biography of anton chekhov

Anton Chekhov

(1860-1904)

Who Was Anton Chekhov?

Through stories such as "The Steppe" and "The Lady with the Dog," and plays such as The Seagull and Uncle Vanya , Anton Chekhov emphasized the depths of human nature, the hidden significance of everyday events and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Chekhov died of tuberculosis on July 15, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany.

Youth and Education

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father, Pavel, was a grocer with frequent money troubles; his mother, Yevgeniya, shared her love of storytelling with Chekhov and his five siblings.

When Pavel’s business failed in 1875, he took the family to Moscow to look for other work while Chekhov remained in Taganrog until he finished his studies. Chekhov finally joined his family in Moscow in 1879 and enrolled at medical school. With his father still struggling financially, Chekhov supported the family with his freelance writing, producing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pen name for local magazines.

Early Writing Career

During the mid-1880s, Chekhov practiced as a physician and began to publish serious works of fiction under his own name. His pieces appeared in the newspaper New Times and then as part of collections such as Motley Stories (1886). His story “The Steppe” was an important success, earning its author the Pushkin Prize in 1888. Like most of Chekhov’s early work, it showed the influence of the major Russian realists of the 19th century, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Chekhov also wrote works for the theater during this period. His earliest plays were short farces; however, he soon developed his signature style, which was a unique mix of comedy and tragedy. Plays such as Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889) told stories about educated men of the upper classes coping with debt, disease and inevitable disappointment in life.

Major Works

Chekhov wrote many of his greatest works from the 1890s through the last few years of his life. In his short stories of that period, including “Ward No. 6” and “The Lady with the Dog,” he revealed a profound understanding of human nature and the ways in which ordinary events can carry deeper meaning.

In his plays of these years, Chekhov concentrated primarily on mood and characters, showing that they could be more important than the plots. Not much seems to happen to his lonely, often desperate characters, but their inner conflicts take on great significance. Their stories are very specific, painting a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian society, yet timeless.

From the late 1890s onward, Chekhov collaborated with Constantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater on productions of his plays, including his masterpieces The Seagull (1895), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904).

Later Life and Death

In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress from the Moscow Art Theatre. However, by this point his health was in decline due to the tuberculosis that had affected him since his youth. While staying at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, he died in the early hours of July 15, 1904, at the age of 44.

Chekhov is considered one of the major literary figures of his time. His plays are still staged worldwide, and his overall body of work influenced important writers of an array of genres, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Henry Miller.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Anton Chekhov
• Birth Year: 1860
• Birth date: January 29, 1860
• Birth City: Taganrog
• Birth Country: Russia
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Russian writer Anton Chekhov is recognized as a master of the modern short story and a leading playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Death Year: 1904
• Death date: July 15, 1904
• Death City: Badenweiler
• Death Country: Germany

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• Last Updated: October 27, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Biography of Anton Chekhov

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Born in 1860, Anton Chekhov grew up in the Russian town of Taganrog. He spent much of his childhood quietly sitting in his father's fledgling grocery store. He watched the customers and listened to the their gossip, their hopes, and their complaints. Early on, he learned to observe the everyday lives of humans. His ability to listen would become one of his most valuable skills as a storyteller.

Chekhov's Youth His father, Paul Chekhov, grew up in an impoverished family. Anton's grandfather was actually a serf in Czarist Russia, but through hard work and thriftiness, he purchased his family's freedom. Young Anton's father became a self-employed grocer, but the business never prospered and eventually fell apart.

Monetary woes dominated Chekhov's childhood. As a result, financial conflicts are prominent in his plays and fiction.

Despite economic hardship, Chekhov was a talented student. In 1879, he left Taganrog to attend medical school in Moscow. At this time, he felt the pressure of being the head of the household. His father was no longer earning a living. Chekhov needed a way to make money without abandoning school. Writing stories provided a solution.

He began writing humorous stories for local newspapers and journals. At first the stories paid very little. However, Chekhov was a quick and prolific humorist. By the time he was in his forth year of medical school, he had caught the attention of several editors. By 1883, his stories were earning him not only money but notoriety.

Chekhov's Literary Purpose As a writer, Chekhov did not subscribe to a particular religion or political affiliation. He wanted to satirize not preach. At the time, artists and scholars debated the purpose of literature. Some felt that literature should offer "life instructions." Others felt that art should simply exist to please. For the most part, Chekhov agreed with the latter view.

"The artist must be, not the judge of his characters and of what they say, but merely a dispassionate observer." -- Anton Chekhov

Chekhov the Playwright Because of his fondness for dialogue, Chekhov felt drawn to the theatre. His early plays such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon artistically dissatisfied him. In 1895 he began working on a rather original theatrical project: The Seagull . It was a play that defied many of the traditional elements of common stage productions. It lacked plot and it focused on many interesting yet emotionally static characters.

In 1896 The Seagull received a disastrous response on opening night. The audience actually booed during the first act. Fortunately, innovative directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danechenko believed in Chekhov's work. Their new approach to drama invigorated audiences. The Moscow Art Theatre restaged The Seagull and created a triumphant crowd-pleaser.

Soon after, the Moscow Art Theatre, led by Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danechenko, produced the rest of Chekhov's masterpieces:

• Uncle Vanya (1899)
• The Three Sisters (1900)
• The Cherry Orchard (1904)

Chekhov's Love Life The Russian storyteller played with themes of romance and marriage, but throughout most of his life he did not take love seriously. He had occasional affairs, but he did not fall in love until he met Olga Knipper, an up-and-coming Russian actress. They were very discreetly married in 1901.

Olga not only starred in Chekhov's plays, she also deeply understood them. More than anyone in Chekhov's circle, she interpreted the subtle meanings within the plays. For example, Stanislavski thought The Cherry Orchard was a "tragedy of Russian life." Olga instead knew that Chekhov intended it to be a "gay comedy," one that almost touched upon farce.

Olga and Chekhov were kindred spirits, though they did not spend much time together. Their letters indicate that they were very affectionate to one another. Sadly, their marriage would not last very long, due to Chekhov's failing health.

Chekhov's Final Days At the age of 24, Chekhov began showing signs of tuberculosis. He tried to ignore this condition; however by his early 30s his health had deterorated beyond denial.

