Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: In 1904 and 1905, Sergei Bulgakov and Lev Shestov each concluded, independently, that Anton Chekhov demanded philosophical, not merely literary treatment. Bulgakov named him a myslitel' , a thinker; Shestov, in his own idiom, called him a singer of hopelessness. Bulgakov, still moving through his Idealist period toward his eventual return to the Church, read Chekhov's fiction as registering an oblique, unstated religious hope beneath mundane portraits. Shestov in contrast, moving toward the philosophy of groundlessness that later defined his work, read the same fiction as a sustained, honest demolition of consolation. The present paper compares the two essays' interpretive methods as well as their conclusions. Bulgakov proceeds by patient accumulation, refusing to discount any part of Chekhov's corpus; Shestov proceeds by a method that treats every hope as a concession and every bleak passage as the truth beneath it, a procedure that cannot be tested against the texts it claims to interpret. The paper argues that Bulgakov's slower, cumulative reading answers to a wider breadth of Chekhov's work and does fuller justice to its ethical charge than Shestov's totalising thesis – a judgment on methodology, and not a claim to have settled what Chekhov himself believed.
Source: Research Square
Author: Daniel Kisliakov
Institution: University of Divinity
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204223397