Trained as a doctor, Chekhov retained a scientific professional scepticism and laconicism which insulated him from the philosophical and religious searchings of a Dostoevsky or the aestheticism of a Turgenev. An outsider in the theatre, who preferred the company of actresses to listening to the plays they performed in, Chekhov was uninhibited about breaking all the rules. Hence we have the short story from which the beginning and the end have been discarded, leaving just the knotty middle for the reader to cope with. Compare the twenty pages of "The Lady with the Little Dog" with the nine hundred pages of Anna Karenina and you will appreciate the revolution Chekhov caused in prose fiction by refusing to give us a fully delineated background and a thorough-going moral view.
 

In drama, perhaps, Chekhov's revolutionary techniques were even more effective (though it must be said that all his Russian contemporaries and successors were convinced that his short stories were works of true genius, while many, whose taste in other matters is reliable, insisted that his plays were the result of bungling incompetence, not radical insight). The Chekhov play blurs comedy and tragedy; although full of action, actions don't have consequences-you can fire point-blank at your brother-in-law and neither kill him nor bring in the police.

More important, Chekhov, like all playwrights, introduces a cupboard full of skeletons-family secrets that cause the bad moral smell pervading the stage -but unlike all playwrights before him from Sophocles to Ibsen, and as in real life, Chekhov makes sure that these cupboards remain fully or partly closed. As Sonia says in Uncle Vanya, "No, not knowing is better."

His plays can be acted solemnly or as black comedy (and Chekhov, to his directors' dismay, definitely thought of even his most gruesome scenes as comedy), but they cannot be used to establish an authorial point of view, let alone a morality or a philosophy. Perhaps the key to Chekhov's refusal to judge is his typically medical viewpoint: "It is wrong to practise medicine if you are not professionally qualified and it is wrong to lord it in a philosopher's world if you are a writer." And in one of his wry comments on his private life, Chekhov said something which applies very much to his art: "I find it as difficult to tie up my plots as I do to tie a necktie."

Negatives, like a refusal to judge, or to tie up loose ends, are not quite sufficient to explain the immense popularity that Chekhov has achieved abroad. There are other factors, too. Chekhov is the first green, ecological writer, the first to insist that the destruction of nature is far more serious a catastrophe than the loss of traditional morality or individual unhappiness. He was himself an active planter of trees and in his short life he constructed more gardens than all the major Russian writers together. It is in Chekhov's work that the cutting down of the forests, the pollution of the soil, the drying of the rivers, the extinction of birds and mammals for the first time take precedence as a major theme over the old Russian moral dilemma "What then are we to do?" The doctor and the gardener, then, make for the new kind of writer, and one could certainly argue that the originality of Chekhov's stories lies in his use of the medical student's History of a Disease and in the garden designer's technique of disguising entrances and exits, or never taking a direct path, and of merging the boundaries between the artificial garden and outside nature.

Over the last ten years, with the opening up of Russian archives, we have come to understand rather more of Chekhov as a person. On the one hand, he had what he called "autobiographophobia;" on the other hand, he kept every piece of paper he received, including letters that a more ordinary man would have crumpled up and burnt on receipt, and with the help of his sister methodically sorted all his correspondence into labeled cartons. It was a family habit, so that we have vast amounts of correspondence from and to his five siblings, his parents and many cousins and uncles. We should also remember that in Chekhov's day the Russian postal service was superb. A letter from Moscow to St Petersburg took less than a day to arrive and even a letter from Yalta to Nice took only four days. (Any belief one has in progress is severely tested by such comparisons: when Chekhov took a train from Paris to St Petersburg, it completed the journey in less than 48 hours, somewhat faster than today's timetable.) The outcome, then, is a fully documented life which gives us a picture of the person behind the imaginary author we reconstruct from a reading.
 

As we might expect, the real Chekhov was almost never known to shout, to weep or to plead: an ironic detachment reigned even in his most stormy love affairs and his most difficult parental relationships. One begins to feel that Chekhov was happy relatively rarely, largely when he felt totally in control: these moments might be on a river bank fishing, strolling through a crowd in Genoa, with a Japanese prostitute in a brothel in Eastern Siberia, or at his desk when a story's final paragraph reaches its perfect form. Chekhov's life is a strange one: virtually all of it was spent with his parents, a tyrannical, hypocritical father, a subservient, hysterical mother, neither of whom appear ever to have read a line that their son wrote. Only once did Chekhov's mother go to the theatre, and that was not to one of his plays. As some friends observed, Chekhov's parents, who depended on his earnings, had an attitude to the source of their income that reminds one of people whose daughter supports them by prostituting herself on the streets. They needed the money but preferred not to know where it came from.

