Tolstoy’s hero is a prominent civil servant, and no reader is particularly surprised that he is to find, as he dies in agony, that his life is meaningless. Chekhov’s hero represents the summit of what is attainable to a human being. If Nikolay Stepanovich, the world authority on medicine, is in thrall to existential despair, what hope is there for anyone? Tolstoy consoles his dying man with a peasant lad to nurse him compassionately and a vision of light at the end of a black sack into which he is being sucked. There are no compassionate peasants or lights at the end of the tunnel in ‘A Dreary Story’.

In technique, too, introspection and melancholy have moved Chekhov to a new plane: the interaction of thunderstorm and characters’ moods and behaviour in ‘A Dreary Story’ has none of the obvious Romantic pathetic fallacy – it is an ironic, moving interaction of natural forces and human mood, with nothing of the moral metaphorical import of ‘The Name-day Party’. For the first time, too, Chekhov has hit on a method of first-person narrative that reveals to the reader more than it appears to reveal to the narrator. The all-knowing Nikolay Stepanovich, noting every foible of the family and friends he is alienated from, is not aware that he is in love with his ward, the unhappy actress Katya, from and to whom he refuses all consolation. Here, too, for the first time in Chekhov, we have the hallmark of the mature work – the blurring of the boundary between protagonist and author. There is a distance between the hero–narrator, through whom we see all the rest of the action, and the silent, ubiquitous authorial presence, which has the empathy of an actor for his role. Nikolay Stepanovich expresses hundreds of opinions, usually contemptuous, on his postgraduate students, the city of Kharkov, Brahms, the theatre, fame, the family, Russian literature. Many are to recur in Chekhov’s later work, to acquire an authorial stamp, but for the first time in Chekhov’s work we can no longer mark the frontier between the author and the protagonist: yet another major conventional orienteering aid for the reader has been abolished, and we are deprived of our ability to pass judgement.

The depression of 1889 that found expression in this morbidly ironic if heroic work was only deepened by the increasing boldness of Russia’s critical rabble, who disapproved of Chekhov’s distancing himself from Tolstoyan certainties while adopting a Tolstoyan type of plot. Some critics talked of plagiarism, others of ‘unprincipledness’. The more understandable failure of The Wood Demon added humiliation: Chekhov was told by the distinguished actor Lensky to abandon the theatre since he did not even know the alphabet of drama composition.

The old conflict between the doctor and the writer was renewed, and Chekhov decided on a response which might have been suicidal, both literally and artistically: in spring 1890 he set off on a journey across the freezing damp of Siberia to the penal colony of the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s Devil’s Island and Botany Bay all in one, to investigate the conditions of the prisoners there. The primary motive was certainly to demonstrate that he had more compassion for suffering humanity than any of the critics who accused him of indifference, of refusing solutions to the problems raised; the journey was also a flight from the inordinate demands of relatives, friends and mistresses; lastly, it was an emulation of heroism, notably of the conquistador–explorer, discoverer of the wild horse, Nikolay Przhevalsky, who had died in Central Asia and whose obituary Chekhov had just written, in the form of an anonymous panegyric.

The dividing line between Chekhov’s early and mature work is not a neat fracture point: ‘A Dreary Story’ has features of the mature work, just as the very last pieces take up themes, scenery and mood of the early work. If there is a temporal and spatial cut-off point, then the journey to Sakhalin marks it. Some elements disappear for ever from Chekhov’s works. First, there are now very few saints, heroes, villains, monsters. Evil resides not in single human beings, or even in families, but in a system. It was the prison colony, prisoners and guards, who made a collective evil: the most horrific psychopath, murderer or hangman was as an individual the usual mix of the sympathetic and horrible. The reluctance to judge and categorize becomes absolute in Chekhov’s work after Sakhalin. Secondly, a poetic element that reminded Russian readers of the elegies of Pushkin and the metaphysical lyrics of Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73), Russia’s most powerful if least prolific lyrical poet, enters Chekhov’s works. The absolute certainty of death forces characters to look at life with disbelief and even with renewed capacity for enjoyment.

A year spent abroad also gave Chekhov the benefits of a sabbatical. Very little of his work refers to, let alone is set in, Siberia or Sakhalin. (Likewise, for all his frequent and prolonged visits to St Petersburg, Chekhov only once set a story there.) On his return to Russia Chekhov did not settle down; the following spring he set off with the Suvorins on his first visit to Western Europe (another setting which he uses very rarely, despite four further visits, including almost an entire year spent in Nice). Not until summer 1891 did he suddenly revert to frenzied work, simultaneously writing The Island of Sakhalin, his largely unrecognized magnum opus, one of his longest, most ambitious stories, ‘The Duel’, and a number of explosive shorter stories.

The obsession with death in Chekhov’s work reaches its apogee in a story which appears at first sight to be just a fictionalized account of observations on his long sea journey, as he returned with a pet mongoose from Sakhalin to Odessa. The ship was carrying largely soldiers and guards returning from duty in the prison colony. One of them dies and the body is thrown to the sharks in the Indian Ocean. The tubercular man’s last moments and the extraordinary green light that suffuses the sky as his body goes overboard, however, makes ‘Gusev’ a work that, once read, cannot be forgotten. The green light (in fact, the colour green) is to permeate all Chekhov’s work, right until Natasha’s dress in Three Sisters, as a horrible omen of death.

The frantic summer spent in a magnificent country house at Bogimovo is perpetuated in many later Chekhov stories (for example, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’). The mansion still stands but is now a mental hospital for survivors of shellshock in World War II – as though Ward No. 6 had come back into reality – and its gardens are now a pig farm.