Committed to life's multifariousness …

… Chekhov: A Writer for Grown Ups ‹ Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One can say with some assurance that in settling upon the short story as his chosen narrative form, Chekhov elected in essence not to represent all of life, not to make a big splash, but to fashion discrete parts of life and focus our attentions and sharpest sensibilities there as a form of indispensable moral instruction; to not attempt what Walter Benjamin says the novel always attempts: “to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.” Chekhov made his stories precisely commensurate with life and with a view of it we can accept in an almost homely way. He almost never suggests that life isn’t worth living, or makes us feel at a loss or even feel over-indebted to his genius. But rather he measures his genius alongside our own and according to what we can understand as an act of empathy whose message is that life is much as we know it to be in our efforts to accept and go on.