When The Cherry Orchard opened in 1904, tuberculosis had ravaged his lungs. His body was visibly weakened. Most of his friends and family knew the end was near. Opening night of The Cherry Orchard became a tribute filled with speeches and heartfelt thanks. It was their was of saying goodbye to Russia's greatest playwright.

On July 14th, 1904, Chekhov stayed up late working on yet another short story. After going to bed, he suddenly awoke and summoned a doctor. The physician could do nothing for him but offer a glass of champagne. Reportedly, his final words were, "It's a long time since I drank champagne." Then, after drinking the beverage, he died

Chekhov's Legacy During and after his lifetime, Anton Chekhov was adored throughout Russia. Aside from his beloved stories and plays, he is also remembered as a humanitarian and a philanthropist. While living in the country, he often attended to the medical needs of the local peasants. Also, he was renowned for sponsoring local writers and medical students.

His literary work has been embraced throughout the world. While many playwrights create intense, life-or-death scenarios, Chekhov's plays offer everyday conversations. Readers cherish his extraordinary insight into the lives of the ordinary.

References Malcolm, Janet, Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey, Granta Publications, 2004 edition. Miles, Patrick (ed), Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Anton Chekhov Biography

Born: January 17, 1860 Taganrog, Russia Died: July 2, 1904 Badenweiler, Germany Russian dramatist and author

The Russian author Anton Chekhov is among the major short-story writers and dramatists in history. He wrote seventeen plays and almost six hundred stories.

Early life in Russia

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog in South Russia on the Azov Sea on January 17, 1860. He was the third of six children of Pavel Egorovich Chekhov, a grocery store owner. Chekhov's grandfather was a serf (a peasant who lives and works on land owned by another) who bought his family's freedom in 1841. The young Chekhov and his brothers and sisters worked in the family store and studied in the local school. Their extremely religious father often beat them. In 1876 his father's business failed, and the family moved to Moscow, Russia, for a fresh start. Chekhov, then sixteen, was left behind to finish his schooling.

The blond, brown-eyed Chekhov was a self-reliant, amusing, energetic, and attractive young man. In August 1879 he joined his parents in Moscow, where his father was a laborer and his mother did part-time sewing work. Chekhov immediately entered the medical school of Moscow University. He soon took his father's place as head of the household, a responsibility he carried the rest of his life. After graduating in 1884 he went to work in the hospital at Chikino, Russia, but by December of that year he had begun coughing up blood—the first symptom of the tuberculosis (an infection in the lungs) that eventually caused his death.

First works

Chekhov's first book published by someone else, Motley Stories, came out in 1886 with his real name on it. The book did well, and Chekhov was recognized as a new talent. He began practicing medicine less and writing more. In February 1887 he was elected to the Literary Fund, an honor given only to prominent authors. In the Twilight, a collection of short stories, appeared in August. Chekhov's first completed play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow in November 1887. He stopped writing for humor magazines in favor of serious fiction and drama in an attempt to, as he stated in a letter, "depict life as it actually is."

Many successes

"The Steppe" (1888), a story of the Russian countryside revolving around the adventures of nine-year-old Egorushka while on his way to a distant town with his uncle, began a new phase in Chekhov's writing career. Not only was it accepted by the high-class Northern Messenger magazine—bringing Chekhov a considerable sum of money—but it also was highly praised by other famous writers. In October 1888 he won the Academy of Sciences' Pushkin Prize. "The Lights," "The Name-Day Party," and "An Attack of Nerves" all appeared in this year.

Chekhov spent the summer of 1888 in the Ukraine (where his brother Nikolai died) and at Yalta. The events of this period inspired "A Dreary Story" (1889), in which a dying old man thinks back on what he considers his pointless life. After another collection of stories, Children, was published in March 1889, Chekhov decided that he could now support his family by his writing alone. He wrote some one-act plays and worked on The Wood Demon, but the St. Petersburg (Russia) Theatrical Committee rejected the play, deeply wounding him. In March 1890 his seventh book, a collection of stories entitled Gloomy People, appeared. Late in April 1890 Chekhov set out for the prison colony on the Siberian island of Sakhalin. After spending three months studying the island, Chekhov returned home and wrote Sakhalin Island, which was later published in serial form.

In February 1892 Chekhov bought a 675-acre estate outside of Moscow called Melikhovo, and he settled down on it with his family. Guests streamed out to visit him. By the end of 1893 he was supporting his family comfortably. He began writing more slowly and focusing more on writing plays than before, but his stories continued to appear in the leading St. Petersburg and Moscow magazines. Chekhov was popular and admired. He had a number of pretty, lively, and talented women friends, but none whom he felt strongly enough about to propose marriage. But in 1898, when he was thirty-eight and seriously ill, he met the actress Olga Knipper, and they began an affair.

Series of famous plays

Chekhov's play The Sea Gull drew heavily on a romance between his former love Lidiya Mizinova and his writer friend I. N. Potapenko. The play had failed in its first presentation in 1896, but in 1898 in the new Moscow Art Theater it was such a spectacular success that the gull became, and remains, the theater's official emblem. Chekhov's other great plays followed quickly: Uncle Vanya, a new version of The Wood Demon, in 1897; Three Sisters in 1900–01; and The Cherry Orchard in 1903–04. They are all about the passing of the old order. In each, a group of upper-class landowners struggles to preserve their cultural values against the social change insisted on by the middle-and lower-class teachers, writers, and businessmen to whom the new life belongs.

Chekhov was at the height of his fame. He encouraged younger writers such as Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) and Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919), recommended writers for the Pushkin Prize, and was eagerly sought out for advice and comment. In 1900 he became the first writer elected to membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 1901 he and Olga Knipper were married. She acted in Moscow during the season while he stayed in Yalta to improve his health. The letters between them indicate a deep affection. Chekhov's health worsened in 1904, and his doctors told him that he had to go to a hospital. In June 1904 he set off for Badenweiler, Germany. A friend who saw him in Moscow the day before he left for Europe quoted Chekhov as having said, "Tomorrow I leave. Good-bye. I'm going away to die." On July 2, 1904, he died in a hotel at Badenweiler. His body was returned to Moscow for burial.

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Anton Chekhov. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.

