The aesthetic ideal of an artist precedes his literary career and is developing together with it. The profundity of the ideal will determine the height of the author's work. The scientific study of Chekhov's creative work should start in its time from its aesthetic ideal. Without having determined the aesthetic ideal one can explain satisfactorily neither the writer's common trend nor a single work of his; one cannot avoid empiricism, unfoundedness, and conventional transference of analytical methods from one writer upon another.
The aesthetic ideal includes the peculiarity of the writer's world perception, his humanism, and the peculiarities of his works, not coming down separately to each of its components as the whole does not constitute the parts making up the whole. There also exists the difference between the aesthetic and artistic ideal, as the creative embodiment of the first.
The artistic ideal, in its turn, cannot be reduced to an artistic skill, to a technique of literary work, which is not the aim, but the means.
The article has no pretensions of fully covering the huge problem. There is a tendency in revealing Chekhov's ideal, establishing its genesis, and some approaches to the interpretation of the brief formula “Everything in man must be perfect…” are made.
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