‘Nothing in the twentieth century could foreshadow the emergence of a poet like Brodsky’ is perhaps the strangest statement by the great Czeslaw Milosz. Instead, everything in the twentieth century could be seen as having foreshadowed Brodsky's coming. It was inevitable as a most natural existential and linguistic response to the alienating absurdity and sophisticated cruelty of that century. By the same token, everything in the nineteenth century Russia could be seen as having foreshadowed the coming of Anton Chekhov. He was, if you like, a historical necessity. In the disenchanted generation, suspended between ‘extreme materialism and most passionate idealistic strivings of the spirit’, at the time when populism and utilitarianism, although on their last legs, still dominated both life and art, someone who could walk the border without taking sides, who could ‘rise above’ and find a different route, was desperately needed. As Chekhov himself said about the traveller Przhevalskii: ‘In our ill age, when European societies are swamped with laziness, boredom and faithlessness, when in a strange combination a dislike for life coexists with a fear of death, […] we need devotees like we need the sun’. Chekhov was one of these devotees.