Callow, Philip. Chekhov, the Hidden Ground: A Biography. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.

Chekov, Anton. The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories. New York: Seven Stories, 1999.

Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.

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The Vast Humanity of Anton Chekhov

A new book traces chekhov’s relentless work as both a doctor and a master of the short story..

Anton Chekhov was probably the least statuesque major Russian writer of his generation. He wrote short stories rather than novels, lived modestly, and rarely boomed out complicated philosophical ideas in large valise-sized volumes, as his contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, were wont to do. He came from peasant stock, unlike the aristocratic Turgenev; and his politics rarely got in the way of his fiction, as they sometimes did for Gorky. He was generous, intimate, hardworking, and didn’t express grandiose opinions of himself or suffer unduly from the usual Russian vices—vodka, infidelity, and gambling. But most of all, even after achieving success as a short story writer and playwright, Chekhov never quit his day job as a doctor, and continued supporting his friends and family while suffering everything from hemorrhoids and bad teeth to frequent brain-numbing depressions, phlebitis, and the long case of tuberculosis that eventually killed him at the age of 44.

Born in Taganrog in 1860, Chekhov knew the extremes of Russian life. His father was a freed serf who achieved a brief, hard-fought success as the owner of two local grocery shops before losing them both. He impressed upon Chekhov and his siblings both a respect for the world’s natural forces (he frequently beat them) and a love for music (he devotedly took them to church each week to enjoy the choirs). His mother, a far gentler creature, doesn’t show up as prominently in Chekhov’s correspondence but resides in the background as a vast, humanizing force. Chekhov’s four close-knit brothers and sister each seem to have been both talented and wild. His older brother Nikolai suffered from alcoholism and bad debts that caused him to disappear for weeks at a time, while the youthful Alexander shamed his parents by taking up residence with a married woman.      

From a young age, Chekhov delighted in the company of friends and family, and rarely had a dismissive word to say about anyone. (Toward the end of his life, he even spoke kind words for his violent father, who never bothered to read his stories even after he became famous.) What distinguished both the young and middle-aged Chekhov was his continuing capacity for intensive, daily, unremitting work—whether he was studying for medical exams, writing stories and humor pieces, or pouring out correspondence filled with well-considered advice to those he loved.

He often composed his stories at home in the evenings while surrounded by friends and family, taking a few minutes off to play the piano or join in a song. As his brother Mikhail recalled of their first months living together in Moscow, “he thrived on the excitement.” Another friend recalled the continuous and often amorous clamor of young men and women as a “bacchanalia, my dear, a real bacchanalia!” Even amid his worst periods of depression, ill health, and insolvency, Chekhov never tired of company. He wrote to a cousin who moved nearby: “You will not be an infrequent guest, at least every week.… Except for Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes on Saturdays, I’m always at home in the evenings. Come early so you can stay longer. P.S .: On Tuesdays I’m home after nine, on Thursdays only until nine, so that there is not a single day when you risk not seeing me.”

As Chekhov’s most engaging biographer, Ernest Simmons, once put it: Chekhov “loved life more than the meaning of life.” He took his pleasures small, intimate, and frequent. He was quietly magnanimous and privately monumental—the exact opposite of Tolstoy, who strode widely on the world stage but at home remained a distant, irreproachable personality, especially to his wife and children. Bob Blaisdell’s new biography,  Chekhov Becomes Chekhov , is absorbing, pleasurable, and as unaffected as its subject; and while describing Chekhov’s life through close readings of his multitudinous stories and correspondence over two years—1886 to 1887—he doesn’t simply (as the title promises) explain how Chekhov came to be Chekhov but rather how impossible it was for him to become anybody else.

As Blaisdell summarizes these two tumultuous years, it feels almost as exhausting to read about Chekhov as to be him:

In 1886, the 26-year-old Moscow doctor published 112 short stories, humor pieces, and articles. In 1887, he published sixty-four short stories… and three volumes of his short stories were published. Meanwhile, three hours a day, six days a week, Dr. Chekhov treated patients in his office at his family’s residence, and also made house calls; he lived with and supported his parents and younger siblings. In the winter of 1886, he became engaged and unengaged to be married. He mentored other writers with matter-of-fact encouragement and brilliant criticism. He carried on lively, frank, funny correspondence with editors, friends, and his older brothers.… After a blue and dreary summer of 1887, he wrote a four-act play in the space of two weeks.

It wasn’t as if literature beckoned him so much as he slipped in through the back door. Chekhov’s early short comic pieces and stories appeared pseudonymously in poorly paying literary magazines such as the Petersburg-based Fragments, usually under the self-mocking byline of Antosha Checkhonte. And yet quite quickly he established an audience even while, as a doctor, he treated some of the poorest and most desperate people in Moscow.         

The “study of medicine,” he wrote about those years, “had a serious impact on my literary activities … and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate.” Illness and death are certainly everywhere in Chekhov, and his people suffer a range of infirmities from tuberculosis and pleurisy to anemia and cancer. (Whenever a Chekhov character coughs, it bodes poorly.) But while his stories grew more serious and emotional in later years, and he began publishing in better-paying, better-regarded journals (such as the right-wing New Times, edited by Aleksei Suvorin), they always retained a comic undertone. His characters strive to achieve things—such as love, self-command, or financial success—but those efforts are made ironic in the face of a world that, while sometimes beautiful to look at, remains indurate to human happiness. And even though New Times brought Chekhov wider success, it didn’t reflect his own liberal politics. Yet this was another sign of Chekhov’s broadly accepting nature since, so far as he believed, politics (like religion) didn’t provide much of an antidote to social, or merely human, miseries.  

He preferred to put his faith in art and science—and the opportunities they provided to approach human lives with calm, objective compassion. On the other hand, almost any whiff of ideology or religion worried him, and in many stories, such as “Uprooted: An Incident From my Travels,” he expresses sympathy with young people who find ways to “uproot” themselves from the religious beliefs of their families (especially those of their fathers). For him, Christianity, Judaism, nihilism, and superstition were all common spiritual drags on human life, much like the physical drags of illness, alcoholism, gambling, and despair.  

