Despite Chekhov’s laconism, brevity, and pellucid prose, he is a shape-shifter. Placing Chekhov squarely within any context is difficult; his appeal is universal but hard to define. His stories and plays—especially their endings—permeated with intertextualities from his literary predecessors nevertheless stand apart. My remarks focus on the endings of his stories as one locus of the quiddity of Chekhov’s creative vision. Chekhov’s endings leap out at the reader as a living tapestry containing within its weave strands that, while contradictory, do not negate each other.
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