To write about reality seems simple. All an author must do is portray
             day to day life in a work. This should not be so difficult, considering
             said author lives day to day life every day. However, one must assess the
             differences among each human's day to day lives before assuming to portray
             a conceivable "realist" work. By analyzing and contrasting Dostoevsky's
             Notes from Underground and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard one can be
             convinced of the complexities of realist writing and the problems realist
             writing presents to the writer. Notes from Underground is written from the
             perspective of a man overcome with a desire to follow "isms". The Cherry
             Orchard depicts a family whose ways of thinking do not change throughout
             the entire play, but whose physical reality is changed by the effects of
             time. The similarity between these two works is that both contain
             characters created by an author. The characters portrayed are not actual
             people, and therefore do not contain the complexities of a true human mind.
             They contain the thoughts and predispositions of the author who created
             them, but lack the well-roundedness of an actual human. Realism can be
             described as an attempt to recreate every day life as it truly is in
             literature, but reality can not be recreated in its entirety by a partial
             author creating unreal characters and unreal circumstances.
             Dostoevsky creates an interesting and anonymous character, The
             Underground Man, in his work Notes from Underground. This character is
             meant to embody the "isms" that so bothered Dostoevsky such as optimism,
             atheism, and romantic sentimentalism. This character is supposed to be a
             realistic human living a realistic life, however no true human is composed
             of all of these ideas. No true human takes on all of the faults of society.
             The Underground Man is an outlet for Dostoevsky's distain of humanity, and
             therefore the definition of realism must include un...