‘In the Ravine’: Čechov's Conscience vs. Dostoevskij's Faith

‘In the Ravine’ (‘V ovrage’), one of Chekhov's gloomiest stories from the life of the people, contains explicit references to Dostoevskii's major novels, especially The Brothers Karamazov. Chekhov makes his characters live out Dostoevskian plots but does not provide them with the intellectual apparatus and the heightened self-reflection of Dostoevskii's heroes. The result is striking: outside its literary playing field, in the folkloric world of ‘In the Ravine’, Dostoevskii's carefully structured world of ideas loses most of its authority and potency. Chekhov is interested in the multitude of individual perspectives on faith, and in the complexity and irreducibility of the problem itself. In ‘In the Ravine’, he reformulates the abstract problem of religious faith and moral living in secular terms of conscience and profit.