Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 14, 1 (2022) 83–95

DOI: 10.2478/ausp-2022-0007

Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s

Short Stories
Aliz FARKAS
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
Department of Human Sciences
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0172-6949

Abstract. Existential philosophy addressed questions that either had been

overlooked by traditional philosophy for a long period of time (e.g. the
individual’s experience of anxiety in the face of death, the failure of rational
thinking and science to inquire essential aspects of human life) or had
resurfaced again following the disappointment caused by the destructions
and absurdity of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century
(e.g. questions pertaining to the meaningfulness/meaninglessness of the
human endeavour and of human life in general). Russian realist novelists
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy are often invoked among the earliest
existentialist thinkers, along with philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Drawing on the works of philosophers Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche and cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, this paper will
examine how the existentialist preoccupation with death anxiety, ethics,
and authenticity is represented in two short stories by Anton Chekhov, one
of Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s younger contemporary writers.

Keywords: Chekhov, existentialist philosophy, science scepticism, death

anxiety

Introduction
The term existentialism encompasses various philosophies flourishing in Europe
in the first half of the twentieth century, which emphasize the concreteness
and context-embedded nature of human existence. Under the circumstances of
uncertainty created by the two world wars, existentialism was moved to focus on
the negative aspects of life: pain, frustration, sickness, and death come into the
spotlight of philosophical inquiry.
Intellectual historians trace back the roots of existential thinking as early
as fourth-fifth century theologian St Augustine’s claim that there exists no
84 Aliz FARKAS

unbreakable truth out there waiting to be discovered and understood by mankind.

Rather, finding truth is the result of an inner, self-exploratory journey, for it resides
within the individual, not outside. Almost fifteen centuries later, in a somehow
similar vein but tinged with pessimistic overtones, German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche contests the divine origin of all values and argues that absolute truth
is just an illusion.
Another nineteenth-century scholar, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
concludes that the most frequently employed truth-seeking instrument, human
reason is inadequate to comprehend the mystery and meaning of life.
Although nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky did not
leave behind straightforward philosophical works, philosophical reflections on
the nature of truth and the meaning of life pervade his entire literary oeuvre.
Dostoyevsky’s existential nihilism arises from the conviction that God does not
exist, moral is relative, life has no sense, and the most one can aspire for is living
an authentic life.
Twentieth-century French writer Jean-Paul Sartre explicitly identified himself
as an existentialist condensing his ontology in the following maxim: existence
precedes essence. In Sartre’s concept, in the absence of an omnipotent creator,
“life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to
give a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose” (Sartre
1947, 58). The freedom of choosing our own life meaning and values, however,
comes at the price of total responsibility: we are fully responsible for developing
our authentic selves, setting our own values, and for the actions resulting from
our choices. Sartre emphasized the importance of death consciousness (i.e. a
constant awareness of life’s finitude) in guiding our actions and helping us to
distinguish between the trivial and the essential.
Sartre’s contemporary and compatriot novelist, Albert Camus, also focused
his philosophy around existential problems although he rejected to be identified
as an existentialist. His main preoccupations remained questions pertaining to
the inevitability of death, individual freedom and responsibility, the absurdity
of enduring life in spite of its fundamental meaninglessness, which led him
to seriously consider suicide as a reasonable answer to the incongruity of life
(Camus 1955).
In my paper, I will argue that several of the main claims of existentialism are
strongly represented in Anton Chekhov’s stories. Actually, contemplation on
such questions plays a crucial role in many of his works – a point discussed
in a respectable number of studies written on Chekhov (e.g. Senderovich 1987,
Rayfield 1999, Regéczi 2000, Coptseva 2008, Corrigan 2011, Grevtsova 2011,
Tabachnikova 2012, Nankov 2013).1 The aim of this paper is to provide further

1 From the works mentioned above, Rayfield’s book does not focus on Chekhov’s existential
themes, but it points out elements of existentialism in both Chekhov’s plays and his short
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 85

support for the claim that the Russian author deserves to be considered among
the forerunners of existential thinking.

