SOURCE: Winner, Thomas. “The First Serious Stories: From Antosha Chekhonte to Anton Chekhov.” In Chekhov and His Prose, pp. 17–44. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966.

In the following essay, Winner discusses Chekhov's transition from light, humorous fiction to the more serious stories of the late 1880s.

The early Chekhov has been thought of only as a humorist. But some of the early works are serious in tone and begin to suggest the transition to be effected by the end of the 1880's, when Chekhov abandoned forever the role of Antosha Chekhonte for that of Anton Chekhov, the creator of the significant stories and plays on which his fame rests today. Although most of these early serious stories are still primitive and conventional, some of them begin to express elements of the new forms and styles of which Chekhov was to become master. In 1882, after only two years of...