Chekhov's main insight into human relationships might be said to be this: irritation over an infinite number of petty things, rather than major dramatic conflicts, is the truly destructive force. He was a long-time observer of his parents' and brothers' marriageswhich explains why the frictions of marriage play such an important role in his stories and plays, long before he, when he knew he was doomed to die, married the actress Olga Knipper. As for love, Chekhov was at times in his life a notorious Don Juan: his collapse from TB in spring 1897 must at least partly be ascribed to what his elder brother Alexander described as "the buzz of fornication which has reached St Petersburg." Actresses such a Lyudmila Ozerova and Lidiya Yavorskaya, writers such as Elena Shavrova, women of no definite career, such as the ever-loving Lika Mizinova, feminists such as Olga Kundasova, competed for Chekhov's attention with literature, with civic duties, with running an estate, with the theatre. It is as if he sought safety in numbers, playing one woman off against the other, a game he continued all his life until his health exiled him to the Crimea. There, in isolation, Chekhov was forced to surrender to the pressure from Olga Knipper and commit himself in marriage to one woman.

Non-committal is perhaps the best noun or adjective to apply to Chekhov. His women friends independently of each other used the word neulovimyi, "elusive," and this is where their experience of Chekhov compares with ours. A playfully evasive letter to an adoring woman keeps her hooked without giving her any firm idea of where her future lay or what the author thought of it. A letter to an individual is very similar to a story for the public: it would be a foolhardy critic who asserted that he could find a message from Chekhov the author to the reader as to what lies in wait for us or what we ought to do about it.

Where there are messages, they are put into the mouths of the hero or heroine who, however sympathetic to us, is still not the author in the sense that Tolstoy or Dostoevsky remain authorial and authoritative at key moments in their work. The few messages that strike us as messages are very provocative indeed, and certainly run against all the grain of Russian morality and belief systems. Take again "The Lady with the Little Dog," where the adulterous hero strolls the streets of Moscow, realizing that he does not tally (and friends do not listen) about his most intimate experiences because we all carry with us a secret and lying about it is the way in which we protect our privacy, and this secret lie is our real life.

Chekhov appears-on the page as in life-so tactful, pliant and undemanding of us. Here again, we can be forewarned as readers by the experience of others in real life. The man who best knew and for a time most loved Chekhov was his publisher, the tycoon Alexei Sergeevich Suvorin. A William Randolph Hearst of Russian journalism, a Petersburg theatre owner, a Mephistophelean political eminence grise, Suvorin's judgements about Chekhov are telling: he detected in Chekhov a "flint-like" hardness (while Chekhov found in him a weak-willed softness).

The relationship with Suvorin is a key to understanding Chekhov. On the surface, a little-known journalist and comic writer, who might well have abandoned literature to become a fulltime doctor, is discovered by a Petersburg magnate. The magnate opens all the literary doors to Chekhov, paying him well and regularly, introducing him to the respectable monthly journals, publishing him in book form, helping him re-write his first play, "Ivanov," to make it a stage success. For the next ten years, the two men appear inseparable. All Chekhov's family is helped, subsidised or employed by Suvorin. They travel to Europe together; Chekhov flirts with Suvorin's young second wife, with his teenage daughter, with his governess, with his granddaughters, and is totally captivated by the household.

For many of Chekhov's contemporaries, who disapproved of Suvorin's right-wing views and his opportunism, Chekhov was a Faust who had sold his soul to a Mephistopheles. Only Suvorin's virulent anti-semitism-Suvorin was convinced that Dreyfus should be found guilty, even if personally innocent, because Jews were conspiring against Christendom-cooled the relationship, so that the two men saw less of each other in the last six years of Chekhov's life. Suvorin took Chekhov's death as a betrayal. After his initial distress-he met the train carrying Chekhov's sealed coffin personallySuvorin turned against Chekhov, denouncing him as a mediocrity.

Yet this was no ordinary FaustMephistopheles relationship. For one thing, Dr. Faust was fully informed: Chekhov had been intimately involved with Lilly Markova, who was once the Suvorin's family governess and knew all the secrets of the household: how Suvorin's first wife was killed in a suicide pact with her lover, how Suvorin's daughter and first grandchild died, the virulent conflicts between Suvorin's sons. Suvorin gave Chekhov a map of hell and the material for many of his plays and stories. Conversely, despite their radically different views of Jews, the two men shared a deep scepticism about human nature, about the state and Christianity: Now that Suvorin's dairy has been deciphered and published in its full form, we can see that he too was not just an inspirational publisher, but a pessimist and the victim of an ongoing tragic saga whose company provided an echo for the deep pessimism which is at the core of Chekhov's work.

All his life Chekhov (like Suvorin) loved to stroll around cemeteries-they make for some of the best scenes in his work. The conviction that the cemetery is where the greater part of our physical existence will lie explains, perhaps, why Chekhov is so sceptical about any permanent change to the human condition. It makes him value small tangible gains in the face of death. This is why we have to resign ourself to the fact that Chekhov's major work consists of a mere four plays and two dozen stories which amount in bulk to no more than an average Dostoevsky novel. To change the literature of the world with a couple of volumes is an extraordinary feat.