The boy finally arrives in Kiev and we have no hint of what will happen, just as we have only odd hints of why it has happened in the first place. Delight at the story in Suvorin’s circle turned to frustration: a sequel was suggested – one in which little Yegorushka would become a suicidal adolescent, like Suvorin’s third son. Critics could not see in ‘The Steppe’ the thread holding together a succession of literary pearls – the Jewish innkeeper scene, fishing for crayfish, the thunderstorm – and felt betrayed.

Perhaps it is in response to the strong prejudice in the Russian reader that literature should make him not just happier, but elevated and enlightened, that after ‘The Steppe’ we find the influence of Tolstoy as a writer becoming very marked in Chekhov’s work. Undoubtedly, the success of ‘The Steppe’ made Chekhov secure from poverty or pressure: in the sixteen years left to him he wrote far less than in the previous seven, and he wrote very little comic work, and almost nothing that he did not want to write. But there was a catch in this freedom: public expectations brought his prose closer to the structures and themes that Tolstoy, who was after all the only novelist of genius to have survived into the mid 1880s, had made a norm.

Public recognition also led Chekhov into the theatre – the history of the Russian theatre is made by writers, with the exception only of Griboyedov and Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–86), the almost single-handed creator of the Russian tragic repertoire, who were not professional playwrights but poets or novelists who, after proving themselves masters, then ventured, like fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, into the theatre. Had Chekhov perished in 1890, it is unlikely that there would have been many performances of Ivanov let alone of The Wood Demon. If Ivanov has merit, it is in the way that Chekhov reworks many characters, for example the dispossessed Jew, the morally bankrupt intellectual landowner, from prose fiction into drama, and in the way the play parodies and thus attacks Suvorin’s successful but anti-semitic play Tatyana Repina. The Wood Demon of 1889 is all the more disastrous as a play for taking the material of ‘A Dreary Story’ and of ‘Panpipes’ and failing to make it work as theatre. Two ignoble factors explain Chekhov’s first venture into drama: firstly, a virulent love–hate of the theatre, its repertoire and denizens – he was drawn to actresses yet felt them to be ‘Machiavellis in skirts’; secondly, because through the theatre a Russian writer established an audience and readership in circles, aristocratic and provincial, that did not read the ‘thick monthlies’; thirdly, because of the highly efficient Russian Society of Playwrights and Composers, even a moderately successful play in Russia was a pension – authors collected up to ten per cent of the gross box office for every performance in any town. Over the next two decades, Ivanov thus earned Chekhov more than all the stories he was to write.

Great Chekhovian theatre was only to arise out of more and more mischievous attempts to upset the conventions of the Russian stage – and out of the painful symbiosis that Chekhovian drama would establish with Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s revolutionary Moscow Art Theatre. In this early period, Ivanov, The Wood Demon and the vaudevilles brought Chekhov only an income: literary esteem could come only as his prose took on more novel-like forms.

Tolstoy weighs somewhat heavily on a number of stories of the mid eighties. Not that Tolstoy’s use of language affected Chekhov – his own copy of War and Peace is scored with red underlinings marking disapproval of Tolstoy’s repeated metaphors and sermonizing syntax: one character in Chekhov is to remark that Tolstoy writes with a plasterer’s trowel, not a painter’s brush. Sometimes, however, Chekhov makes an interesting experiment out of Tolstoyanism: he preaches neither ‘simplification’ nor ‘non-resistance to evil’, but explores the morass into which honest people stray when they try to put these precepts into practice. Tolstoyanism shows its mark in the technique of seeking the concrete reality behind an abstraction or a pretended virtue, to look for hypocrisy and lies in the words of the characters and to show the reader what is really happening by monitoring the protagonists’ unconscious body language and internal stream of consciousness. Tolstoyan influence can also be seen in Chekhov’s temporary adoption of a secure judgemental authorial stance.

The best of these Tolstoyan works is probably ‘The Name-day Party’ – it is one of the half-dozen Chekhov works which Katherine Mansfield used as models to evolve her own prose (her The Garden Party is likewise a party spoiled by a catastrophe which the celebrants do everything to suppress). ‘The Name-day Party’ punishes hero and heroine, hosts who have hidden their own misapprehensions and neglected their moral duty in order to impress their guests, with a dramatically disastrous ending; it is full of allusions to Anna Karenina in the hero’s hay making, the worried pregnant heroine’s seeking solace from a peasant, in the parallel of a gathering thunderstorm and miscarriage.

Undergoing Tolstoy’s influence was as much a process of inoculation as were Chekhov’s early years spent singing in church: the essential aesthetic element remained, the ideology evaporated. In a year or two the initial influence is assimilated and even to a certain extent rejected. ‘A Dreary Story’ has Tolstoyan allusions, Tolstoyan parallels, but is not Tolstoyan. Common sense, an aesthetic sensing of the limits between art and philosophy, a doctor’s confidence in science and the unknowability of absolute right and wrong have overcome the temptation to pontificate. Perhaps the key element in Chekhov’s medical training was a conviction that only those qualified in a profession were competent to practise it. Chekhov abjures moralizing because he is not a bishop and philosophizing because he is not a philosopher. Unlike Tolstoy, he is convinced that it is not for the writer to ‘show the paths to paradise’.

In the course of 1888 and 1889 Chekhov’s mood was clouded by serious tragedy: the moral collapse of his brother Nikolay was followed by a physical one, and in summer 1889 Nikolay had to be nursed (mainly by Chekhov’s eldest brother Alexander) as he lay dying of tuberculosis, typhoid and drug addiction. Chekhov had seen two grandparents, several uncles and an aunt die of ‘the white plague’; he, too, had haemorrhages, fevers and coughs and could estimate with fair exactitude his own shortened lifespan. The death of Nikolay brings a despair and depression into his work. Helplessness in the face of death was to expel from Chekhov the last assumptions of certainty or immortality. If ‘The Steppe’, which celebrates a lost primeval natural world, is a masterpiece, then ‘A Dreary Story’, which mourns the loss of all meaning in life, transcends anything that was written by Chekhov’s contemporaries in Russia or Western Europe. It is not just a response to the great classics, it is a riposte to them.

One key element in the first-person narrative is that the hero, who has no surname, is a generally recognized hero: a professor of medicine. If there was one idol generally accepted by all ranks and ideological groups in Russia, it was the new generation of Russian medical scientists. Nikolay Stepanovich, who narrates his own last months, in many ways resembles the renowned surgeon, Professor Botkin, who was known to be dying of a liver cancer he himself refused to diagnose. The Tolstoy work which ‘A Dreary Story’ seeks to supersede is The Death of Ivan Ilich.