Anton Chekhov consistently ranks as one of the greatest short story writers in the world, with an output, in just a few years, of hundreds of stories. (This is in addition to his work as a playwright, for which he may be even better known.) Of all Chekhov’s short stories, his personal favorite was “The Student.” He called this brief story, only a few pages in length, a “manifesto for optimism.”¹ If Chekhov valued this story so highly, if it is indeed a manifesto for optimism, then might there not be something vital to be gleaned from it—something positive, something optimistic, something consistent with Chekhov’s own values, something consonant with the title itself? What makes this story so significant among his countless narratives?

I. Sickness Unto Death

Chekhov wrote in the shadow of sickness (tuberculosis), facing the prospect of early death. “The Student,” his favorite among his stories, was written in spring 1894, in Yalta, Crimea (in what is now Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory).² The story was published on April 16, 1894, shortly before Orthodox Easter that year. Chekhov’s illness was acute at that time. He described essentially a near-death experience that spring with clinical understatement, writing in a letter: 

The other day I almost fell down and I fancied for a minute that I was dying. I was walking along the avenue with the prince, our neighbour, and was talking when all at once something seemed to break in my chest, I had a feeling of warmth and suffocation, there was a singing in my ears, I remembered that I had been having palpitations for a long time and thought—“they must have meant something then.” I went rapidly towards the verandah on which visitors were sitting, and had one thought—that it would be awkward to fall down and die before strangers. . . .³

What inspired this short story of religion-infused reflection? It’s impossible to know for sure. But given his sickness and his Orthodox upbringing, perhaps it is not surprising that Chekhov would grapple in “The Student” with themes of denial, death, resurrection, and hope, inhabiting in it the role of a religious student in the process. The story follows a young seminary student, darkened by existential doubt, who visits two widows on Good Friday. It begins with the famous biblical language, “In the beginning,” (or, technically, “The weather in the beginning”) and it then conveys elements from the Christian narrative of fall/alienation, repentance/redemption, and reconciliation. Along the way, the narrative invites identification with Peter and his denial of Christ just before the crucifixion. And it hints at the unconditional love and reconciliation extended to Peter by Christ—healing fruit that flourishes from the garden of Christ’s suffering. 

II. Mysterious Hope

One mystery within the story is the stark transition from almost blasphemous pessimism near the beginning—“All of this [evil] was, is, and has been,” a godlike description of evil—to luminous, communal connection and optimism by the end. Chekhov notably viewed his story as a “manifesto for optimism.” At the beginning of the story, evil seems to endure forever. By the end, the main character (re)discovers that it is truly goodness—the transcendent truth and beauty of the Creator, the Supreme Narrator as it were—that endures forever. 

What provides the mysterious new basis for hope in the story? On one level, the story seems to show how love of neighbor builds connection, inspires hope, and fuels optimism. Chekhov applied this principle in his own life. He generously provided for the medical, educational, and religious needs of others. On another level, despite his ambiguous relationship with religion,⁴ Chekhov may also have had in mind the eternal love and providence of God as another source of this mysterious movement towards optimism. Specifically, for the Christian, and likely for the seminarian, this healing encounter with the love of God is built on Christ’s suffering, forgiveness, and resurrection, transforming frail sin-burdened people into free forgiven spirits. Arguably, it is his participation in Peter’s story and Christ’s story that undoes the student’s earlier oppression by the evils, terrors, and miseries of human life. Chekhov could have written (or attempted) a variation on this story, a different manifesto for hope, one with a nonreligious character who moves toward hope without the aid of religious reflection. Yet that alternate version is not the story he chose to write here. Likewise, Chekhov often presented characters in balanced pairs, articulating antithetical views without ultimate resolution of the tension or conflict. Yet here he does not offer a contrasting character to dispute with the student’s perspective. Elsewhere Chekhov treats the idea (presented by Tolstoy) of a vague, spiritual, impersonal, amorphous resurrection skeptically.⁵ Yet here he seems to treat a transcendent idea of resurrection, reconciliation, and eternity more positively. 

