Chekhov and Zola's Naturalism

Abstract

It is a critical commonplace that the young Chekhov owed a substantial debt to the French author Emile Zola, who was famous throughout European letters, many would say notorious, for his forthright, oftentimes graphic depictions of sexuality and the human body. However, this commonplace is a shallow one: most parallels between Chekhov and Zola in contemporary criticism are made in passing and a full‐length study on the two authors has yet to be undertaken. In this connection, my article explores how those very features found in Zola that so infuriated critics of his day, including his graphic sexuality, his love of raw detail, and his oftentimes haphazard blend of in vogue scientific theories and imaginative literature, shaped Chekhov’s own work. More specifically, I focus on Chekhov’s relationship to one of Zola’s most intriguing scandals, the publication of his novel Therese Raquin. In his scandalous introduction to this work, Zola laid out his Naturalist method of writing imaginative literature. In his view, an author must be a “surgeon” who performs analysis on his characters, in particular his female characters, in the same way a doctor does an autopsy on a corpse. My article examines the implications such an artistic orientation had for the young Anton Chekhov, who as both a professional physician and a professional artist, responded particularly to Zola’s dual self‐posturing and its resulting implications for describing complex female characters in Russian literature.