Caryl Emerson distinguishes Chekhov from the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky through his specific evocation of embarrassment, an emotion so ubiquitous in Chekhov’s writing as to become fused with his poetics and his worldview. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built their plots on more assertive acts and emotions, Chekhov, as Emerson shows, runs his path to redemption and discovery through the moral capacity to cringe at one’s own words and behavior.