Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up the files on a man who might just be the most
misunderstood figure in the history of literature.
And I know that sounds like a massive exaggeration
to kick things off with, but honestly, once you
dig into the reality of his life versus the reputation
he has, the gap is enormous. It is a bold claim,
but I think the evidence backs it up completely.
The public perception of this guy has been, you
know, frozen in amber for about 100 years. And
it's mostly wrong. I think so, too. Yeah. Because
if I ask you or really. anyone listening right
now, to picture at Anton Chekhov, what is the
immediate mental image that pops up? Oh, it's
always the same. It's usually pantsnake glasses,
a neatly trimmed goatee, and a bunch of aristocrats
sitting in a drawing room staring out a window,
sighing about how boring their lives are. A grandfather
of gloom. That's the standard caricature. We
tend to think of him as this delicate, intellectual
master of the moody silence. The guy you read
when you want to feel sophisticated, but, you
know. Kind of depressed. Yeah, exactly. But the
stack of research articles and biographies we
have on the table today tells a story that is
almost violently different from that image. We
are looking at the life of a man who didn't start
as a high -minded artist, but as a guy. writing
like dirty jokes for tabloids just to keep his
family from being evicted. A man who was a practicing
doctor his entire adult life. His whole life.
Literally treating cholera outbreaks and conducting
autopsies while writing literary masterpieces
in his spare time. It's unbelievable. And a man
who, at the very height of his fame, decided
to travel thousands of miles across a frozen
wasteland to interview convicts in a penal colony
just because he felt guilty that he wasn't doing
enough. And perhaps most famously, a man who
lived this intense double life. There's that
famous quote of his that really sets the stage
for everything we are going to discuss today.
Oh, yeah. It just establishes the core conflict
of his existence. He said, medicine is my lawful
wife and literature is my mistress. Which is
just such a fantastic line. It feels very naughty
for the 19th century. But it wasn't just a metaphor
for him, was it? No, not at all. He literally
lived that duality until the day he died. So
our mission today is to explore how this grocer's
son, who wrote purely to keep his family from
starving, ended up inventing the modern short
story, revolutionizing the way actors act, all
while hiding a fatal illness from everyone he
loved. It is a story of incredible resilience
and honesty. A massive amount of hustle. Yes.
This isn't a story about a guy waiting for a
muse in a garden. It's about a guy grinding it
out against impossible odds. So let's rewind.
We have to start with the origin story because
Chekhov's childhood, well, looking at the notes
here, it sounds absolutely brutal. It's not the
aristocratic upbringing people assume he had,
given the subject matter of his plays. Not even
close. It really frames his later obsession with
human dignity. Anton Chekhov was born in 1860
in Taganrog. This is a port city in southern
Russia on the Sea of Azov. And you have to picture
this place. It's dusty. It's full of grain merchants
and smugglers. It's hot. It is definitely not
the cultural hub of St. Petersburg. And the family
dynamic seems... Volatile, to put it mildly.
So putting it politely, complicated is the word
usually used in textbooks, but abusive is probably
more accurate. Right. His father, Pavel Chekhov,
was the son of a former serf. He had bought his
own freedom. He ran a grocery store. But his
real passion, his obsession, really was the church
choir. Right, the choir. This seems like such
a weird detail to be traumatic, but it was. Oh,
it was. Pavel was a devout Orthodox Christian,
extremely strict. And he was the director of
the church choir. He forced his sons, including
Anton, to sing. He treated it like a military
drill. The research mentions this anecdote that
really stuck with me. To the congregation looking
up at the choir loft, these boys looked like
little angels. It was this perfect image of piety
and family unity. But Chekhov later recalled
that they didn't feel like angels at all. No,
he said they felt like little convicts. That
phrase, little convicts, that's heavy for a kid.
It implies a total lack of freedom. It is. And
it's so telling. In a letter later in life, he
actually described his childhood as a time of
suffering. Wow. He recalled the horror and disgust
he felt when his father would throw a tantrum
at dinner just because there was too much salt
in the soup. He would scream. He would call Chukov's
mother a fool. It was a household ruled by despotism
and lying. And physically abusive, too. Yes.
