Why A Boring Story isn't : early Chekhov

Chekhov's weirdly named story "A Boring Story" is not boring but it's not his greatest story either - it's interesting to see him relatively early in his career experimenting with a longer form, pushing toward some of the novellas he would later write, and even more important to see him develop one of the first of his characters suffering from the distinct form of Chekhovian despair that we all have come to know and appreciate mostly from his great dramas: the protagonist/narrator is an early version of a Chekhov type, the intellectual late in his life looking back at a lifetime of missed opportunities and misunderstandings. He's an elderly medical professor who has contempt for his students, his colleagues; feels little or nothing for his wife, whom he used to love, and for his daughter (though there are some moments of tenderness there - but he has no sympathy for her loneliness and disappointments) - the only person he seems to love is his adopted daughter or ward, a deeply troubled young woman who is in despair herself: a single mother, ostracized. There's a great deal of sexual undercurrent here, which Chekhov leaves as a background element, almost unstated - but there's certainly a sense that the professor is attracted to his ward because of her licentious sexual history, and that he is troubled to learn that one of his colleagues is courting her. Like many Chekhov stories, this one ends on an ambiguous note - the characters resigned to their difficult fates, to their loneliness and isolation - much like the endings of his plays. This story not as great as some of the later ones in that there's too much exposition, the protagonist states his beliefs at great length, whereas in the later masterpieces - e.g., Lady with a Lapdog - the despair is made evident by the action of the characters.