Chekhov's lasting influence

What a pleasure to begin reading the Pevear-Volkhansky translations of Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories - I've probably read about a million words in translation from P-V, and I'm very grateful for all they've done to make great Russian literature accessible to English-readers. This edition arranges the 20 or so stories chronologically, so it's very instructive to follow Chekhov's career and development as an artist. The first stories are still amazingly distinct and, probably in 1880s, very startling: bright, acerbic, just a single scene or moment or event, barely sketched in; the first in the collection about a lower-ranking clerk who sneezes during an opera performance and spends several days in agony about making an apology to a man of superior "rank," and when he completes the apology: he dies (story called The Death of a Clerk, I think) - short, strange, with a hint of a deeper meaning, making his obeisance is a kind of death foretold, his sense of inferiority makes him a living dead man. Reading deeper into the collection, we see the stories grow more mysterious and more distinctly Chekhov's - one example being the great one with a title that translates as something like Prayer for the Dead (we would say Kaddish): a man in church sees the priest staring at him after Mass, realizes the priest is angry because his daughter was a "harlot," man asks the priest to do a memorial service, priest agrees, and as the story ends Ch. describes smoke from the censer drifting its way in ribbons toward the ceiling: this story is an illustration in miniature of Ch.'s great work - the focus on ordinary people, their lives told in simple and stark detail, dialogue that's very natural, and, with a very light hand, use of mysterious symbols and a very open ending - a form highly influential in literature to this day, more than 130 years later - the obvious heir and benefactor in America being Raymond Carver, who revered Chekhov and whose last story was a tribute to the master: both understood the need for economy of words and action, authorial distance, focus on ordinary people and everyday behavior, an open structure, and the power of imagery when it can grow out of the action of the story rather than be imposed upon the story by the artist.