The father believed in the rod. Yes. Beatings
were common. Pavel believed in the old school,
spare the rod, spoil the child mentality. So
you have this sensitive, observant boy growing
up in a house where he's constantly walking on
eggshells, trying to anticipate his father's
moods. But the mother, Eugenia. She was the counterweight
in this equation, wasn't she? She was. She was
a cloth merchant's daughter. And unlike the father
who was rigid and intensely local, she had traveled
all over Russia as a child with her father. She
was an excellent storyteller. Ah, so that's where
you get some of it. Chekhov always said they
got their talent from their father because Pavel
did have an artistic side, however twisted, but
they got their soul from their mother. She was
the warmth in that cold shot. So you have this
sensitive kid in a volatile house, singing hymns
he hates, dodging his father's temper, working
in the grocery store hauling oil and tea. But
then, in 1876, the bottom falls out completely.
The crisis. This is the moment that changes the
trajectory of the entire family. Pother, the
father, had overextended himself building a new
house. He wanted to look successful. You know,
he wanted to be a big shot in Tigenrog. Keeping
up appearances. But he was actually cheated by
a contractor. The debts piled up. And in Russia
at that time, debtor's prison was a very real
threat. It wasn't just declare bankruptcy and
restart. It was a hole you got thrown into. So
what does Pavel do? Does he face the music? No,
he runs. He runs. He flees to Moscow where his
two older sons were studying, effectively hiding
from his creditors. The mother and the younger
kids followed him shortly after to escape the
shame and the bailiffs. But not Anton. No. And
this is a part that feels like a movie script
where the protagonist is tested. At 16 years
old, Anton is left behind in Tigenrog. All alone.
All alone. Why? Why leave a 16 -year -old behind?
Well, he had to finish his schooling. That was
the practical excuse. But more importantly, someone
had to deal with the mess. He had to sell off
the family's household possessions to pay off
the immediate creditors. He was basically the
liquidator of his own childhood. Imagine that.
You're 16. Your family vanishes to the big city
to escape prison. And you are left in the empty
shell of your house, which isn't even yours anymore.
Right. The house was taken by a man named Selivanov.
He was actually a lodger who had bailed the family
out previously, but then he bought the house
for a fraction of its value. Oh, that's brutal.
And Anton actually had to pay rent to this guy
to keep living in a corner of his own childhood
home. That sounds incredibly familiar. If you
know Chekhov's place, specifically the Cherry
Orchard. That scenario rings a huge bell. A businessman
buying out the family estate and the family being
displaced. It's almost autobiography. Chekhov
lived that loss of home before he could even
grow a beard. He understood what it meant to
lose your place in the world. And he didn't just
sit there and feel sorry for himself. This is
where that hustle you mentioned comes in. The
source material lists the jobs he took to survive.
Private tutoring, obviously helping younger kids
with their Latin and math. But there's one detail
here that I absolutely love. Catching and selling
goldfinches. Goldfinches. It just shows you the
level of scrappiness. He was out there trapping
birds to sell at the market for pennies. And
here is the kicker. He wasn't just supporting
himself. No. He was sending money to his family
in Moscow. Because they were destitute. Absolute
poverty. They were living in basements, changing
apartments, constantly freezing in the Moscow
winter. So this teenager living alone in Taganrog
is sending them cash. And crucially, he's sending
them funny letters. He's writing humor to cheer
them up while he's effectively an orphan in his
own hometown. That period, those three years
alone, must have forged some serious steel in
him. It created an independence that defined
him forever. He learned that he couldn't rely
on his father. He couldn't rely on the system.
He had to be the adult. He became the parent.
He essentially became the father figure to his
own father. He wrote a letter to his cousin during
this time saying, I have learned to paint a smile
on my face. So fast forward to 1879. He finally
finishes school, catches a train to Moscow, and
reunites with the family. He gets into medical
school at Moscow University. You'd think, OK,
he's made it. He's on the path. But the reality
of their life in Moscow was grim. Grim is an
understatement. His father couldn't find steady
work. He was too proud, too difficult and, frankly,
broken by the bankruptcy. So Anton, the student,
takes on the burden. And this is where the double
life really begins. To put food on the table
and pay his medical tuition, he starts writing.
And we need to be clear here. We aren't talking
about high art. He wasn't sitting down to write
the great Russian novel to compete with Tolstoy.
Not at all. This is the Antosha Chakante era.
Antosha Chakante. That was his main pseudonym.
