Tchéhoff began his literary career very early. Already during the first years of his university studies--that is, in 1879, he began to write short humorous sketches (under the pseudonym of Tcheónte) for some weeklies. His talent developed rapidly; and the sympathy with which his first little volumes of short sketches was met in the Press, and the interest which the best Russian critics (especially Mikhailóvskiy) took in the young novelist, must have helped him to give a more serious turn to his creative genius. With every year the problems of life which he treated were deeper and more complicated, while the form he attained bore traces of an increasingly fine artistic finish. When Tchéhoff died last year, at the age of only forty-four, his talent had already reached its full maturity. His last production--a drama--contained such fine poetical touches, and such a mixture of poetical melancholy with strivings towards the joy of a well-filled life, that it would have seemed to open a new page in his creation if it were not known that consumption was rapidly undermining his life. No one has ever succeeded, as Tchéhoff has, in representing the failures of human nature in our present civilisation, and especially the failure, the bankruptcy of the educated man in the face of the all-invading meanness of everyday life. This defeat of the “intellectual” he has rendered with a wonderful force, variety, and impressiveness. And there lies the distinctive feature of his talent. When you read the sketches and the stories of Tchéhoff in chronological succession, you see first an author full of the most exuberant vitality and youthful fun. The stories are, as a rule, very short; many of them cover only three or four pages; but they are full of the most infecting merriment. Some of them are mere farces; but you cannot help laughing in the heartiest way, because even the most ludicrous and impossible ones are written with an inimitable charm. And then, gradually, amidst that same fun, comes a touch of heartless vulgarity on the part of some of the actors in the story, and you feel how the author’s heart throbs with pain. Slowly, gradually, this note becomes more frequent; it claims more and more attention; it ceases to be accidental, it becomes organic--till at last, in every story, in every novel, it stifles everything else. It may be the reckless heartlessness of a young man who, “for fun,” will make a girl believe that she is loved, or the heartlessness and absence of the most ordinary humanitarian feeling in the family of an old professor--it is always the same note of heartlessness and meanness which resounds, the same absence of the more refined human feelings, or, still worse--the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of “the intellectual.”