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 But Chekhov quite ceased to be a peasant. He had enjoyed immense advantages: a decent and intelligent family life, full of kindly and affectionate feeling; a university training followed by a medical education; and early and lifelong association with cultivated men. He knew modern science and modern literature. He read Darwin, Spencer, Buckle; Goethe, Schiller, Hauptmann, Nordau, Nietzsche; Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maupassant; H. B. Stowe and Thoreau; Cervantes; Ibsen; Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich. He emerged from the peasant class into the intelligentsia. He emerged from Russia into Western civilization. And very keenly at an early age he felt responsible for conducting both his life and his art like a European gentleman who was also an intellectual.

You can see him applying that standard effectively to his own friends, to the actors in the theater, and, very significantly, to such authors as Tolstoy and Gorky. The sincerity and elevation of Tolstoy's spirit he profoundly revered: he recognized the man's essential nobility, and for that reason loved him above all other Russian writers. But Tolstoy's asceticism and his glorification of the peasant he regarded as wide aberrations from common sense. Chekhov hadn't the faintest desire to return to the peasantry. He knew it too well. He admired the talent of Gorky, befriended and helped him. At first meeting with him he was pleased with Gorky's intellectual outlook, pleased with everything about him except his peasant smock. Later he reacted against something raw, overstrained and violent in him—Maxim had a tedious tendency to "scream" under excitement and roar a man down. Chekhov had a well bred hatred of domination and