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have come to know well. Getting to know a character can be a challenge in the short narrative form. In the newspaper sketches Chekhov wrote for a living in the early 1880s, he was often limited to a per-story length of one hundred lines. In very short compass, how might a writer deepen and thicken an environment so that meaningful choice, genuine accident, and the wisdom (or folly) of other lives can be experienced through it?

One means for adding dimensions to a work of slender compass is to evoke earlier, familiar literary worlds and fictive characters. The young Dostoevsky did this brilliantly with Gogol, and Chekhov often avails himself of this strategy. But mere isolated interjections tend to be ironic or unkind. In The Duel, for example, Layevsky is reminded of Anna Karenina’s dislike of her husband’s ears at just the moment when the white neck and curls of his own mistress are getting on his nerves. Such passing references make their point – both about Anna and about Layevsky’s lazy use of literary images for self-justification – but overall, Chekhov seeks to communicate on a plane more durable than ridicule. He wishes to examine other ways of adjusting to reality. For Chekhov is not so much a “realist” as he is an accepter of reality. His much discussed “comedic” quality probably originates here. Thus he gives us the genuine tragic accidents – “Enemies,” “The Name-day Party,” tragedies of the failure to heal or cure – and then the false tragedies, which are in fact comedic. These are situations felt as tragic by their indolent or self-pitying participants who cannot (or will not) act to change their situation, although they are free to do so. From Chekhov’s correspondence, we know that he considered such laziness to be a major vice of his age, and if his dramas were indeed the comedies he called them, it was because they built their plots out of this vice. Chekhov might have been drawn to recast Anna Karenina in just this direction, because the one thing that this tragic Tolstoyan heroine refused to do was to adjust to the reality that her own actions had brought about. By the 1880s, Anna Karenina was already an “infidelity stereotype.” The briefest reference to a plot detail (black unruly curls, meeting a future lover at a ball, squinting or screwing up one’s eyes when lying to oneself, prominent jutting ears, trains, or simply the name “Anna”) invokes the whole. Chekhov rewrote that whole several times, each time in a different key.

In the 1886 story “A Calamity,” a young woman with a sluggish, preoccupied husband is being courted passionately by a neighboring lawyer, Ilyin. He is ashamed of his behavior but attractive to her because of it. Trains are prominent

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in the story – some train whistle is always interrupting his entreaties – but not as a tragic motif. The story ends as the heroine is rushing out the door to a tryst with the persistent and lovesick Ilyin; her husband wasn’t interested in hearing about her temptation, her daughter suddenly struck her as phlegmatic. The young wife is disgusted at her own duplicity, appetite, and ordinariness (to that extent she is still an “Anna”). But to balance those self-recriminating Tolstoyan moments, she is also curious, excited, and willing. Chekhov does not dismiss the seriousness and validity of lust. Like a doctor he gently probes its dynamics. The heroine will learn some sort of lesson from this “Calamity,” but it will not be a tragic one.

The same non-tragic message, albeit in a cynical key, underlies “Anna on the Neck” (1895). Anna Petrovna, eighteen-year-old beauty from a poor family married against her will to a pompous middle-aged bureaucrat, quickly perceives that her husband values her solely as a social asset and stepping stone to higher rank, the Order of St. Anna. This husband is no unexciting but inoffensive Aleksei Karenin; he is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Luzhin. But Chekhov’s Anna cannot get out of the marriage in time, as Dunya Raskol-nikova did, and must adjust to her new reality. After she succeeds in pleasing the appropriate “Excellency” at a gala ball, she calls her husband a blockhead to his face and more honest relations between them are established. Her infidelities become her own business. And she is no longer visited by her nightmare, that a “storm cloud or locomotive was moving in on her to crush her.”

In “About Love” (1898), the third rewrite of the novel, Chekhov is already parodying Tolstoy in a deeper, more spiritually satisfying way. Rather than merely supply alternative erotic andcynical contexts for the Annaplot, Chekhov now rematches entire Tolstoyan characters. “About Love” is the final story in Chekhov’s Little Trilogy. Its narrator, Pavel Konstantinovich Alyokhin, closely resembles Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin:aloner,anintellectual turned farmerwith ahigh sense of honorand ahabitofsevereself-criticism. Thelovestory he relates to his friends concerns his unconsummated passion for Anna Alekseyevna, wife of his good friend, and he frames it with his confession, years later, that the failure to consummate this passion was probably a mistake. Chekhov’s variant bears all the marks of a clinical tragedy as he understood that genre: a tragedy of accident and timing. A Levin and a Kitty fall in love – both of them decent, proper people committed to responsible behavior – but they fall in love after the woman has married someone else. This is the plot that could easily have occurred in Anna Karenina, but Tolstoy makes sure it will not. He safely removes his attractive Kitty and disillusioned Levin from circulation until the wound caused by their mutual “accident of timing” – her rejection of his initial proposal, his pout over it – could heal on both sides. These two author’s pets

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are granted immunity, which means, a plot “timed” in their favor. Chekhov will have none of that.

Alyokhin and his Anna Alekseyevna are in love. But being neither Anna Kareninas nor Vronskys, not possessing the selfishness or the heroic initiating power required to launch the Anna plot, they continue over several years to “do the right thing,” which is to do nothing. Irritations and tensions between them increase, to their mutual distress. What energy there is, the would-be lovers spend on kindness and on respecting prior commitments, but both sense its falseness. By their decency and model self-discipline they are, of course, spared Anna’s and Vronsky’s terrible denouement. But Chekhov will not close on that pellucid moral. “About Love” still ends on a train scene. The reader must decide whether it is a victory or a defeat. In the coach, saying farewell, the two finally confess their love. Relating the story years later, Alyokhin concludes:

“I realized that when you love someone, your reasoning about that love should be based on what is supreme, on something that is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in the way that they are usually understood, otherwise it is not worth reasoning at all.”38

What might that supreme thing be, that replaces all reasoning? Chekhov does not say. Although the title of his story echoes Tolstoy’s imperious position-papers from his final two decades – “About War,” “About Religion,” “About Relations between the Sexes,” “About Life,” – a less Tolstoyan final verdict, unsettling in its openness, could hardly be imagined for a story about extramarital love.

A year later came the most famous Anna story in all of Chekhov, “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899). Here too we have our share of trains and theatres. But this is a genuine love story, one of the world’s greatest, in which Chekhov mixes Tolstoyan prototypes, and at times Tolstoyan diction, to achieve a new perspective on adultery and adult responsibility. Dmitry Gurov, from whose perspective the tale is told, resembles a Vronsky, or perhaps an Oblonsky; Anna Sergeyevna, whom he meets in Yalta, is a timid, inexperienced Kitty. But there is an important difference: neither Gurov nor Anna Sergeyevna is free. Both have Karenin-like spouses: Gurov’s wife is a bluestocking intellectual, Anna Sergeyevna’s husband a “flunkey” who serves in some provincial office. The first half of the story is written in the voice zone of a Stiva Oblonsky, from a light philandering position. Anna Sergeyevna’s departure on a train back north at the end of the story’s Chapter 2 concludes that type of infidelity plot, the “successful one-time affair” that hurts no one and leaves no scars. But then the second half of the story takes both hero and heroine by surprise. It begins to resemble the expansive mid-parts of Tolstoy’s novel, where the reader realizes,

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with excitement and growing dread, that (however absurd it seemed at first) the love between our two adulterers is real. The fact that Vronsky might be a frivolous military officer unworthy of a person of Anna’s caliber, or that Anna is trying to have it all in a society where she will be lucky to have even a part, is completely