TEHRAN -- Iranian author Shohreh Ahadiat is currently working on a project surveying the role of female characters in the short stories of Anton Chekhov.

“Long time ago, I went through the Chekhov’s oeuvre and learned about his particular view on women,” Ahadiat told the Mehr News Agency on Sunday.
“It took me two years to research on this subject,” she added.
“In Chekhov’s view, women are always recognized as the symbols of infidelity, trickery, and hypocrisy,” she said.
According to Ahadiat, the dark view of Chekhov should be evaluated in reference with his social circumstances.
Woman characters appear in many works of the Russian playwright and master of the modern short story.
This subject has previously been surveyed by other authors in the world. One of them is Carolina De Maegd-Soëp, whose “Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work of Chekhov” (1987) presents an in-depth study of this issue.
“Give me a wife, who, like the moon, would not appear in my sky every day,” De Maegd-Soëp wrote quoting Chekhov in a letter he sent to his publisher A.S. Suvorin in 1895.