roused feelings of intolerable bitterness in Chekhov. He found it more pleasant to listen to the merciless menaces of a downright materialist than to accept the dry-as-dust consolations of humanising idealism. An invincible power is in the world, crushing and crippling man—this is clear and even palpable. The least indiscretion, and the mightiest and the most insignificant alike fall victims to it. One can only deceive oneself about it as long as one knows of it only by hearsay But the man who has once been in the iron claws of necessity loses forever his taste for idealistic self-delusion.

And thus, says Shestov, “the only philosophy which Chekhov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism,” which says that “man, brought face to face with the laws of nature, must always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way” The human spirit can only submit. And yet in Chekhov “the submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy.”

It is worth pursuing Shestov’s argument, because it is easy to mistake his meaning. He calls Chekhov “the poet of hopelessness.” This sounds like the same old accusation of pessimism and resignation that is so often leveled at Chekhov. But Shestov means something very different.

Thus the real, the only hero of Chekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely no action left for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones … He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this “creation out of the void,” or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Chekhov. When he has stripped his hero of the last shred, when nothing is left for him but to beat his head against the wall, Chekhov begins to feel something like satisfaction, a strange fire lights in his burnt-out eyes, a fire which Mikhailovsky did not call “evil” in vain.

Shestov is right to state the paradox in the most extreme terms. Chekhov, who admired men of action, has no action left except to beat his head against the wall. It is hardly a scientific way to proceed. But then, readily as he acknowledged his debt to science, it is precisely science that has “robbed him of everything.” His only hope lies in utter hopelessness. Anything else would be a lie or a form of violence, a general idea or a utopia at gunpoint. And it is here, in this “void,” that Chekhov begins “seeking new paths.”

Like Hamlet, he would dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may at one moment blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark, but Chekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving … An inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all. It may be Chekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time.

That is how Chekhov formulates the question. In a conversation with Ivan Bunin, he mentioned that his own favorite among his stories was “The Student,” and wondered how people could call him a pessimist after that. The story is one of his shortest. It interweaves the student’s grim thoughts about poverty and hunger and the surrounding emptiness and darkness—“all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better”—with his sudden recollection of Peter’s denial of Christ. He tells the story to an old widow and her daughter, and they both begin to “weep bitterly,” as Peter wept after his betrayal. The student goes on his way.