The history--that is, the philosophical history--of a national literature is sure to reveal the close relation subsisting between the significant social movements of that nation and its literature. Those who think lightly of fiction as a force in a people’s life fail to recognize that in the large it is something more than a mirror of the times, since worthy fiction must be an expression--and that the most vivid possible--of the ideals, the faiths, the scepticisms, the struggles, the foibles, the prejudices, the occupations light and serious, and, chiefly, the social ferment, of the era it represents, because out of, and not merely during, that era its fiction was born. While really no more applicable to Russia than to any other nation, this representative quality of literature is more startlingly apparent in Slavic literature than in any other. During the period just preceding 1880, the “back to the people” movement was at its height. Tolstoi’s life among his peasants inspired many to imitation--but that is a story by itself. Enough to note here that the movement broke down of its own weight, as all social movements must which think to fill old skins with new wine. And Anton Pavlovich Chekhov came to a full though depressing inheritance of the stunned discouragement characteristic of the early eighties. In common with his entire school, Chekhov’s philosophy embraced three paramount tenets: The “system” in Russia is productive of evil, and evil only; there is no present hope of better things; but for the future, such hope as may gestate unborn can come to birth only by the Russian people’s facing the full truth honestly and fearlessly. Here is a social philosophy which is something more than pessimism, for while it believes that things must be worse before they can be better, it neither denies nor predicts the coming of that meliorated day. The true basis of Russian realism is thus seen to differ from the French: French realism is sensational and of the senses; that of Russia is intellectual and largely for a patriotic purpose. * * * * * Chekhov was a south-Russian, born January 17, 1860, in Taganrog, a seaport on an arm of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don. His father was a serf, whose ambition and ability led him early to buy his freedom and provide for the education of his four children. Anton passed through the local college and was graduated from the school of medicine at Moscow, but more than his year as a hospital interne, and a volunteer service during an epidemic of cholera, he did not practise.