In seeking further the spark of hope in the story, it may help to ask a related question. Why does the familiar story within the story of Peter’s denial of Christ have such a seemingly profound impact on the two widows? The women seem to exist at the edge of the village, the edge of society. Almost abandoned. Not unlike the ostracized woman Jesus seeks at a well in Samaria. They’ve neglected to fast on Good Friday, despite the Orthodox tradition, and perhaps they feel guilty or exposed or alone, like Peter. The student never mentions this. Yet he helps bring community back to them. And through his retelling of Peter’s denial of Christ and Christ’s impending crucifixion on that same day centuries past, he humbly identifies with Peter, and reminds hearers of Jesus’s forgiveness and reunion with Peter soon afterwards. All three characters are moved. And while the two widows may be at different stages of their emotional journey, nevertheless, a hopeful future of eternal love seems to surface, surprising and swift and beautiful. Somehow as the characters participate as though pilgrims in the timeless story within the story, witnessing again Peter’s denial and the movement of his soul and of one another’s souls, they are brought together in cathartic connection, bridging the loneliness of human isolation with a lilting breath of Love’s narrative. 

Truth and beauty endure forever, the student suggests, and it’s by connection to the transcendental, to God, the source and creator of all, that one may find ultimate communal connection, hope, and compassion for others. In this encounter with the transcendent, the story suggests in its last line, life may finally transform into something “entrancing, wonderful, and endowed with sublime meaning.”⁶ 

III. Coda: Readers as Empathetic, Eternal Students

Chekhovian meaning almost always retains an enigmatic quality. Critics emphasize different elements and potential meanings within the story. (See, for example, the dueling interpretations of Robert Louis Jackson and Wolf Schmid in the Norton Critical Edition of his short stories.) At the same time, in this story, to a higher degree than usual perhaps, he deploys intricate details that act as clues to vital hope-filled meaning, sufficient to justify his description of the story as a manifesto for optimism. Meanwhile, flawed characters invite empathy, probing our own humanity. Come, explore, experience, detect, trust, and love all the beauty and truth and goodness of the Creator’s creation. Optimism waits for us, ready to (re)awaken us abruptly at any moment along this path, he seems to say. 

1. From a letter to his brother Alexander. See “The Student (short story),” Wikipedia (accessed Feb. 3, 2026) (citing Jefferson Hunter, “Three Versions of Peter’s Denial,” The Hudson Review (Spring 1980), p. 56). ↩︎
2. As both a doctor and a writer, Chekhov was an eloquent advocate of freedom, and opponent of all forms of oppression, a voice desperately needed now in his native land. “I hate lying and violence in all their forms,” he wrote, seeking recognition of “the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, whatever form they may take.” Letter to A.N. Pleshtcheyev, October, 1889.  ↩︎
3. Letter to A.S. Suvorin, April 21, 1894.  ↩︎
4. At one point, he could write, “I have no religion now.” Letter to I.L. Shtcheglov, March 9, 1892. At other times, he seems to express surprising trust in divine Providence. And he invokes God repeatedly in his letters. Writing of the progression of his sickness, he concludes, “But all that is in God’s hands.” Letter to A.S. Suvorin, Nov. 18, 1891. And in another letter he writes, “I am not to blame for my disease, and it’s not for me to cure myself, for this disease, it must be supposed, has some good purpose hidden from us, and is not sent in vain . . .” Letter to A.S. Suvorin, Nov. 25, 1892.  ↩︎
5. “We discussed immortality. He accepts the idea of immortality in the Kantian sense, proposing that all of us (human beings and animals) will continue to live on in some primal state (reason, love?), the essence and purpose of which is a mystery hidden from us. However, this primal state of force appears to me to be a shapeless mass of jelly, into which my `I,’ my individuality, my consciousness, would be absorbed. I don’t feel any need for immortality in this form. I don’t understand it, but Lev Nikoleyevich finds it astonishing that I don’t understand it.” Quoted in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Penguin, 2004).  ↩︎
6. An example of the “eucatastrophe”—“the sudden joyous ‘turn’” that Tolkien described in his essay “On Fairy Stories”—“that does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” ↩︎