Existential Psychology: Ernest Becker

In order to review some of the main tenets of existentialism, I will invoke
American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, more precisely his book The
Denial of Death (1973), for which he posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in
1974. Becker, who was labelled as a melancholic existentialist, outlined a
psychoanalytic version of existentialism.
He starts his reasoning with the assertion that – contrary to Freud’s view –
consciousness of death is the primary repression, rather than sexuality. He
deliberately uses graphic language to deliver the bare reality about the human
condition:

The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating
creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood
over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the
anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is
conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception
of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious
animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that
one is food for worms. (Becker 1973, 87)

This awareness of the gloomy prospects awaiting all beings gives rise to a basic
need specific to the human species: the desire to contribute to something outside
the individual, which will live on even after one dies.
In order to repress death anxiety and to render significance to their lives,
humans develop denial systems in the form of different types of heroism:
religious heroism (which essentially loses its significance in an atheistic world),
cultural heroism (including art, science, social activism), personal heroism
(manifesting itself in the way one manages his/her personal life, including family
relationships, social status, but also in building one’s character).
Becker invokes Sándor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s closest disciples, who claimed
that “Character-traits are, so to speak, secret psychoses” (Ferenczi 1950, 291). So,
according to Becker and Ferenczi, personality is nothing but a mask that keeps

stories. Regéczy, Corrigan, Grevtsova, and Tabachnikova explore Chekhov’s philosophical

stance in general and his ties with existentialism in particular. Coptseva discusses the theme of
“existence in the face of death” in Chekhov’s dramas, while Senderovich and Nankov analyse
several of his short stories from an existentialist perspective.
86 Aliz FARKAS

paralysing death anxiety at bay and gives the illusion of stability and coherence.
All these defences support the grand illusion of transcending our physical reality,
an illusion that we desperately need because “to see the world as it really is is
devastating and terrifying” (Becker 1973, 60).
For Becker, the existential paradox consists in the discrepancy between
the desperate human condition with all its creatureliness, its finitude, on the
one hand, and the symbolic constructions of culture, science, and character
designed to efface death anxiety, on the other. The big question is: how does one
respond to this existential paradox? According to Becker, there are two options:
we either ignore it, and conduct our lives as if this incongruity did not exist, or
we become paralysed by anxiety, and develop neurosis. The first option makes
it possible for humans to live a healthy, symptom-free life, but considering that
this attitude is based on denial and distraction, it may be justified to enclose the
word “healthy” in quotation marks. Becker evokes Kierkegaard claiming that to
be a “normal cultural man” is to be sick – whether one knows it or not: “there
is such a thing as fictitious health” (Kierkegaard 1941, 34). Fictitious health is
the reverse of hypochondria: one looks and feels healthy, but in fact s/he is not.
Denial systems, then, are adaptive means that spare us from total bewilderment
and make life bearable and liveable despite the prospect of physical dissolution
and sinking into oblivion.

Chekhov’s Existentialist Short Stories

As many of his short stories testify it, existentialist themes like the ones
discussed above were among Chekhov’s main intellectual preoccupations. In her
book written on Chekhov’s relations with early existentialist philosophy, Ildikó
Regéczi concludes that the writer regarded giving voice to the existentialist
question with the deepest possible understanding as the main goal of literature
(Regéczi 2000, 56).
The insoluble conflicts arising from the desire to be one’s authentic self and
the roles imposed by social games, physical and mental suffering, the cultural
relativity of mental health, the inadequacy of scientific reasoning to address
essential aspects of the human condition, science and philosophy as distractors
and defence systems against the terror of looming death become the central
themes of short stories like “The Black Monk,” “A Medical Case,” “Easter Eve,”
“An Actor’s End,” “A Nervous Breakdown,” “The Man in the Case,” “A Dreary
Story,” or “Ward No. 6.” In order to yield a deeper and more thorough analysis,
this paper focuses on the last two pieces of this list: the less cited “A Dreary
Story” and the more widely known “Ward No. 6.”
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 87

