“To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Chekhov was the poet of helplessness.” This is how Russian existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov has put it into words. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the Southwest of Russia in 1860. As a young man he was accepted to medical school, and published humorous sketches in newspapers in order to support his family financially. Writing his first short stories on middle-class and lower-class people of Russia, he situated them in everyday-life incidents. “I learned to write concisely on long events,” Chekhov said once.