He also wrote as Man Without Spleen, which is
just a fantastic name for a medical student writer.
I love that. Man Without Spleen. i'd read that
blog today or sometimes my brother's brother
he was writing for the equivalent of like buzzfeed
lists or tabloid gossip pages short humorous
sketches of russian street life for weekly papers
jokes about mother -in -laws drunk merchants
corrupt officials the volume of work he produced
during this time is staggering he was writing
daily he admitted later that he wrote mechanically
half consciously He said he cared nothing about
the reader or himself. It was purely a transaction.
Words for rubles. He was churning out vignettes
about chaotic weddings and confused peasants
just to buy bread. If he didn't write a joke,
the family didn't eat. It's the classic 10 ,000
hours principle, isn't it? He didn't think he
was making art. He was just trying to get paid.
But in doing so, he was learning how to sketch
a character in three sentences because he didn't
have space for four. Precisely. The strict word
limits of these cheap papers forced him to be
concise. He couldn't ramble like the big novelists.
He had to hit the joke and get out. By 1882,
he's writing for Oskolki, or Fragments, which
was a leading humor magazine. But the tone was
harsh. He was satirical, sometimes cruel. He
hadn't found that famous Chekhovian empathy yet.
He was just trying to survive the grind. That
shift happens with a specific event. I love this
part of the story. It's like the call to adventure
in a hero's journey. The Grigorovich letter.
1886. This is the turning point. Dmitry Grigorovich
was a literary celebrity at the time. He was
an old man, very respected, kind of the elder
statesman of Russian letters who had discovered
Dostoevsky decades earlier. A deal. A huge deal.
He happens to read a story by Chekhov called
The Huntsman. And The Huntsman isn't a joke story.
No, it's a bit sadder, a bit deeper. It's about
a hunter who meets his estranged wife in the
woods. And Grigorovich is floored. He writes
a letter to this young, unknown hack writer.
And he basically tells him, stop wasting your
time. He told him, you have real talent. He said
it was a talent that placed him in the front
rank of the new generation. But he gave him a
stern warning. Stop doing this hack work. Stop
rushing. You are sinning against your gift. Respect
your talent. Imagine getting a DM from, I don't
know, Stephen King or Hemingway today telling
you that your blog posts are genius, but you
need to get serious. How did Chekhov react? He
said the letter struck him like a thunderbolt.
He wrote back a confession. He admitted that
he had been writing his stories the way reporters
write up notes about fires, just getting it done
mechanically. He said, But, and this is the key
to understanding him, he didn't quit his day
job. Never. He qualified as a doctor in 1884.
And even as he started winning awards, like the
Pushkin Prize in 1888, he kept practicing medicine.
And often for free. He treated the peasants,
the poor. This is crucial for understanding his
writing. You have to realize most Russian writers
of that time were aristocrats. Turgenev, Tolstoy.
They observed the peasantry from the window of
a carriage or from the balcony of their estate.
They had a romanticized view of the people. But
Chekhov was touching them. Literally. He was
smelling the sickness, lancing the boils, delivering
the babies in dirt floor huts. He saw the ugly
bodies, the disgusting death. There's a story
mentioned in the notes. Peasants. It's brutal
in its honesty. It is. He describes the cramped,
unhealthy living conditions with a clinical eye.
There is no noble savage myth in Chekhov. He
once wrote in his notebook, aristocrats, the
same ugly bodies, the same toothless old age
as with market women. Wow. The doctor in him
saw the biological reality of humans. We all
bleed. We all rot. Class is just a costume. That
medical detachment combined with human empathy
is his secret sauce. That clinical eye brings
us to his specific style. Because once he started
taking writing seriously after that letter, he
changed the game. He didn't write like the people
before him. No, he moved away from what we call
the event plot. The event plot. In traditional
Victorian fiction, or even earlier Russian fiction,
stories were about big things happening. A murder,
a marriage, a lost inheritance, a shocking revelation.
The plot twists. The cliffhangers. Exactly. Chekhov
started writing about life as it is actually
lived. And let's be honest, in real life, we
don't have a climax every Tuesday. Most life
is just happening. It's eating dinner. It's being
bored. It's misunderstanding someone. There's
a great quote from Virginia Woolf in the source
material about this. She was a huge fan. She
said that reading Chekhov feels like you've overrun
your signals. It's a brilliant observation. She
says the tune stops short without the expected
chords. You get to the end of a Chekhov story
and you think, wait, is that it? Right. Because
he doesn't give you a tidy conclusion. He gives
you a question mark. Which feels very modern.
