The “fundamental accuracy of observation” at work makes me trust the writer and feel engaged. This is, roughly speaking, the essence of “realism”: there’s a world out there and the writer makes his story resemble it. But as we’re seeing, realism isn’t all that real. The Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy stories we’ve read so far are compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them. (Was there ever a woman as self-abnegating as Olenka? Ever a master as one-noted as Vasili? Do your trips home from town contain as much compressed drama as Marya’s?)
