SOURCE: Rayfield, Donald. “The Student.” In Anton Chekhov's Short Stories: Texts of the Stories, Background, Criticism, edited by Ralph E. Matalaw, pp. 335–38. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

In the following essay, originally published in 1975, Rayfield examines the placement of Chekhov's story “The Student,” between the author's “Steppe” stories of the later 1880s and his more lyrical prose of the 1890s and early 1900s.

The mystic side of Chekhov—his irrational intuition that there is meaning and beauty in the cosmos, which aligns him more to Leskov than to Tolstoy in the Russian literary tradition—is very nearly suppressed in the Melikhovo phase, preoccupied as it is with the objective and concrete. But there is one work of 1894, “The Student,” which Chekhov insisted to Bunin was his favorite and most optimistic piece. It is the only story of the Melikhovo period which links the lyricism of “Steppe” with...