Many of these early, relatively brief stories are better than one might expect, and it’s the greatest pleasure of this book that it invites us to read (or reread) such “minor” stories as “The Beggar,” in which a middle-class businessman boasts about how he reformed a poor man with “tough love” rather than handouts—only to learn that it was the kindness of a fellow servant that actually put him on the road to sustainable living. A similar dynamic drives another shortish story, “Who Was to Blame?” in which a school headmaster buys a cat to hunt the mice in his school, but the cat proves shy of mice, which the headmaster tries to correct by beating him. Eventually the headmaster throws the cat into the street, where it spends the rest of its life more terrified of mice than ever before. As the headmaster’s sympathetic nephew recounts at the end of the story, he was himself “taught” Latin by this same uncle and later grows up to find that whenever he sees a classical work, he’s haunted by the vision of his uncle’s “sallow grey face.” “I turn pale,” he confesses, “my hair stands up on my head, and, like the cat, I take to ignominious flight.”

Chekhov’s “twist in the tail” endings are never just jokes but reveal fundamental ironies of human life—such as that cruelty and force don’t teach animals (like us) how to behave but only what to fear (which is, of course, cruelty and force). In “A Work of Art,” a doctor receives a special gift from a poor client—a candelabra decorated with rude orgiastic images that he’s ashamed to display in his home, and so he “regifts” it to someone else. They “regift” it forward, and forward again, until the original client returns to the doctor with a surprise—he found a matching candelabra! Unlike O’Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” this relay race of gift-giving doesn’t disclose a sentimental message about the selflessness of love; it reveals a fundamental human selfishness: that people don’t appreciate an act of generosity if it makes them look bad in front of their friends.

Chekhov’s early stories have often been dismissed as minor work, or a pulpish training ground that led him to write bigger, better stories, but most of them are no less complex or moving than the later ones, inhabited by the same sorts of men and women who seek (and usually fail) to achieve the same things: love, knowledge, success, freedom, and a good life. But if they’re lucky, being alive and healthy is the only true achievement they ever attain; and even then it’s with the knowledge that it won’t last.

Chekhov may have been one of the most realism-bound of all the great short story writers; he rarely tried his hand at fantastic stories or stories that verged on the supernatural (unlike Maupassant), and whenever “macabre” events occur—such as in “A Night in the Cemetery,” in which a drunk, dreaming of a post-death experience, awakens in a very real mortuary where he had passed out—the punch line of the “joke” is reality itself, which proves more terrifying than any dream. “Chekhov believed in nightmares and hallucinations,” Blaisdell notes, “but not in ghosts”

And while Chekhov’s peers wrote big books on banner-headline topics such as War and Peace, The Possessed, and Crime and Punishment, Chekhov produced the most unassumingly titled stories in modern fiction: “A Boring Story,” “A Trifle,” “A Misfortune,” “A Trivial Incident,” and so on. (His second collection was simply titled “Motley Tales,” as if it were an assembly of scruffy, mismatched mutts.) He presented his stories as small, insignificant, and forgettable; and yet within the first few sentences, each one deftly establishes who and where the main characters are, what is significant about their lives (not much), and what the weather is like—a continuum of natural forces that determines the lives of Chekhov’s characters far more than their private desires and aspirations.

In one of Chekhov’s first stories for Suvorin’s New Times, “The Witch,” the sexton of a rural church sits pondering the storm outside his house. He believes that it’s driven by the passionate desires of his errant wife, whom he envisages as possessing vast supernatural powers:

It was hard to say who was being wiped off the face of the earth, and for the sake of whose destruction nature was being churned up into such a ferment; but, judging from the unceasing malignant roar, someone was getting it very hot. A victorious force was in full chase over the fields, storming in the forest and on the church roof, battering spitefully with its fists upon the windows, raging and tearing, while something vanquished was howling and wailing.… A plaintive lament sobbed at the window, on the roof, or in the stove. It sounded not like a call for help, but like a cry of misery, a consciousness that it was too late, that there was no salvation.

When the storm forces a postman to seek protection in their home, the sexton presumes his wife has lured him there for sex. For Chekhov, all-too-human rage and passion are about as supernatural as the world ever gets.

Chekhov wrote quickly, industriously, and prodigiously during these years, and he largely did it for money. At the same time, he never dissembled about the world as he saw it, and he seemed to care as much for his fictional characters as he did for his friends and family. For him, writing had little to do with technique, plot devices, acceptable notions about politics and religion, or educating his readers. It was only about writing as quickly as possible about the world he knew. “What is there to teach?” one of his many writerly characters asks. “There is nothing to teach. Sit down and write.” Don’t waste life on theorizing about it, Chekhov said, again and again. Which is why Chekhov’s most cerebral characters are unhappy—they think too much about the things they should be doing (telling someone they love them, moving to Moscow, selling the family estate, etc.). If there is any panacea for the stress and bitterness of human life, it is only by exhausting one’s anxieties and ambitions through hard work. And working hard was something that Chekhov rarely stopped doing until he died.         

These two tumultuous years chronicled by Blaisdell came to a conclusion with the production of Chekhov’s first full-length play, Ivanov, leading him to write more for the theater and less for the magazines, at which point he washed up on the happiest, most successful years of his short life. He finally had time and opportunity to write stories at whatever length he preferred, and found his way into his great novella-length stories, such as “Ward Six,” “The Duel,” “A Boring Story,” and “Three Years.”         

“Among the Russians who are happily writing at the present day I am the most light-minded and least serious,” Chekhov wrote near the height of his fame as a story writer. And it was by toiling in what was considered the relatively unserious shorter forms that Chekhov must have felt free to express his monumentally small visions of life. But “light-mindedness” doesn’t do justice to the brooding and complex dispositions of his characters, who are usually too serious for their own good. They commit horrible acts when they think they’re behaving nobly, or noble acts for the most selfish of motives; they misjudge the true qualities of other people and are just as often misjudged in turn; and while they occasionally enjoy love, a nice meal, or a warm day in the sun, they never escape the knowledge that these moments can’t last.        

As Blaisdell confesses in his conclusion to Chekhov Becomes Chekhov : “I have found myself in the midst of writing this biography sometimes reading Chekhov’s publication record like an accountant.” But this almost stolid intrepid reading of Chekhov’s daily productions is what makes this book so pleasurable. It’s the sort of book that dedicated readers rarely find, one that doesn’t presume to teach us about Chekhov so much as simply enjoy him.  It is like reading along with a fellow lover of Chekhov, attentive to the nuances of the life behind the work and yet never absorbed by anything but Chekhov’s inexhaustible affection for the odd, brave, ridiculous, grotesque, noble, brutal, and always marvelously understandable people he knows so well.