A Dreary Story (1889)

The short story subtitled “From the Notebook of an Old Man” recounts the end-
of-life reflections of sixty-two-year-old medical professor Nikolay Stepanovitch.
In the shadow of his impending death, the first-person narrator developed in
himself the alertness of a hypochondriac and reacted in utter bewilderment
to any sign of physical and mental decline. He was utterly perplexed by his
experience of sudden estrangement from everything he had thought his whole
life consisted in: his “honoured and distinguished” name (Chekhov 1918, 132)
symbolizing the decent social status he had achieved,2 his family of wife and
two children, his colleagues, and the social circles he had previously frequented.
Approaching death made him aware of the discrepancy between his symbolic
self (his name and carefully moulded character) and his imperfect, failing flesh-
and-blood self: “I am myself as dingy and unsightly as my name is brilliant
and splendid” (Chekhov 1918, 132). But what alarmed him most was that he
came to harbour feelings of contempt towards his wife, resentment against his
children, and indifference towards his colleagues and students – all of which he
interpreted as being signs of mental and moral disintegration. “I am full of hatred,
and contempt, and indignation, and loathing, and dread” (Chekhov 1918, 177) –
he confessed to Kathy, his adopted daughter, the only person he could open up to
in his self-imposed isolation. Kathy’s reaction was straightforward and shocking
for him: “Illness has nothing to do with it […] it’s simply that your eyes are
opened, that’s all. You have seen what in old days, for some reason, you refused
to see” (Chekhov 1918, 178). And, indeed, from what the narrator reveals about
the characters, the readers can conclude for themselves that the professor’s wife
was frivolous and hopelessly narrow-minded, his grown-up children were selfish
and utterly inconsiderate of their father, who could hardly make ends meet while
they were living an idle but extravagant life. So, from the reader’s perspective,
Nikolay Stepanovitch’s emotions seem perfectly justified, the only problem
being his suppressing his authentic feelings for so long that they bewildered him
completely when they were finally released.
There was only one thing he managed to preserve intact from his previous
life, namely his unflinching reverence of science, even if he had to admit the
possibility of being deluded: “Just as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the
threshold of death, I am interested in nothing but science. […] This faith is
perhaps naïve and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I
believe that and nothing else; I cannot overcome in myself this belief” (Chekhov
1918, 148–149).

2 It is interesting to note that the original title of the story was “My Name and Me,” which –
according to Regéczi – was later changed by Chekhov as a gesture of making a clear distinction
between the author and the first-person narrator (Regéczi 2000, 39).
88 Aliz FARKAS

This is the reason why he so desperately clings to his job as a university

professor although his declining intelligence and physical frailty make him “feel
nothing but torture” during his lectures (Chekhov 1918, 147–148).
But what stands behind Nikolay Stepanovitch’s stubborn faith in science?
Just as Ernest Becker regards science as a defence system against the fear of
death, Nietzsche identifies fear as the source of scientific inquiry: “For fear is
the original and basic feeling of man; from fear everything is explicable, original
sin and original virtue. From fear my own virtue too has grown, and it is called:
science” (Nietzsche 1978, 302). Amid the ruins of his crumbling life, after losing
all certainty, Nikolay Stepanovitch’s faith in science was the last shelter from
this deadly fear. The narrator informs the reader on several occasions about the
intense fear he was experiencing: “I was possessed by unaccountable animal
terror, and cannot understand why I was so frightened: was it that I wanted to
live, or that some new unknown pain was in store for me?” (Chekhov 1918, 206).
Paradoxically, as he was desperately grasping at his faith in science as his final
hope for salvation, he was in fact embracing nihilism. Nietzsche warns us that
the rules of reason are abstractions with a doubtful validity to the real world:
“The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured
the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious
world”3 (Nietzsche 1968, 13).
Nikolay Stepanovitch’s lengthy and strenuous ruminations led him to the
important revelation that his life as he lived it was but a collection of actions,
ideas, and judgments lacking any inner coherence, and in his mind this deficiency
rendered his entire life absolutely meaningless:

