Chekhov's Antidotes: Prescriptions for an Age of Unrest

A rousing tour through Chekhov's stories and plays, with lessons for managing troubled times

For all his immense literary fame, Anton Chekhov is underappreciated as a thinker. Widely regarded as a purveyor of gloom and indecision, Chekhov was in fact a reparative moral philosopher who fought back against the pathologies of a divided and dysfunctional age. In the face of emergent revolution and civil war, Chekhov wrote about the polarization, apathy, and fanaticism that were driving his society towards self-destruction. In Chekhov's Antidotes, Corrigan offers a bold reassessment of why Chekhov's thought matters, both for his own time and for ours.

Telling the story of Chekhov's career in a new light, Corrigan approaches the plays, letters, and short stories as puzzle pieces in larger reparative meditations. New readings of "House with a Mezzanine" and Uncle Vanya yield practical reflections on how to heal and resist culture war. In "The Student" and The Cherry Orchard, Corrigan probes Chekhov's thoughts for alleviating modern strains of sloth, loneliness, and despair. And, tracing Chekhov's monumental study of the dangers of unskilled empathy through such works as "Breakdown," "Ward Six," and "The Wife," Corrigan discerns a call for a new concept of activism in the face of what cannot be repaired. Chekhov emerges from these readings as a voice of sanity and wisdom for an age of unrest.

Chekhov offers no panaceas for the pathologies of modern life, only pragmatic meditations on how to salvage an irreparably broken world, and on how to cultivate meaning, dignity, and integrity as incurably fragmented human subjects--lessons we can all use in our current divisive era, in the shadow of our own looming crises.