Scott Bradfield’s most recent book is Reading Great Books in the Bathtub: Essays & Reviews 2005–2021 .

Anton Chekhov's Prose

A middlebury blog.

• Born on January 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia.
• Died (of tuberculosis) on July 15, 1904 in Germany (Aged 44)
• Practiced as a medical doctor throughout his writing career: “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.”
• One of the originators of early modernism in the theater and his stores emphasize the depth of the human experience

BIBLIOGRAPHY (in order of publication)

• That Worthless Fellow Platonov
• On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco
• Ivanov  (maybe not a classic, but created Chekhov’s “gun rule”)
• A Marriage Proposal
• A Tragedian in Spite of Himself
• The Wedding
• The Wood Demon
• The Festivities
• The Seagull
• Uncle Vanya
• Three Sisters
• The Cherry Orchard
• “ The Death of a Government Clerk “
• “The Chameleon”
• “Oysters”
• “A Living Chronology”
• “Small Fry”
• “ The Huntsman “
• “Seargeant Prishibeyev”
• “A Gentleman Friend”
• “At the Mill”
• “Agafya”
• “Anyuta”
• “Easter Eve”
• “Grisha”
• “Misery”
• “The Chorus Girl”
• “Ivan Matveyich”
• “The Requiem”
• “Van’ka”
• “Home”
• “The Siren”
• “Kashtanka”
• “Sleepy”
• “The Bet”
• “A Dreary Story”
• “Gusev”
• “Peasant Wives”
• “In Exile”
• “Ward No. 6”
• “The Black Monk”
• “Rothschild’s Violin”
• “ The Student “
• “The Teacher of Literature”
• “Anna on the Neck”
• “Whitebrow”
• “Ariadna”
• “An Artist’s Story”
• “Peasants”
• “The Petchenyeg”
• “The Schoolmistress”
• “ The Man in a Case “
• “ Gooseberries “
• “About Love”
• “Ionych”
• “A Doctor’s Visit”
• “The Darling”
• “On Official Duty”
• “The Lady with the Dog”
• “At Christmas Time”
• “In the Ravine”
• “The Bishop”
• “Betrothed”
• An Anonymous Story
• Three Years

LATER LIFE AND DEATH

Tired from relentless writing and fading health, Chekhov went to Ukraine–and found influence to create  The Steppe.  He was then asked to create a play–Ivanov–and from that play Chekhov’s rule of theater was discovered:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Chekhov soon after became obsessed with prison reform and traveled to Sakhalin, an island north of Japan. He came to the conclusion that it is the government’s responsibility to humanely treat convicts.

Chekhov then moved to Melikhovo after purchasing a small country estate, and then ultimately moves again to Yalta after his father’s death. He married an actress–Olga Knipper–in 1901, but at that point the tuburculosis that Chekhov had had since his youth was seriously affecting his health. He died in 1904, while staying at a health resort in Germany. His death has since become a piece of literary history, as many have fictionalized it and used it as inspiration for their own writing, most famously by Raymond Carver in his short story “Errand”.

Chekhov’s plays are still staged, his works still read. He is one of the greatest writers of his time and his tremendous body of work shaped the arc of literature and still does.

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Biography of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright, a writer of short stories, and one of the most prominent dramatists in theater history. He was born in Taganrog, a bustling port in southern Russia. The third of six children, his family was once serfs, but his grandfather managed to purchase their freedom. Only a year after Chekhov's birth, Russian peasants were emancipated and the feudal system was abolished. Still, Chekhov was weighed down by the class status of his family. His father was a merchant and was often physically abusive to his family. Eventually, his father went bankrupt, and Anton became financially responsible for his family. He wrote vignettes about Russian street life to support himself while also pursuing a medical degree. At the time, Russia was so socially stratified that there were no successful writers of his class; Chekhov became the only great Russian writer of the 19th century from the peasant class.

In 1887, Chekhov was commissioned to write a play, Ivanov . In 1895, he wrote The Seagull , which was a failure: after it ended, the audience booed, and Chekhov renounced theater. In 1898, however, the play was revived by Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre to great critical acclaim. This launched Chekhov's career as a playwright, and Stanislavski would go on to produce Chekhov's Uncle Vanya , Three Sisters , and The Cherry Orchard .

In 1901, Chekhov married Russian actress Olga Knipper, who had acted in many of his plays in Moscow. Their marriage lasted only three years: Chekhov died of tuberculosis in 1904. That same year, his final play, The Cherry Orchard, premiered to great acclaim. Posthumously, Chekhov became a Russian literary celebrity on par with Tolstoy, who was a friend and admirer. Gradually, Chekhov became popular elsewhere. In the United States, his popularity is linked to the trend of Stanislavski's school of method acting becoming more popular in the 20th century. There, Chekhov's approach to psychology and drama greatly influenced the work of many theater practitioners, including Clifford Odets, Lee Strasberg, and actors like Marlon Brando. He also influenced non-dramatic writers, such as Raymond Carver and William Boyd.

Study Guides on Works by Anton Chekhov

Agafya anton chekhov.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Russia in 1860. He initially wanted to study Medicine but he later also began a career as an author. He died in 1904 in Germany after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Agafya focuses on the story of Savka, a...

• Study Guide

The Bet Anton Chekhov

"The Bet" is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekov, written in 1889. It centers on a bet that is made one night between a banker and a young lawyer at a party of intellectuals. The banker, a successful millionaire and gambler bets the lawyer...

The Black Monk Anton Chekhov

"The Black Monk” belongs to that lush category of fiction which is said to have been inspired by the dreams of the author. The nature of remembering dreams being what it is, one should take any assertion on this subject with a grain of salt. This...

Chekhov's Short Stories Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer of the nineteenth century. He was born during 1860 in Russia and died during 1904 in Germany. Chekhov possessed rather simplistic yet commendable literary talent as his top plays and...

