For all his immense literary fame, Anton Chekhov is unknown as a thinker. In Chekhov's Antidotes, Corrigan offers a bold reassessment of why Chekhov's thought matters, both for his own time and for ours. Widely regarded as a purveyor of gloom and indecision, Chekhov was in fact a reparative moral philosopher who fought back against the pathologies of a divided and troubled age. In the face of emergent revolution and civil war, Chekhov studied the polarization, apathy, and fanaticism that were driving his society towards self-destruction. Corrigan tells the story of Chekhov's career in a new light, reading the short stories and plays as antidotes to looming catastrophe. The book uncovers Chekhov's practical meditations on how to heal and resist culture war; on how to alleviate modern strains of sloth, loneliness, and despair; and how to conceive of robust forms of activism when confronting what cannot be healed or repaired. As Corrigan reveals, Chekhov offers no panaceas for the pathologies of modern life, only pragmatic meditations on how to salvage an irreparably broken world, and on how to cultivate meaning, dignity, and integrity as incurably fragmented human subjects—lessons we can all use in our current divisive era, under the shadow of our own looming crises.