However much I might think, and however far my thoughts might travel,
it is clear to me that there is nothing vital, nothing of great importance in
my desires. In my passion for science, in my desire to live, in this sitting
on a strange bed, and in this striving to know myself – in all the thoughts,
feelings, and ideas I form about everything, there is no common bond to
connect it all into a whole. Every feeling and every thought exists apart in
me; and in all my criticism of science, the theatre, literature, my pupils,
and in all the pictures my imagination draws, even the most skilful analyst
could not find what is called a general idea, or the god of a living man. And
if there is not that, then there is nothing. (Chekhov 1918, 214–215)

In his book, Ernest Becker invokes Otto Rank, who found the perfect term
for the behaviour that made the professor so disappointed with his life:
“partialization” (Becker 1973, 198). The term describes our capacity to narrow
down attention to a single aspect of life at a time, losing sight of the bigger
3 Nietzsche’s italics.
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 89

picture charged with all the terrors of the world and inner anxieties, otherwise
we would be impaired for action.
While partialization is an indispensable means of adaptation to circumstances,
unconscious dependence on it leads to a vacuous and mechanical life. His illness
and chronic insomnia compelled Nikolay Stepanovitch to face questions he had
been unaware of during his “healthy” years. Kierkegaard’s notion of “fictitious
health” mentioned earlier in this paper (Kierkegaard 1941, 34) is a pertinent
one when we envisage the professor’s former, healthy self. He had been living
his life in such a way as to meet the demands of his family and live up to the
expectations imposed by society, simultaneously suppressing his emotions and
genuine self. When approaching death put an end to his complacent slumber (he
opened his eyes, as Kathy observed), he was deeply disturbed by his new reality:
“everything is disgusting; there is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I
have already lived must be reckoned as wasted” (Chekhov 1918, 190–191). He had
the revelation that Shakespeare’s King Lear had before him: he realized that he
was nothing more than a barefoot biped animal (Regéczi 2000, 93).4 The despair
ensuing from this revelation is the beginning of authenticity. José Ortega y Gasset
uses the powerful metaphor of the shipwrecked to demonstrate the necessity of
experiencing utter despair for individual development to follow its course:

The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those
fantastic “ideas” and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is
problematic, and feels himself lost. […] These are the only genuine ideas;
the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He
who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say,
he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality. (Ortega
1957, 157)

However, there was no further development for Nikolay Stepanovitch; he

remained paralysed by the dismal discovery about the senselessness of his
existence. So, when his stepdaughter turned to him in despair to ask for guidance
(“‘Only one word, only one word!’ she weeps, stretching out her hands to me”),
he failed to offer any kind of support, just like in every crucial moment of Kathy’s
life. The story ends with the professor’s mixed feelings of shame and pity for the
girl’s foreseeable misery: “I look at her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than
she. The absence of what my philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have
detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the
soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!”
(Chekhov 1918, 218).

4 Regéczi is citing Lev Shestov, a Russian existentialist, who studied both Shakespeare’s and
Chekhov’s works.
90 Aliz FARKAS

Ward No. 6 (1892)

