At the end Laptev, although he and Julia have lost their own child, has become a father – to his sister’s children, Lida and Sasha. This is part of his becoming a man, as is replacing his autocratic father at the head of the family business and taking over the reins.

As we have come to expect in Chekhov’s work, the secondary characters are drawn with carefully chosen, often devastating detail that ‘rubs the reader’s nose’ in reality. For example, there is the carefully noted fact that Panaurov’s second wife has the beginnings of a moustache. We learn that Laptev’s brother Fyodor is seriously ill, and that his flowery manner of speech and flippant manner hide a deep unhappiness; tellingly, it is Julia who consoles him when he breaks down. Yartsev is a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia; Chekhov first mocks his literary strivings – again the detail that he signs his articles with a single letter ‘Ya’ (‘I’) reads as ironical, a literary cliché – so that when we learn that his belief in science is matched by his optimism that ‘we’re on the threshold of some fantastic triumph’ we know to take it with a huge pinch of salt. Yartsev’s boosterism contrasts totally with Laptev’s feelings of resignation: ‘I feel as if our life’s over and that some dull half-life is just beginning.’ Such details might be multiplied many times over: what is important is that the reader becomes attuned to Chekhov’s carefully modulated irony.

However understated, and however much the reader has to look between the lines to discover it, Chekhov’s ultimate concern is spiritual. The crisis of faith that he documents may legitimately be seen as the theme of nineteenth-century Russian literature, as it grapples with the imported values of western culture and politics, and as the industrialization and westernization of the country led to a questioning and rejection of traditional religious values. It is precisely this crisis that is central to the story ‘Murder’. Here we see the journey of the murderer Yakov from a stifling and stultifying preoccupation with the form of religion that leads to the murder of his cousin, to a new faith – religion’s true spiritual content. Buried in the text are clues pointing back to two other key texts in Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (in Russian Besy) and Pushkin’s poem of the same name that Dostoyevsky used as an epigraph to his own work. Chekhov could rely on his readers’ knowledge of the previous works to evoke certain echoes. Essentially, Pushkin’s poem describes the situation of a young man who is lost in a snowstorm. Enough clues are built into the description of Matvey’s return to the inn to create a resonance between the poem and the story; this is then maintained by the repeated use of the word besy. In using Pushkin’s poem as an epigraph to his novel, Dostoyevsky had seized upon the latent potential of the poem to serve as a metaphor for the spiritual crisis of the young Russian lost in a world without faith, and document its consequences in terms of Stavrogin’s sexual debauchery and Pyotr Verkhovensky’s disdain for human life. The howling of the storm, that Pushkin had likened to the wailing of demons or devils, thus assumes an enormous symbolic significance.

At the same time, there are crucial differences between Chekhov’s story and the two preceding texts. In part, they are class differences. Chekhov describes, not the milieu of a young Russian officer who has hired a coach, nor that of the provincial aristocracy we find in Dostoyevsky’s story, but rather the world of the impoverished innkeeper who has been displaced by the advent of the railway, his cousin, the victim of an industrial accident, and the owner of a railway buffet who has fallen on hard times. There is a gritty reality to Chekhov’s descriptions of a milieu he knew only too well. Moreover, the last part of the story takes place on Sakhalin Island and is the direct result of his observations of the life of the prisoners there. Chekhov simply describes this reality – unsentimentally, with an eye to the telling detail, without any attempt to sugar the pill and gloss over his characters’ faults. Ironically, in the slight format of a short story, he achieves something that eluded Dostoyevsky in vastly organized novel after novel (e.g. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) – namely a convincing description of the spiritual renewal of one man. One might call this the holy grail of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

The topography of Chekhov’s work is largely located in two areas of Russia. The first of these is the south of Russia, initially the southern steppe around the town of Taganrog, where he was born and grew up; typical steppe landscapes with their two dominant features – the coal mine and the cherry orchard – are found in numerous works, not only of his early period. In the last years of his life the advanced state of his tuberculosis forced him to return south to seek a milder climate, this time in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, but even before that Crimean landscapes began to occur in his work (e.g. in the final episode of ‘The Black Monk’). The second region of Russia that figures largely in his work is Moscow, where he moved in 1879. His Muscovite experiences give rise to the many sketches of the country estates around that city and their denizens, the impoverished gentry, and also, of course, to the different areas in the city itself, as in ‘Three Years’. Chekhov did not speak any foreign language fluently, and only went abroad to Western Europe (Italy and France) for the first time in early 1891, so that foreign scenes are almost totally absent from his work. The story ‘Ariadna’ is an exception; evidently the scenes that take place in Italy and the Adriatic coast were based on experiences gained during his 1891 trip.