It's like watching an indie movie where the screen
cuts to black while the couple is just sitting
there in a diner. You don't know if they break
up or stay together. Exactly. He trusts the reader
to figure it out. And this brings us to one of
the most famous concepts associated with him,
which people use all the time but often get wrong.
Chekhov's gun. Oh, yes. Let's untack this. Because
usually when I hear Chekhov's gun. I think of
an action movie rule. If you show a gun, someone
has to get shot. Right. The principle is, if
you say in the first chapter that there is a
rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third
chapter, it absolutely must go off. So people
think that means there has to be violence or
action. But it's not about violence. It's about
narrative economy. It means... Don't put anything
in the story that isn't necessary. If you describe
the gun, the gun must matter to the plot. If
it's not going to be used, take it out. Don't
describe the curtains if the curtains don't tell
us something about the character. It was his
way of stripping away the clutter of the 19th
century novel, which was often full of irrelevant
descriptions. So it's about focus. He wanted
to focus purely on the internal state of the
characters. Exactly. Take the lady with the dog,
for example. Nabokov, who was a very harsh critic
and hated almost everyone. called this one of
the greatest stories ever written. Wow. Okay,
so give us the synopsis. It's deceptively simple.
A man, Gurov, and a woman, Anna, meet in Yalta
on vacation. They are both married to other people.
They have what they think is a casual holiday
fling, standard affair territory. Sure. But then
they both go back to their regular lives, him
to Moscow, her to a provincial town, and they
realize they are profoundly unhappy. They can't
forget each other. But the ending isn't a typical
romance ending. They don't run away together
into the sunset. They don't die in a suicide
pact like Romeo and Juliet. No. They meet secretly
in Moscow. They realize they are in love. And
the story ends with them sitting together, realizing
that the most complicated and difficult part
of their journey is just beginning. That's the
end. That's it. There is no solution. They can't
be together publicly, but they can't be apart.
That is the Chekhovian state. The unresolved
tension of real life. He captures that feeling
of being stuck and he leaves the reader with
that feeling. Speaking of being stuck or rather
not being stuck, we have to talk about 1890.
Because right when he is becoming a literary
superstar, when he could just sit in Moscow and
enjoy the fame, Chekhov does something that seems
completely irrational. The Sakhalin journey.
This is the moment that proves Chekhov was, I
don't know. A saint as well as an artist? He
decides to travel across Siberia to a penal colony.
It baffled his friends. They thought he was crazy.
Sakhalin Island was a frozen hellscape north
of Japan where the Russian Empire sent its worst
convicts, murderers, political prisoners. It
was the end of the world. And this wasn't a luxury
trip. We aren't talking about a sleeper car on
the Trans -Siberian because the Trans -Siberian
didn't exist yet. No. He traveled by horse -drawn
carriage and river steamer. It took months. He
was slogging through mud, up to the axles, freezing
cold, getting soaked in rain, risking his health,
which we know wasn't good. He already had symptoms
of tuberculosis. So why? Why did he do it? Why
leave the comfort of literary Moscow for that?
He was restless. His brother Nikolai had just
died of tuberculosis, which shook him deeply.
And he was obsessed with prison reform. He felt
that sitting in comfortable rooms writing stories
wasn't enough. He said he wanted to engage with
the extreme limits of man's degradation. He wanted
to pay his debt to medicine. And he certainly
found degradation. He conducted a one -man census.
He interviewed thousands of convicts face to
face. He saw floggings. He saw forced prostitution.
He saw officials embezzling supplies meant for
the prisoners. He saw a society that had completely
failed its most vulnerable members. There is
one image from his notes that is just haunting.
He describes a convict on a steamer who had murdered
his wife. He was wearing fetters -heavy chains
on his legs. And his six -year -old daughter
was with him. Yes, holding on to his fetters.
Scrambling after him, holding the chains so she
wouldn't get lost in the crowd. And at night,
she slept in a heap with the convicts and soldiers.