The story is set in a provincial asylum and explores the philosophical conflict
unfolding between Ivan Gromov, a patient suffering from paranoiac psychosis, and
Andrey Ragin, the director of the asylum. Ragin, who was living a comfortable and
relaxed life, was an advocate of stoicism, and he lectured Gromov about the non-
importance of life circumstances: “In any surroundings you can find tranquillity
in yourself,” exemplifying his credo with the case of Diogenes, who “lived in a
tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth” (Chekhov 1921, 66).
He was not only a stoic but also a nihilist often contemplating on the
meaninglessness of life. On one occasion, he cooled down Gromov’s passionate
speech about the wonder of life with the following words: “However magnificent
a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet in the end be nailed up in a coffin and
thrown into a hole” (Chekhov 1921, 65–66).
Gromov, who was suffering from starvation and beatings locked up in the
asylum, indignantly refused Ragin’s philosophizing, and he counteracted with
his existentialist concept of life, in which suffering and death anxiety were
unalienable parts of life: “to despise suffering would mean to despise life
itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger,
cold, injury, loss, and a Hamlet-like dread of death” (Chekhov 1921, 73). But,
notwithstanding his wretched condition, he assumed the idealist position by
giving credence to the existence of God and spiritual immortality: “I firmly
believe that if there is no immortality the great intellect of man will sooner or
later invent it” (Chekhov 1921, 66). It is interesting to see how the character
living in misery was an advocate of idealism, while the one in the privileged
position took the stance for nihilism.
The meetings and discussions with his patient gradually changed Ragin’s
life. His colleagues and his superiors started to regard him with suspicion, and
eventually he lost his job and comfortable income. Curiously, this change for
the worse in his social status and financial situation provoked a positive turn
in the doctor’s attitude towards life. While earlier he was unsatisfied and often
complained about his being buried in an intellectually undemanding provincial
area populated by boring people totally absorbed in their day-to-day chores and
petty interests, losing his existential security made him much more interested
and involved in the events of everyday life such as peeling potatoes with his
housekeeper or listening to the mass on Sunday – activities that he had despised
so much previously.
As he was growing more authentic in his life, he became increasingly irritated
by the fake care of his former colleague and the pretended joy and forced laughter
of his former friend. Surprisingly, this mood totally changed his perspective on
his nihilistic vision upon human life. At this point, the meaninglessness of all
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 91

human endeavour and concern, which he found so disconcerting and anxiety-

provoking earlier in his life, became a soothing and comforting idea:

To stifle petty thoughts he made haste to reflect that he himself, and

Hobotov, and Mihail Averyanitch, would all sooner or later perish without
leaving any trace on the world. If one imagined some spirit flying by the
earthly globe in space in a million years he would see nothing but clay and
bare rocks. Everything – culture and the moral law – would pass away and
not even a burdock would grow out of them. (Chekhov 1921, 94)

Eventually, Ragin was locked up in the very same institution he had managed
for more than twenty years, was beaten by Nikita, the guard, and died of apoplectic
stroke the next day.
The story reflects a rather bleak outlook on life, and Chekhov does not come to
the reader’s rescue with any comforting explanation of Ragin’s tragic destiny. Was
there anything he could have done in order to avoid his dreadful demise? If we
look closely at the cause of Ragin’s downfall, we make a surprising discovery. His
problem was not that he was indifferent or heartless, as we could have suspected
– quite the opposite is the case.
Ragin’s fault was that he was too agreeable, and for this reason “he was
absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, and to insist” (Chekhov 1921,
47). His excessive agreeableness prevented him from confronting his inferiors
although he knew too well that they systematically abused the patients by stealing
their food, beating and mistreating them in every conceivable way: “When the
patients complained to him of being hungry or of the roughness of the nurses,
he would be confused and mutter guiltily: ‘Very well, very well, I will go into it
later . . . Most likely there is some misunderstanding . . .’” (Chekhov 1921, 47;
ellipsis in the original). Another positive human ability that went awry in Ragin’s
practice was empathy. He became professionally paralysed by the sight of pain
and suffering, and so his expertise was side-tracked from offering real medical
assistance to getting rid of the patient by hastily prescribing some medicine and
sending him/her away.
These two qualities, agreeableness and empathy, which are considered to be
positive human traits, were distorted by the doctor to such an extent that they
triggered a chain of events leading to disaster not only for his patients but even
for Ragin himself. His misplaced empathy induced him to neglect his duties as
a medical doctor, while by not confronting the debased personnel he enabled
abuse to continue and perpetuated misery.
Although Ragin’s sins were apparently rooted in his virtues, the narrator
of the story reveals that he knew all too well what damage he was causing all
along. In order to suppress his feelings of guilt, he recurred to such tactics
92 Aliz FARKAS

