Shestov on Chekhov

Left Zagajewski and have settled on some Shestov essays I found on Amazon. The first is on Chekhov. It's Shestov working on Chekhov. A sample:

To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Tchekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekhov was doing one thing alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes.

*

There is no detailed biography of Tchekhov, and probably will never be, because there is no such thing as a full biography—I, at all events, cannot name one. Generally biographies tell us everything except what it is important to know. Perhaps in the future it will be revealed to us with the fullest details who was Tchekhov's tailor; but we shall never know what happened to Tchekhov in the time which elapsed between the completion of his story The Steppe and the appearance of his first drama. If we would know, we must rely upon his works and our own insight.