Anton Chekhov spent twenty years practicing medicine in rural Russia. He treated peasants, convicts, the destitute, the dying. He watched people lie, steal, betray their families, drink themselves to ruin. He saw every variety of human failure at close range. And he never condemned a single one of them.

His fiction is full of weak men, selfish women, cowards, adulterers, people who knew better and did worse anyway. He renders them all with the same attention. His critics pushed him to take sides, to punish his characters or reward them, but he refused. The artist's job, he said, was to present the question correctly. Answering it was someone else's work.