He probes the human till he reaches the animal, and so, as in the case of Vronsky's mare, Frou-frou, he probes the animal till he reaches the human. He brings the likeness of God to the image of the beast.
There are in Tolstoy's books no heroes, no characters, no personalities ... and hence there is no tragedy, no catastrophe, no redeeming horror, no redeeming laughter. The principals are all clever, honourable, good, simple, naïve or kindly, yet we never feel at home with them. There is always present that feeling with us that he lacks spiritual liberty, as Turgenev said. It is due entirely to his too great sense of the body, too little sense of the spirit.
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TCHEHOV (1860-1904)
Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupassant is to French, but he has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with the middle classes, minor officials and the professional classes. Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like "ennui," "greyness," and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed playing vint.
Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had sunk back into torpor: the disease of Oblòmovism had a firm grip of them.
He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a good education, finishing at the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing, which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year in artistry.
His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life, especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the all-pervading meanness of everyday life.