Of all the contemporary Russian novelists A. P. Tchéhoff (1860-1904) was undoubtedly the most deeply original. It was not a mere originality of style. His style, like that of every great artist, bears of course the stamp of his personality; but he never tried to strike his readers with some style-effects of his own: he probably despised them, and he wrote with the same simplicity as Púshkin, Turguéneff and Tolstóy have written. Nor did he choose some special contents for his tales and novels, or appropriate to himself some special class of men. Few authors, on the contrary, have dealt with so wide a range of men and women, taken from all the layers, divisions and subdivisions of Russian society as Tchéhoff did. And with all that, as Tolstóy has remarked, Tchéhoff represents something of his own in art; he has struck a new vein, not only for Russian literature, but for literature altogether, and thus belongs to all nations. His nearest relative is Guy de Maupassant, but a certain family resemblance between the two writers exists only in a few of their short stories. The manner of Tchéhoff, and especially the mood in which all the sketches, the short novels, and the dramas of Tchéhoff are written, are entirely his own. And then, there is all the difference between the two writers which exists between contemporary France and Russia at that special period of development through which our country has been passing lately. The biography of Tchéhoff can be told in a few words. He was born in 1860, in South Russia, at Taganróg. His father was originally a serf, but he had apparently exceptional business capacities, and freed himself early in his life. To his son he gave a good education--first in the local gymnasium (college), and later on at the university of Moscow. “I did not know much about faculties at that time,” Tchéhoff wrote once in a short biographical note, “and I don’t well remember why I chose the medical faculty; but I never regretted that choice later on.” He did not become a medical practitioner; but a year’s work in a small village hospital near Moscow, and similar work later on, when he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district during the cholera epidemics of 1892, brought him into close contact with a wide world of men and women of all sorts and characters; and, as he himself has noticed, his acquaintance with natural sciences and with the scientific method of thought helped him a great deal in his subsequent literary work.