SOURCE: O'Connor, Frank. “The Slave's Son.” In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, pp. 78–98. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962.

In the following essay, O'Connor descants the changing face of the short story, particularly with Chekhov.

There is still no satisfactory book on Anton Chekhov, and this is scarcely to be wondered at. He has been the victim of more enthusiastic misunderstanding than any short-story writer, praised for all the wrong reasons and imitated in ways that would have astonished him. In literature as in life he was a difficult man; diffident and evasive, hard to pin down to any positive statement except perhaps that Dreyfus was innocent or that Russian teachers were underpaid.

He must have been always difficult. Already in his youth there is a contradiction between the lighthearted young medical student who wrote stories that were sometimes less than edifying to support a...