From Russia, with love

In the Letter from America which the late Alistair Cooke devoted to commemorating Charles Schulz in February 2000, he recalled the time when the creator of the legendary Peanuts cartoon strip was asked why his hapless hero Charlie Brown never won. "Well of course, winning is great," Schulz replied, "but it's not funny. And there are no happy endings in my stories because happiness, too, isn't funny."

For Cooke, this remark went a long way towards explaining what lies at the root of all great humorists. It is certainly true of Anton Chekhov, who began writing skits for lowbrow comic journals in order to earn money, and went on to establish an extraordinarily successful career writing poignant stories and plays about the grown-up Charlie Browns of late imperial Russia. Remember the bespectacled and painfully shy officer Ryabovich in The Kiss? After mistakenly receiving an embrace intended for someone else at a dance, he succumbs to fantasies of a happy, ordinary life (marriage, a family) until he is met with the equivalent of Lucy's eternal put-down of "Good grief, Charlie Brown!" when his fellow officers snigger at his breathless story. You know that Ryabovich will never get his girl, just as you know that Charlie Brown will never win the heart of his red-haired sweetheart. Always the losers. And yet how affectionately drawn.

As self-effacing, disciplined and celebrity-shy as Schulz, and no less prolific, Chekhov shared a similarly wry view of the world. His understated works continue to enjoy a worldwide appeal today because of the universality of their subject matter. Chekhov was a Russian through and through, but the problems of human interaction which he explores transcend national boundaries, and have not changed essentially since his death.

Chekhov succumbed to tuberculosis 100 years ago today, on July 15 1904. He would have enjoyed the irony of dying in a health spa, in a pristine and b&uumlaut;rgerlich resort in Germany's Black Forest. At the time of his death, he was Russia's greatest literary celebrity after Tolstoy (who outlived him by six years). He was a man whose hatred of hypocrisy and cant was visible in everything he wrote, from the searing indictment of the Tsarist penal system in his book The Island of Sakhalin, to the hard-hitting letters he sent to his anti-semitic newspaper magnate friend, Alexey Suvorin, about the Dreyfus case while sojourning in Nice. It can also be seen in the simple, direct language of his 600 short stories and 12 plays, irrespective of whether he was writing slapstick vaudevilles (the author of the elegiac Three Sisters is also the author of the uproarious one-act play The Bear) or profound meditations on the human condition (compare the comical early story The Malefactor with Ward No. 6). Chekhov is nowadays the most popular playwright after Shakespeare in the English-speaking world: a remarkable achievement when one remembers that his reputation rests largely on just four plays, the last two of which were written with great difficulty when he was already gravely ill. Nevertheless, the combination of the carefully shaped form of his plays - full of poetic, pregnant pauses - with the tragicomic human dramas of his sympathetic characters continues to ensure their enduring appeal to audiences today. And, of course, if you ask any writer whom they revere as the founder of the modern short story, the chances are the answer will be Chekhov.

The centenary of Chekhov's death provides a serendipitous opportunity to reflect on how our perception of this astounding and inspiring writer has changed over the decades. Chekhov was a man of his time, rightly associated with the giants of 19th-century Russian literature. But he was also a furtive iconoclast who challenged just about every literary convention going. The deceptive simplicity of his work masks a sophisticated technique which now propels a vast scholarly industry: there were no fewer than 100 speakers at the international conference on Chekhov held last month in Moscow. Not only did Chekhov do away with conventional plots in his plays and stories, he challenged our assumptions about how they should begin and end, and what sort of people made interesting characters. It was really only in the second half of the 20th century that we began to be able to perceive, from our post-existentialist vantage point, how modern Chekhov was, how sensitive as a writer to the contingencies of being. Only astute readers such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield recognised Chekhov as their contemporary straight away. Chekhov is not heroic, Woolf wrote in 1918, "he is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful, and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme".

Chekhov's astounding range, his ambiguities, his glorious sense of the absurd, have won him followers among writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever and Eudora Welty. Raymond Carver, whose own late story, Errand, deals with Chekhov's final hours, unequivocally described him as the greatest short story writer who has ever lived. "Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared," he maintained. "It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote - for few, if any, writers have ever done more - it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish." Richard Ford, another master of the modern short story, is another eloquent proponent of Chekhov's continuing importance. "As readers of imaginative literature, we are always seeking clues, warnings," he wrote in the introduction to a recent anthology. "Where in life to search more assiduously; what not to overlook; what's the origin of this sort of human calamity, that sort of joy and pleasure: how can we live nearer to the latter, further off from the former? And to such seekers as we are, Chekhov is a guide, perhaps the guide."

Chekhov is indeed a great guide. But happily for us, he could never take life too seriously. A random entry picked from his notebooks reminds us of his irrepressible humour and his delightfully quirky view of the world: "A government official started to live an unusual life," he tells us. "A very tall chimney on his dacha, green trousers, a blue waistcoat, a dog with dyed hair, dinner at midnight. Within a week he had given it up." It was not for nothing that Chekhov's friend Suvorin spoke of him after his death as "the kind of poet who sings like a bird - sings and rejoices."

· Dr Rosamund Bartlett is a lecturer in Russian in the school of modern languages at Durham University. In addition to Chekhov: Scenes From a Life (Simon & Schuster, 2004), she is the author, with Anna Benn, of Literary Russia: A Guide (Picador, 1997). She is also editor and translator of Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 2004) and translated Chekhov's About Love (OUP, 2004).