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 pra