Was Chekhov an Aberration?

I studied Russian because I loved Russian literature. Misguidedly, I thought I would therefore love all Russians. I imagined that they would have the calm detached sense of absurdity of Chekhov, the godlike understanding of humanity of Tolstoy, the surreal sense of life's tragicomedy of Gogol. I see now that this was as idiotic as imagining the people you meet in London are all going to be as wise as William Shakespeare.

The trouble is though that, while Londoners are not all William Shakespeare, they are not all utterly antipathetic, whereas in my experience Russians usually are (yeah, yeah, I know it's a huge generalisation, but I'm sticking with it, until something happens to make me believe otherwise - and it's been quite a few years since I first arrived at this sorry conclusion and nothing has yet suggested I'm wrong).

Not only have I never met a Russian even a bit like Chekhov, I'm not sure I've met one who properly understood what I think are his absolutely central themes - that life is a joke made by the universe and that our individual posturings are silly and hilarious and pathetically sad. This is what Fawlty Towers is all about, as well, in my opinion, but Russians of my acquaintance all reject Fawlty Towers. It is emblematic of everything they despise about us. For them there is nothing humorous or even interesting in the situation it portrays. They are happy to wallow in the sadness of existence, but they do not want to make light of it. They look at us laughing and shake their heads. They retreat back behind the barrier they have built between us. It is made from their own unwavering, accusatory sense of cultural superiority and their unconcealed disgust at our Anglo Saxon frivolity and lack of proper seriousness.

But the poet Bronwyn Lea has described all this so much better than I have in her poem called 'Miserability':

Grey skies over Brisbane today -
maybe like the skies over St Petersburg,
I think, but she says, 'No.
The clouds in St Petersburg are heavy like bells'
And so it is with her eyes.
'Your people are kind,' she says, 'this is true
but because I know how it is
to be whittled down to a twig and grow again into a tree -
because I know it & speak it,
they think me clown.'
'Yes,' I say, 'my people are kind
but we do not like to talk about sad things.
It's always been this way.'
She looks at me through wet lashes
in that wounding way of children,
her black eyes bright with 'miserability' -
'Then tell me,' she says, as if I were her
messenger and not her witness, 'where are your poets?'

How brilliant of Bronwyn Lea to write a poem as revenge.