When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

And let’s note that we’re only asking these questions (which, in turn, are causing the story to ask questions about the nature of love) because the length of each relationship was specified by the story and because Chekhov “remembered” or “took the trouble” to vary this parameter.

Gogol was a strange creature,” Nabokov wrote, “but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life.” Tolstoy and Chekhov, Nabokov said, also had their “moments of irrational insight” that produced an abrupt moment of “focal shift,” but in Gogol “this shifting is the very basis of his art.

It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us.

The stories we’re reading here are among the best their authors ever wrote. But these authors also wrote lesser ones, and it’s important to read those too, if only to remind ourselves that nobody hits it out of the park every time, and that a masterpiece might have three or four test runs behind it, in which the artist was working some things out.