Maupassant, Tchekhov, comparisons and differences
In his way, and despite all the differences in style between the two, Guy de Maupassant can be considered the French Chekhov. Like the Russian master, Maupassant was a short story writer of seminal influence. The American critic Richard Fusco pointed out, in his book Maupassant and the American Short Story, how much the formal aspects of the short story perfected by the French author
influenced English-speaking short story writers such as Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ambrose Bierce, all of whom were early admirers and founding authors of the “short story” still practiced in the United States today.
It is obvious that the short story was already practiced before Maupassant, but the Frenchman was one of the first to realize that the best ones were the most concise, and that a linear plot is not always the most efficient in terms of impact on the reader. Assuming the reader’s point of view, Maupassant, in a correct and sober language, but without the exuberance of his master Flaubert, honed his plots and made a model of the unadorned tale, with a story confined within strict limits that would provoke an intense effect of miniaturization of life.
The parallel between Chekhov and Maupassant can also be traced beyond the performance of both as short story writers (Maupassant was more devoted to long narrative than the Russian), but extends to unusual biographical circumstances. Both were gone at a young age, victimized by the common diseases of their time — Maupassant died demented at 43, destroyed by syphilis, while Chekhov perished at 44, of tuberculosis. And despite their relatively brief lives, both astonish with an extensive and very high quality output. Perhaps the case of Maupassant is even more astonishing,
since, as a disciple of Flaubert, he inherited from him the obsession for tirelessly revising his own texts, and only considered himself a “professional writer” after the age of 30. In a decade, therefore, even revising his writings with the obsession of a goldsmith, Maupassant produced six novels, three hundred short stories, and an almost equal number of chronicles in the press.
What cannot be compared in both, however, is their worldview. Although disenchanted, both of them, Chekhov, even when describing his most pathetic beings, had a melancholy tenderness completely absent in the Frenchman’s work. Zola’s partner in the endeavor of realism, though unhampered by the former’s scientism, Maupassant devoted himself to exploring desire, loneliness, and inner hell with far more dryness and cruelty.