The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov

The nineteenth century offered two important developments to Russia which are manifested in the play. In the 1830's, the railroads arrived, an important step in Russia's move into a more international sphere. More importantly, in February of 1861,...

• Lesson Plan

The Darling Anton Chekhov

"The Darling" is a short story by Anton Chekhov, written in December 1898. First published in The Family magazine, it was ultimately included in the nine volume of Chekhov's work, released by book publisher Adolph Marx. The story draws from...

The Death of a Government Clerk Anton Chekhov

"The Death of a Government Clerk" is a short story by Anton Chekhov. It was first published in "Fragments" in 1883 with the subtitle "The Incident." It was later included in the collection "Motley Stories" in 1886.

The story details an incident...

The Lady With the Dog Anton Chekhov

"The Lady with the Dog" was written in 1899 by Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, and was first published in the journal Russian Idea. It has often been deemed by critics to be Chekhov's answer to Anna Karenina; Lyudmila Parts calls it...

The Malefactor Anton Chekhov

Technically, the title of this story by Anton Chekhov usually carries the indefinite article rather than the definite, thus making it a story about “A Malefactor” rather than “The Malefactor.” Since there are only two major characters at play,...

The Seagull Anton Chekhov

“A comedy – three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.”

One month before Chekhov finished writing The Seagull , this is the synopsis he offered to Suvorin, a rich...

Three Sisters Anton Chekhov

Three Sisters is a play written by Anton Chekhov in 1900. It follows the lives of the Prozorov sisters as their fortune is in decline and they must seek out a happy life against the odds. The play traces various human disappointments, specifically...

Uncle Vanya Anton Chekhov

Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekov’s most notable dramas and a mainstay of the theater. The play is set at the estate of the first wife of Professor Serebryakov, where he and his...

Vanka Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov devoted several of his stories to the lives of ordinary people; in some famous cases, he focused specifically on unknown, obscure, and miserable individuals. One such poignant work is "Vanka," the story of a lonely peasant boy who...

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How Chekhov Made Sense of His Surroundings Through Writing Short Stories

Bob blaisdell on chronicling the literary and personal life of one of russia’s most prolific writers.

Anton Chekhov’s biography in 1886-1887 is captured almost completely in the writing that he was doing. Reading the stories, we are as close as we can be to being in his company.

In 1886, the twenty-six-year-old Moscow doctor published 112 short stories, humor pieces, and articles. In 1887, he published sixty-four short stories. The young author was, to his surprise and occasional embarrassment, famous; admired by, among others, Russia’s literary giants Lev Tolstoy and Nikolay Leskov. In these two years, three volumes of his short stories were published.

Meanwhile, three hours a day, six days a week, Dr. Chekhov treated patients in his office at his family’s residence, and also made house calls; he lived with and supported his parents and younger siblings. In the winter of 1886, he became engaged and unengaged to be married. He mentored other writers with matter-of-fact encouragement and brilliant criticism. He carried on lively, frank, funny correspondence with editors, friends, and his older brothers. Having written, he was exhausted, but in the midst of writing, whether venting and making jokes in letters or amusing himself and us with stories, his senses seemed fully alive, consciousness and imagination flowing together. Weary and suffering from various ailments including the tuberculosis he had contracted at twenty-four, he took a long trip south in the spring of 1887 to Taganrog, where he had grown up. He continued writing even on vacation.

In his short stories he identified with a variety of characters: doctors, patients, actors, drivers, writers, artists, children, women, men, drunks, religious folk, Moscovites, Petersburgers, exiles, villagers, judges, criminal investigators, cheats, lovers, midwives, business owners and animals. After a blue and dreary summer of 1887, he wrote a four-act play in the space of two weeks. He concluded these two years of artistic work by composing one of Russia’s most famous children’s stories, “Kashtanka,” and the start of what became a renowned novella.

Chekhov’s imagination is what brought him to the world’s attention and has kept him there. His imagination—and its prodigious flowering during these years—is the focus of this biography; the facts of his life build the frame around the picture of that imagination. In 1888 until to the end of his life, the amount of his writing only slowed to a pace that any other great author would have been proud of, and he eventually curtailed his medical duties. He died in 1904, the most famous writer in Russia other than Tolstoy; posthumously his short stories and plays became in translation the English-speaking world’s model of everyday comedy and tragedy.

The stories and humor pieces that he was producing on deadline for St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines required that he keep an eye on topicality (e.g., New Year’s, Lent, Easter, spring thaws, summer dachas, return to school, winter snows, Christmas). What I did not expect to discover in researching his life in these years is that when those 178 pieces are read in chronological order and in conjunction with the personal letters to and from him, they become a diary of the psychological and emotional states of this conspicuously reserved man. For example, when he was in the midst of his frustrating and anxious engagement, young couples in his stories are continually making their rancorous way into or out of their relationships.

When Dr. Chekhov was overtaxed by his medical duties, the doctor characters explode or implode. Chekhov’s talented but drunken older brothers and Chekhov’s domineering father became transmuted into characters, but almost always Chekhov converted the circumstances of the people he knew into fictional ones at various removes: the opposite gender, a younger or older age, a different profession, a different place, a different family. His clever brothers would have recognized themselves, though not the circumstances, in many comic and serious stories. His father, born a serf to a “slave-driving” serf-father, was reputedly incapable of recognizing the similarities between himself and the brutal or ridiculous fathers in his son’s stories.

On my middle-aged way to learning Russian so I could read Anna Karenina in the original, I read dozens and dozens of Chekhov’s stories, some in heavily annotated editions for us Russian learners. In English I had read all thirteen volumes of Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov, and I either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she didn’t arrange the stories chronologically. She gathered the stories the way a florist might arrange bouquets: loosely, occasionally thematically, occasionally by time-range, size or quality.

When I was reading Russian collections, however, I kept noticing that so many of my favorite stories had been published in 1886 and 1887. I loved Chekhov’s later stories too, but there weren’t so many of them. Had anyone else noticed all those 1886 and 1887 publication dates?… Of course others had! In the best book about Chekhov, read by me at least a few times since the early 1980s and “forgotten,” there is this emphatic and dead-on declaration: “Eighteen eighty-six and early 1887 brought a whole stream of stories, unprecedented in Russian literature for the originality of their form and subject matter and for their compression and concision.” I second that evaluation.