as self-justification and blame shifting. For not offering proper medical care
to his patients, Ragin justified himself by making reference to the ultimate
inevitability of death and the utter insignificance of ordinary people’s lives:
“why hinder people dying if death is the normal and legitimate end of everyone?
[…] Pushkin suffered terrible agonies before his death, poor Heine lay paralyzed
for several years; why, then, should not some Andrey Yefimitch or Matryona
Savishna be ill, since their lives had nothing of importance in them, and would
have been entirely empty and like the life of an amoeba except for suffering?”
(Chekhov 1921, 49).
The argument of insignificance was invoked once more by Ragin when he
tried to explain away his choice of non-action in the face of evident abuse in his
environment exempting himself from all responsibility and shifting the blame to
society in general: “I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only
part of an inevitable social evil: all local officials are pernicious and receive their
salary for doing nothing … And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame,
but the times … If I had been born two hundred years later I should have been
different” (Chekhov 1921, 60; ellipsis in the original).
By reporting on Ragin’s innermost thoughts and ways of reasoning, the
omniscient narrator makes it clear for the reader that it is not the aforementioned
agreeableness and empathy on their own that rendered him impotent as a doctor
and as the manager of the asylum but rather his decision not to take any action
and turn a blind eye to the personnel’s despicable deeds against the patients for
twenty years. It was only when Nikita, the guard, struck him in the face while
locked up in the same institution, and he felt the taste of his own blood in his
mouth, that he came to realize the falsity and absolute worthlessness of his entire
life philosophy, which crumbled in the first instant of suffering, just as his former
patient, Gromov, had predicted. How phoney it had been from him to preach
about ignoring physical pain and remaining content in all circumstances, to
cite Diogenes and Marcus Aurelius to his patient undergoing constant torture
and humiliation, and then go back to his cosy life crammed with mundane
distractions, numbing his feelings of guilt with self-exoneration and nonsensical
reasoning? His last conscious thoughts revolved around the realization that by
avoiding pain and discomfort all his life he became insensitive to other people’s
suffering: “How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he
had not known it and had refused to know it? He knew nothing of pain, had no
conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his conscience, as inexorable and
as rough as Nikita, made him turn cold from the crown of his head to his heels”
(Chekhov 1921, 107). At the very end of his life, he finally understood what Ragin
had known long before: that pain, suffering, and looming death are indispensable
parts of human life, and that avoiding first-hand experience of these at all cost
equals to avoiding life itself.
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 93

Ironically, the philosophical discussions with his mentally ill patient, which
triggered Ragin’s awakening to the true nature of life, also brought about his
falling into misery and untimely death. His tragedy lies in the tardiness of his
awakening: he came to understand his situation only a few hours before his
death, when he could not do anything about it anymore.
Despite the protagonist’s tragic demise, the story does not end in a nihilistic
tone. In fact, Ragin’s calamity curbed his empty philosophizing and his nihilistic
outlook upon life. After losing his job and status as a medical doctor, he started to
live more authentically by appreciating the small joys of life, refusing to participate
in phoney social interactions and ditching his own shallow philosophies. In the
final hours of his life, he even came to realize the untenability of his previous
“nothing really seems to matter” nihilism, and he faced up to the feelings of
guilt and remorse that he had been eluding for so long. He finally understood the
lesson that had he been more courageous and made the right choices, he could
have made a difference in the life of his patients.

