A favorite professor of my undergraduate years taught the short stories of Anton Chekhov as models of supreme, writerly virtues: brevity, compression, (seeming) simplicity, a cold realism, yet deep compassion for the felt experience of human suffering. He also extolled Chekhov’s personal life—brief, cool, practical, compassionate—giving the impression that the style was the man. The Soviet Union was falling apart then, but this Chekhov was a writer the Soviets could claim as a pre-Revolution hero of the people: a wise, kind doctor who served in public health crises; traveled at great personal risk to a penal colony to write an early work of social science; helped build schools, libraries, sanatoriums, and local infrastructure; cared for his family as devoted son and brother; was a non-believer before atheism became state policy; and had brought fame to the motherland as a giant of literature and theater around the world.…