That image, a little girl holding on to the chains
of a herder because he's the only parent she
has, it breaks you just hearing about it. And
that is what Chekhov wanted to document. He didn't
write a novel about Sakhalin. He wrote a book
of social science, The Island of Sakhalin. He
concluded that charity wasn't the answer. The
government had a legal and moral duty to treat
these people humanely. So he proved he wasn't
just an art -for -art sick guy. Not at all. He
had a profound social conscience. He used his
fame to shine a light on a place everyone wanted
to forget. So he comes back from this harrowing
trip, and you'd think he might take a break.
But instead, he buys a country estate. and throws
himself into two things, gardening and theater.
And medicine, still. He was treating peasants
for miles around his estate. He actually built
schools for peasant children with his own money.
Unbelievable. But yes, this is the period where
the playwright Chekhov emerges. The Chekhov that
drama students today are terrified of. But it
wasn't a smooth start. The premiere of The Seagull
in 1896 sounds like a nightmare. A total disaster.
It was at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
You have to understand, the audience was used
to melodrama. They wanted clear heroes and villains.
They wanted a woman to faint and a man to pull
a pistol. They didn't get it. What happened?
They booed. They hissed. They laughed at the
wrong parts. The lead actress lost her voice
from nerves. Oh, no. Chekhov was so humiliated,
he hid backstage and then fled the theater before
the final curtain. He swore he would never write
a play again. He wrote to a friend, I have failed.
I am not a playwright. But he was saved by the
Moscow Art Theater. Specifically by Vladimir
Nemirovich Donchenko and Konstantin Stanislavski.
These are the giants of theater history. They
saw what the first audience missed. They realized
that Chekhov's plays couldn't be acted in the
old style. You couldn't just stand there and
project your voice. This brings us to the theater
of mood. What made his plays so different that
people actually booed them at first? How do you
explain this change to someone who doesn't study
theater? Okay, think of a soap opera or a standard
play of that time. If a character was angry,
they yelled. If they were sad, they gave a soliloquy
about being sad. Everything was on the surface.
I am betrayed. I am ruined. Very literal. Exactly.
In Chekhov, the characters talk about the weather.
They talk about the tea being too cold. They
argue about whether to sell a cherry orchard
or play billiards. But underneath those trivial
lines... their lives are falling apart. This
is the birth of subtext. Exactly. Stanislavski
famously said that in Chekhov, the characters
often feel things not expressed in the lines.
This forced actors to change how they acted.
They couldn't just read the lines. They had to
develop an internal life. They had to know what
the character was thinking while they were stirring
their tea. Which essentially creates modern acting.
It is the root of method acting. You don't get
Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep
without Stanislavski trying to figure out how
to play Chekhov. He realized that real drama
happens in the silences, in the pauses. And the
big four plays. The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three
Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. They are all masterpieces
of this style. But there was this funny ongoing
argument between Chekhov and Stanislavski about
what genre they actually were. Oh, they fought
about this constantly. It's hilarious. Chekhov
insisted they were comedies, even farces. He
thought they were funny. Funny. Uncle Vanya's
heartbreaking. Three sisters ends with them trapped
in a town they hate. Chekhov didn't think so.
He'd say, I wrote a vaudeville. But Stanislavski
directed them as tragedies. He had the actors
crying and sighing and pausing for long moments.
And Chekhov hated that. He would get so annoyed,
he'd say, I wrote a comedy. Why is everyone weeping?
Why did you think they were comedies? Because
he saw the absurdity of people who complain about
their lives but do nothing to change them. Take
the cherry orchard. You have these aristocrats
who are losing their family home. All they have
to do to save it is lease the land for summer
cottages. It's a simple business decision. But
they don't do it. But they refuse because it's
vulgar, so they lose everything. Chekhov thought
that was ridiculous. He thought their inaction
was funny. I think about the character Lopakhin
in The Cherry Orchard. He's the son of a serf
like Chekhov's father. who ends up buying the
aristocratic estate where his father was a slave.
That's a heavy, tragic thing for the aristocrats
losing the house. But for Lopakhin, it's a triumph.
And it's a parallel to Chekhov himself. Lopakhin
is the practical, hardworking man replacing the
dying, ineffective aristocracy. Chekhov wasn't
sentimental about the old ways. He knew that
the cherry orchard had to be cut down for the
future to happen, even if it was sad. He saw
the absurdity in the aristocrats crying over
a house they were too lazy to save. That's the
comedy. It's the comedy of human folly. While
all this artistic revolution is happening, Chekhov's
personal clock is ticking. We mentioned earlier
that he hid his illness. Tuberculosis. It was
the scourge of the 19th century. He had been
coughing up blood since 1884. And he was a doctor.
