Man in a case. Chekhov A.

“Chekhov is Pushkin in prose. This is how in Pushkin’s poems everyone can find a response to their personal experience, everyone can find the same response in Chekhov’s stories, ”Leo Tolstoy responded about the works of his younger contemporary. The Chekhov art world, like a mosaic, consists of individual paintings and situations, from various manifestations of human characters, sometimes unexpected, sometimes paradoxical. At the same time, we can hardly find “pure” paints with Chekhov, an openly expressed author’s position: “The artist should not be a judge of his characters and what they are talking about, but only an impartial witness,” the writer formulated his creative credo. It is often difficult for his works to give an unambiguous interpretation: the usual evaluative categories (ideological, social, psychological) are not that they are not applicable, but not absolute. “You can cry and wall on the stories, you can suffer at the same time with your heroes, but, I believe, you need to do this so that the reader does not notice. The more objective, the stronger the impression is, ”the words from Chekhov’s letter could be put an epigraph to this collection, in which the works of 1886-1902 are printed.