“Everything Here is Accidental”: Chekhov’s Geography of Meaninglessness

This chapter argues that, for Anton Chekhov, certain particularities of place matter in a way they often do not for other writers. It considers where, how, and how much. In other words, the chapter asks if Chekhov's provinces stand for the provinces, or if they stand for something else. A previous chapter has argued that for Gogol the provinces never really stand for the provinces, since his symbolic geography never allows us to imagine that a better life might be found in some other real place. But Chekhov's provinces, notwithstanding their clearly and even insistently symbolic import, are often locations that we could imagine pinpointing on a map of Russia: the specificities of place do matter in Chekhov's world, if in subtle ways. And perhaps most importantly, a place's meanings can change over time.