My Master And His Art

We all have someone we look up to in life, someone we admire so deeply that without them, our life feels as if it has lost its armour to defend itself against the arrows of difficult circumstances. For me, that someone is Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, whose words have always thrilled my thoughts and spirit.

I still remember that fifteen-day-long warm holiday when I was entirely under the sway of Chekhov’s Russia. I had just finished my eleventh grade. Spring smiled under the sky and in the songs of the nightingales, its scent slipping away along with the illusions I had been living with. Drunk with the ecstasy of sparrows and the magic of Jacaranda blossoms, I picked up the short stories I had bought in a store in Jhamsikhel and allowed the wintry sadness of the Russian world to take over me.

That afternoon, when I was on the twelfth day of my holiday and had already read most of Chekhov’s works, I laid my hands on Ward No. 6, the story which still sends shivers down my spine. There was something about the weather that particular afternoon. Everything felt unusually quiet. I stared at the melancholy sky for a while. The trees swayed broodingly, their motion resembling smoke lifting into the air.

Evening had already seeped into the city when I finished the story. That evening, there was a mysterious ache, a throbbing heaviness, as if something from the story had settled into my bones. Every time I walk down the aisles of hospitals, even now, I recall the doctor from the story, the one who slips into madness, descending so far that he dies as a person with a mental health condition in the very hospital where he once treated others.

Almost every story of Chekhov awakens something within me—something that, more often than not, blurs the line between my reality and his fiction. I usually go on walks to calm my emotions when I read his stories. And I walk until I don’t feel any restlessness within me.

Chekhov does not write to teach or to console. Instead, he opens a window, and through it, life reveals its true nature. The reality his stories unveil lingers, unsettling in ways not immediately grasped. But when it finally sinks in, you can’t help but endure the fire—so subtle it makes you shudder—and, of course, smile, because what else can you do when faced with the works of such a great genius?

Sleepy, one of his stories that has left an indelible mark on me, always makes me marvel at the beauty of literature. More precisely speaking, in Chekhov’s literature. A teenage girl kills an infant who won’t stop crying. Disgusting? Merciless? Pitiful? Yes. You hate the girl, don’t you? I mean, why am I even asking? It’s obvious, almost too obvious, to despise her. But if you were to read the story, trust me, you would feel more sympathy for the teenage girl than for the murdered infant. How? It seems absurd given what I just said. And yet, once you finish the story, you are not the person you were when you started. And that is what Chekhov does to his readers.

Let me share a moment when I read his early story, The Bird Market. Chekhov knows precisely what he wants his readers to feel. He makes you sad, laugh, think, and even cry—always at the perfect moment. His mastery of Chekhov’s gun isn’t just about objects or plot points; it’s in the emotions he plants early on, only to fire them with full force when you least expect it.

As I sat down to read the story, I found myself laughing almost the entire time, until silence enveloped me, until I reached the penultimate paragraph, where he prepared me for the final blow. And then, in the last section, he wrote: “And Trubnoy Square, that little bit of Moscow where animals are so tenderly loved, lives its little life, grows noisy and excited, and the business-like or pious people who pass by along the boulevard cannot make out what has brought this crowd of people…” How subtly Chekhov captures the things we overlook when caught up in the chaos of life, the quiet tragedies unfolding at the edges of our awareness. We pass by, oblivious, much like the “business-like or pious people” in the story, never truly knowing what we failed to notice, not then, not ever.

When you realise this, a crushing ache will grip your grieving heart. You’ll peek out, yearning not to miss a single thing. You’ll focus so intently that you might start to believe you’re capturing it all—yet, deep down, you know the truth. You are missing things. You will miss countless things. Perhaps, at this very moment, someone has drawn their last breath in a room not far from yours, and yet you will never know. Possibly, you’ll never see the sorrowful glint in your friend’s smile, the one that's always there, even when they say everything’s fine. Perhaps you’ll never notice how your mother fidgets with her necklace when talking about her past. All these will slip past you like sand through fingers.

Sad? Yes, it is indeed sad. To know this, to truly understand the weight of it all, is an ache almost beyond bearing. It makes you question everything, for how could one reconcile such awareness without crumbling beneath its pressure? But as long as life lingers in the light of existence, we must continue to live. We must. For what is happiness if not the shadow cast by sorrow? How could we even recognise joy if we had not first tasted pain? And what, then, would pain be if we had never known the sweet relief of love or the quiet comfort of happiness? Without one, the other loses its meaning, its essence. We endure because life demands it, and in that endurance, we learn to appreciate the moments when we, too, can find light in the darkness.

This delicate balance of suffering and joy, of endurance and light, is precisely what Chekhov masterfully captures in his work. Known for his mastery of realism, he cuts deep into the fabric of human existence, pouring himself into it with such perfection that, whenever you sit down to read any of his stories, you can almost hear his voice whisper. It’s a voice no true lover of literature should miss. It’s the voice of literature itself.

(The author is an intern at The Rising Nepal.)