Tchekov’s stories deal for the greater part with the middle classes, the minor landed gentry, the minor officials, and the professional classes. Tolstoy is reported to have said that Tchekov was a photographer, a very talented photographer, it is true, but still only a photographer. But Tchekov has one quality which is difficult to find among photographers, and that is humour. His stories are frequently deliciously droll. They are also often full of pathos, and they invariably possess the peculiarly Russian quality of simplicity and unaffectedness. He never underlines his effects, he never nudges the reader’s elbow. Yet there is a certain amount of truth in Tolstoy’s criticism. Tchekov does not paint with the great sweeping brush of a Velasquez, his stories have not the great broad colouring of Maupassant, they are like mezzotints; and in some ways they resemble the new triumphs of the latest developments of artistic photography in subtle effects of light and shade, in delicate tones and half-tones, in elusive play of atmosphere. Apart from its artistic merits or defects, Tchekov’s work is historically important and interesting. Tchekov represents the extreme period of stagnation in Russian life and literature. This epoch succeeded to a period of comparative activity following after the Russo-Turkish war. For in Russian history one will find that every war has been followed by a movement, a renascence in ideas, in political aspirations, and in literature. Tchekov’s work represents the reaction of flatness subsequent to a transitory ebullition of activity; it deals with the very class of men which naturally hankers for political activity, but which in Tchekov’s time was as naturally debarred from it. The result was that the aspirations of these people beat their grey wings ineffectually in a vacuum. The middle class being highly educated, and, if anything, over-educated, aspiring towards political freedom, and finding its aspirations to be futile, did one of two things. It either moped, or it made the best of it. The moping sometimes expressed itself in political assassination; making the best of it meant, as a general rule, dismissing the matter from the mind, and playing vindt. Half the middle class in Russia, a man once said to me, has run to seed in playing vindt. But what else was there to do?