Protest, którego nie było —spotkanie Antoniego Czechowa
A protest that never happened — Anton Chekhov’s an encounter

Summary/Abstract: In his article, Artur Sadecki analyses the theme of protest in Anton Chekhov’s short story An Encounter. This story belongs to a cycle of stories in which Chekhov refers to Leo Tolstoy’s thoughts, chiefly to the principle of nonresistance: the refusal to violently resist evil. Sadecki shows how this idea has affected the lives of two ordinary people: the peasant Ephraim and the thief Kuzma. Ephraim’s refusal to use violence after the theft influences Kuzma, but the latter takes a long time to regret his deed and soon returns to his former life. In Chekhov’s fiction, this form of protest turns out to be incomplete; it causes people to act unnaturally and fails to create strong interpersonal ties in a society that offers individuals no educational, medical or moral-religious support.

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