He knew what that meant. Of course he knew. He
described the blood in clinical terms, but he
practiced a form of cognitive dissonance. He
refused to be examined by his colleagues. He
brushed it off as bronchitis. He kept working.
He kept traveling. And amidst this, he finally
falls in love. Or at least he finally gets married.
He was known as the elusive bachelor for a long
time. He valued his independence immensely. He
once wrote to his friend Suvaran that he would
only marry if his wife, like the moon, won't
appear in my sky every day. Which is not the
most romantic proposal I've ever heard. I'll
marry you as long as I don't have to see you
every day. It sounds cold, but he found someone
who fit the bill. Olga Nipper. She was the leading
actress at the Moscow Art Theater. She played
the lead in his plays. Oh, okay. They met at
rehearsals. They married in 1901. And the circumstances
forced them into exactly the arrangement he wanted.
Yes. Because he was sick, he had to live in Yalta,
in the warm south. For his lungs. And she had
to live in Moscow for her acting career. So they
had the world's first famous long -distance relationship.
They wrote hundreds of letters. It was a marriage
of words. And in a way, it was perfect for him.
He had his intimacy. He loved her deeply. But
he also had his solitude to write. Although the
letters show that he missed her terribly towards
the end. But the disease eventually caught up.
It's 1904. He's only 44 years old. That is shockingly
young for the amount of work he produced. It
is. He goes to a spa town in Germany, Baden -Weiler,
with Olga. He's very weak. And the story of his
death is one of the most famous scenes in literary
history. It's almost too perfect. Like, he wrote
it himself. Walk us through it. It's the middle
of the night. He wakes up and sits up unusually
straight. He requests a doctor. When the doctor
arrives, Chekhov looks at him and says, in German,
ich sterbe, I am dying. And the doctor? Doesn't
give him oxygen. Doesn't try to revive him. No.
The doctor checks his pulse, realizes it's the
end, and orders a bottle of champagne. Champagne?
That seems so strange to us now. It was an old
medical tradition for a dying colleague. A way
to ease the passing when there was no hope left.
Chekhov takes the glass, turns to Olga, smiles,
and says, It's a long time since I drank champagne.
He drains the glass, lies down on his left side,
and stops breathing. It's so quiet. It's so Chekhovian.
No big speech about the meaning of life. Just
a small observation about champagne and then
silence. But then, and this is my favorite part,
reality intrudes with a detail that Chekhov would
have absolutely put in a play. His body had to
be transported back to Moscow for burial and
it was sent in a refrigerated railway car. Okay,
that makes sense. It was summer. But the car
wasn't a hearse. It was a freight car. And on
the side, in big letters, it said, for oysters.
For oysters. Yes. Maxim Gorky, another famous
writer and a friend of Chekhov, was furious.
He thought it was disrespectful. He was ranting
about the indignity of it. But Chekhov. I think
Chekhov would have appreciated the irony. The
tragedy of a great writer's death mixed with
the ridiculous banality of an oyster wagon. That
mixture of the sad and the funny is exactly what
his writing was about. Life isn't a pure tragedy
or a pure comedy. It's just life. It's messy.
It's sublime. And it's ridiculous all at once.
So looking back at his legacy, he died at 44.
But he left this massive footprint. Huge. James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams.
They all owe a debt to him. He changed the fundamental
DNA of how we tell stories. He taught us that
a story doesn't need a hero or a villain. It
just needs people. And he taught us that it's
okay not to have the answers. That is his ultimate
philosophy. He believed the role of the artist
is to ask questions correctly, not to provide
the answers. In a world that is constantly screaming
opinions at us, especially on social media, Chekhov
invites us to sit in the silence, to look at
the subtext of our own lives. Which is a pretty
powerful thought to leave on. Maybe the most
important things in our lives aren't the things
we're shouting about, but the things we're not
saying while we're drinking our tea. Exactly.
Sometimes the gun on the wall doesn't need to
go off. Sometimes it just hangs there and that's
the story. That's it for this deep dive into
Anton Chekhov. Thanks for listening, and we'll
see you next time.