Anton Chekhov wrote his stories and plays with an eye to looming cataclysm. He died more than a decade before the unrest of his time would peak in violent revolution and civil war, but his works are vividly alert to these prospects. A practicing doctor, he wrote diagnostically, studying the polarization and fanaticism that were paralyzing his society, permeating every aspect of daily life. “The world will perish,” as Elena predicts in Uncle Vanya, “not from brigands and not from fires, but from hatred, enmity—from all these petty squabbles.”

This talk explores Chekhov’s attempts to help push back against such a future. He has been rightly canonized as an apolitical writer, a consummate artist who abstained from moral instruction and polemics. But reading Chekhov in light of escalating culture war allows us to see how keenly invested he was in shoring up the life of the formless middle, in giving shape to the awkward and onerous work of political reconciliation.