Conclusions
Although Anton Chekhov is not generally referred to as an existentialist thinker,
the philosophy exposed in his literary works and the considerable amount of
literature discussing his intense preoccupation with such questions as existence
as a concrete experience, dread of death, limits of scientific inquiry, the possibility
of choice, and the ensuing individual responsibility qualify him a forerunner of
twentieth-century existentialism.
The analysis of his two short stories, “A Dreary Story” and “Ward No. 6,” published
three years apart, demonstrates that Chekhov did not only dedicate a lot of attention
to address the existential conundrum of life, but he also explored possibilities for
action against the existential despair. Both professor Nikolay Stepanovitch from
“A Dreary Story” and doctor Andrey Ragin from “Ward No. 6” experienced the
lowest depths of misery where they were compelled to look death and nothingness
in the face. But while Nikolay Stepanovitch remained petrified at the grim spot
of desperation without the slightest clue how he should have lived otherwise (a
situation reflected by his inability to offer a beacon of hope to his adopted daughter),
Andrey Ragin at least came to the realization that his stoic “nothing really matters”
attitude to life had been a fatal mistake. Apparently, the only person who could
have lived a worthwhile life was Andrey Ragin’s patient, Gromov, but he was
denied the opportunity by having been locked up in the asylum for years under the
supervision of doctor Ragin until they finally became roommates.
Just as the existentialist thinkers invoked in this paper, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Ortega, and Becker, Chekhov appears to view exasperation as a necessary step
94 Aliz FARKAS

towards spiritual awakening. Chekhov’s two protagonists differ from each other
in the way they face their ordeal: while Nikolay Stepanovitch sinks into life-
denying nihilism, Andrey Ragin gains a new perspective of existence.

Works Cited
Becker, Ernest. 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
Camus, Albert. 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Transl. Justin
O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Chekhov, Anton. 1918 [1889]. “A Dreary Story.” Transl. Constance Garnett. In
The Wife and Other Stories, 129–219. London: Chatto & Windus.
1921 [1892]. “Ward No. 6.” Transl. Constance Garnett. In The Horse-Stealers
and Other Stories, 29–109. New York: Willey Book Company.
Coptseva, Natalia P. 2008. “A. P. Chekhov as a Philosopher: ‘Game’ Phenomenon
and ‘Existence in the Face of Death’ in his Dramas.” Journal of Siberian Federal
University. Humanities & Social Sciences vol. 1: 22–38.
Corrigan, Yuri. 2011. Chekhov’s Existentialism. The Ethics of Outsidedness.
Charleston, South Carolina: BiblioBazaar.
Ferenczi, Sándor. 1950 [1926]. Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique
of Psycho-Analysis. Transl. Jane Isabel Suttie. London: The Hogarth Press.
Grevtsova, Elena S. 2011. “On the ‘Philosophical Fate’ of the Work of Anton
Chekhov.” Russian Studies in Philosophy vol. 50, no. 2: 83–98.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1941 [1849]. The Sickness unto Death. Transl. Walter Lowrie.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nankov, Nikita. 2013. “The Brainless Virtuoso as an Existential Thinker: Čechovʼs
Poetics of Contrariety in ‘Dreams.’” Russian Literature vol. 74, no. 3–4: 327–
361.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968 [1901]. The Will to Power. Transl. Walter Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.
1978 [1883]. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Transl. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Penguin Books.
Ortega y Gasset, José. 1957 [1930]. The Revolt of the Masses. Transl. Anonymous.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Rayfield, Donald. 1999. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s
Prose and Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Regéczi, Ildikó. 2000. Csehov és a korai egzisztencia-bölcselet [Chekhov and the
Early Existentialist Philosophy]. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1947 [1946]. Existentialism. Transl. Bernard Frechtman. New
York: Philosophical Library.
 Existential Concerns in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 95

Senderovich, Marena. 1987. “Chekhov’s Existential Trilogy.” In Anton Chekhov

Rediscovered: A Collection of New Studies with a Comprehensive Bibliography,
eds. Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, 77–91. East Lansing: Russian
Language Journal.
Tabachnikova, Olga, ed. 2012. Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian
Thinkers. London, New York, and Delhi: Anthem Press.