I chose to study the two years where Chekhov took center stage in Russian literature so that I could give myself and you, my reader, the illusion of comprehensiveness. There is no comprehensive biography of Chekhov, though there are many good biographies. Like Garnett’s story collections, they too seem to focus on a theme or aspect of his life. Rosamund Bartlett, who seems to me to have the most thoroughly knowledgeable appreciation of Chekhov’s life and work, focused her biography, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2005), on the places where he lived and visited.

Donald Rayfield’s Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997, updated and revised in 2021) is large and long but not focused on his writing. It is informative about the Chekhov family’s dynamics and is full of unexpurgated material from Chekhov’s and his correspondents’ letters that had never even been published in Russian. Michael C. Finke’s Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings (2021) is a good but brief biography that fairly balances the life and work. I have read all his 1886–1887 letters in Russian, and there are several collections of his letters in English, which I draw on and quote from. It’s possible to catch Chekhov in the looking-glass in the miracle years of 1886 and 1887 because he had almost no time to look away.

“My work is like a diary. It’s even dated like a diary.” –Pablo Picasso *

I wish we really knew how he wrote his stories or even any single tale. In that hour or three wherein Chekhov’s hand and imagination inscribed a story, even if we watched his quick right-handed penmanship slide and scritch across his narrow notebook pages, with sometimes not even a cross out, what would we know beyond the appreciation of his speed and focus?

Perhaps it would be like viewing the replayed iPad paintings of David Hockney, where in about sixty seconds the screen displays a flurry of the artist’s eyes’ and finger’s decisions: lines, shapes, colors, tones, resizings…and voila, a beautiful tree-lined road. Chekhov’s mother Evgeniya said, “When he was still an undergraduate, Antosha would sit at the table in the morning, having his tea and suddenly fall to thinking; he would sometimes look straight into one’s eyes, but I knew that he saw nothing. Then he would get his notebook out of his pocket and write quickly, quickly. And again he would fall to thinking.”

From some such perspective we can at least imagine him at work, and certainly we can see the proof in the pudding. Chekhov’s stories are as personal as any great artist’s landscapes and portraits. David Hockney is not the trees and he is not the friends he paints.

But from Hockney’s many works we know a lot more about how he sees and understands the world than we probably know about our own ways of seeing. He and Chekhov help us appreciate what can be appreciated, if only we were focused geniuses. We know from Chekhov’s thousands of pages of writing that the challenge of his life was to free himself to feel the entirety of his humanity, which meant in his case a combination of intelligence and wit and a deep well of sympathy for the weak and the vulnerable:

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshiping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before god and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.

That fearsome “young man” who squeezed “the slave out of himself drop by drop” was of course Chekhov. This declaration, written to his closest friend and confidant of the time (1889), is the most personal revelation he ever made, but unfortunately he himself never wrote that story, though his memoirist siblings and his conscientious biographers have ever since his death tried to do so. My modest suggestion is that his own stories do tell, in pieces and flashes, that story of himself, the “real human being.”

No one has tracked his daily routines beyond what the editors of the invaluable Letopis’ (“Chronicle”) of his life have compiled. We have a few contemporary facts about some particular days, but there isn’t an appointments calendar or a record of the patients he saw. He was on the other hand very good at keeping track of publications, sending follow-up letters and commissioning various brothers to round up the late payments from forgetful or tight-fisted editors.

During my mostly happy days of research, I had the big, great obvious idea of compressing this biography of two years of his life—writer, doctor, financial provider, joker, lover, friend—into a short story, written as if by himself. It would be brilliant, amusing and concise. We would know Chekhov from the outside through carefully selected observations and from the inside through his buzzing thoughts….I didn’t manage to write that story.

For this biography, Chekhov would have advised me, had he been unable to dissuade me from writing it at all, to Keep it simple. Sketch the mundane everyday life and activities, but vividly. Admit what you don’t know. Be modest. Be brief! That sounds simple, but as his friend Viktor Bilibin eventually protested when Chekhov cajoled him toward greater artistry in his writing: I’m not you, Anton Pavlovich!

__________________________________

Excerpted and adapted from Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius by Bob Blaisdell. Copyright © 2022. Available from Pegasus Books.

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Anton Chekhov Biography

Birthday: January 29 , 1860 ( Aquarius )

Born In: Taganrog, Russia

Anton Chekhov was one of the most illustrious and celebrated short-story writers in the history of literature. Trained as a physician, he pursued his career of a medical practitioner without giving up on his passion for writing which he discovered when he was young. Interestingly, writing happened incidentally to Chekhov who started off by writing humorous letters to his family in Moscow, while he was in Taganrog to uplift their morale as the family faced trying times. Following this, he started writing materials which soon were featured in newspaper periodicals and literary journals. Initially writing for monetary gains, his artistic ambitions later forced him to concentrate on quality work as he came up with the evolution of what is today known as modern short story. His most impressive works as a short story writer and playwright include, ‘The Cherry orchard’, ‘The Seagull’, ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘Three Sisters’ and ‘Lady with the Dog’.

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Also Known As: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Died At Age: 44

Spouse/Ex-: Olga Knipper (m. 1901–1904)

father: Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov

mother: Yevgeniya Chekhov

siblings: Maria Chekhova Alexander Chekhov Nikolai Chekhov Mikhail Chekhov

Born Country: Russia

Playwrights Short Story Writers

Died on: July 15 , 1904

place of death: Badenweiler, Germany

Ancestry: Ukrainian Russian

Cause of Death: Tuberculosis

education: Moscow State University

You wanted to know

What are some common themes in anton chekhov's works.

Some common themes in Anton Chekhov's works include the complexities of human nature, the passage of time, the struggle for meaning and purpose in life, the tension between social classes, and the fleeting nature of happiness.

How did Anton Chekhov's medical background influence his writing?

Anton Chekhov's medical background influenced his writing by providing him with a deep understanding of human psychology and behavior, as well as a keen eye for detail and observation. This is evident in his realistic portrayals of characters and their interactions.

What is the significance of the "Chekhov's Gun?"

The "Chekhov's Gun" literary technique, popularized by Anton Chekhov, emphasizes the importance of every element in a story serving a purpose. It suggests that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must be fired by the end. This approach highlights Chekhov's economy of storytelling and avoidance of unnecessary details.

How did Anton Chekhov influence the development of modern short stories?

Anton Chekhov had a significant impact on the development of modern short stories by revolutionizing the genre with his focus on character development and subtle, nuanced storytelling. His use of realism and psychological depth set a new standard for short fiction.

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Anton Chekhov was a practicing physician who treated patients while also pursuing his writing career, showcasing his dedication to both medicine and literature.

Chekhov had a great love for nature and often found inspiration for his works while spending time in the countryside, reflecting his deep connection to the natural world.

Chekhov was known for his philanthropy and often provided financial assistance to struggling writers and artists, demonstrating his generosity and support for the creative community.

In addition to his renowned plays and short stories, Chekhov also wrote a number of essays and letters that offer insight into his thoughts on art, society, and human nature, showcasing his multifaceted talent and intellectual depth.

See the events in life of Anton Chekhov in Chronological Order

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Anton Chekhov

Short stories.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Jan 29, 1860 - Jul 15, 1904) was a Russian physician and supreme short story writer and playwright. He was the third of six children. His father was a grocer, painter and religious fanatic with a mercurial temperament who "thrashed" his children and was likely emotionally abusive to his wife. Chekhov, like Dickens , was no stranger to financial hardship and in 1875 his father took the family and fled to Moscow to escape creditors. Chekhov stayed behind for three more years to finish school. He paid for his tuition by catching and selling goldfinches and dispensing private tutoring lessons, and selling short sketches to the newspaper. He sent any money he could spare money to his family in Moscow. Chekhov is considered an exemplar author in the genre of Realism . A child-family separation theme plays out in several of Chekhov's stories including Vanka , The Steppe , and Sleepy .

"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."

Some consider Chekhov to be the founder of the modern short story and his influence is observed in a diverse group of writers including Flannery O'Connor , Tennessee Williams, William Somerset Maugham , Raymond Carver and John Cheever. Most of the English-speaking world knows him as a playwright, particularly for The Seagull , Uncle Vanya , Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard .

In 1897 Chekhov was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He purchased land in Yalta in 1898 after his father's death and had a villa built. He moved into the villa in 1899 with his mother and sister. This was a very prolific period for the great writer and he produced some of his most famous work during this period. Amongst those works is a trilogy featuring Ivan Ivanovitch, a veterinary surgeon and his schoolmaster friend, Burkin. The two are on a small trekking and shooting holiday. Chekhov overlays three stories that are amongst his most famous short stories in a trilogy sometimes referred to as "The Little Trilogy". The three short stories, in order, are: The Man in a Case , Gooseberries , and About Love . It was also during this period in Yalta that he produced Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard .

We feature two volumes of Anton Chekhov's great short stories in our Favorite Short Stories Collection . You may also enjoy reminiscences about Chekhov by Maxim Gorky and Aleksandr Kuprin .

Chekhov is featured in our collection of favorite Russian Writers

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Melikhovo period: 1892–98

Yalta period: 1899–1904.

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• TheatreHistory.com - Biography of Anton Chekhov
• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of Anton Chekhov
• Wilson Center - Anton Chekhov: The Role of Author in Russian Society
• Anton Chekhov - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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After helping, both as doctor and as medical administrator, to relieve the disastrous famine of 1891–92 in Russia , Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Moscow . That was his main residence for about six years, providing a home for his aging parents, as also for his sister Mariya, who acted as his housekeeper and remained unmarried in order to look after her brother. The Melikhovo period was the most creatively effective of Chekhov’s life so far as short stories were concerned, for it was during those six years that he wrote “The Butterfly,” “Neighbours” (1892), “An Anonymous Story” (1893), “The Black Monk” (1894), “Murder,” and “Ariadne” (1895), among many other masterpieces. Village life now became a leading theme in his work, most notably in “ Peasants” (1897). Undistinguished by plot, the short sequence of brilliant sketches created more stir in Russia than any other single work of Chekhov’s, partly owing to his rejection of the convention whereby writers commonly presented the Russian peasantry in sentimentalized and debrutalized form.

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Continuing to provide many portraits of the intelligentsia, Chekhov also described the commercial and factory-owning world in such stories as “A Woman’s Kingdom,” (1894) and “Three Years” (1895). As has often been recognized, Chekhov’s work provides a panoramic study of the Russia of his day, and one so accurate that it could even be used as a sociological source.

In some of his stories of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked by implication the teachings of Leo Tolstoy , the well-known novelist and thinker, and Chekhov’s revered elder contemporary. Himself once (in the late 1880s) a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also of nonresistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now rejected those doctrines. He illustrated his new view in one particularly outstanding story: “ Ward Number Six ” (1892). Here an elderly doctor shows himself nonresistant to evil by refraining from remedying the appalling conditions in the mental ward of which he has charge—only to be incarcerated as a patient himself through the intrigues of a subordinate. “In My Life ”(1896) the young hero, son of a provincial architect, insists on defying middle-class convention by becoming a house painter, a cultivation of the Tolstoyan simple life that Chekhov portrays as misconceived. In a later trio of linked stories, “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love” (1898), Chekhov further develops the same theme, showing various figures who similarly fail to realize their full potentialities. As those pleas in favour of personal freedom illustrate, Chekhov’s stories frequently contain some kind of submerged moral , though he never worked out a comprehensive ethical or philosophical doctrine.

Chayka ( The Seagull ) is Chekhov’s only dramatic work dating with certainty from the Melikhovo period. First performed in St. Petersburg on October 17, 1896 (Old Style), the four-act drama , misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed, it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act, having suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the stage again. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre , enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov’s friends.

In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis , symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-invalid, Chekhov sold his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta , the Crimean coastal resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French Riviera, cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St. Petersburg. That was all the more galling since his plays were beginning to attract serious attention. Moreover, Chekhov had become attracted by a young actress, Olga Knipper, who was appearing in his plays, and whom he eventually married in 1901; the marriage probably marked the only profound love affair of his life. But since Knipper continued to pursue her acting career, husband and wife lived apart during most of the winter months, and there were no children of the marriage.

Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works, excluding plays, to the publisher A.F. Marx for 75,000 rubles, an unduly low sum. In 1899–1901 Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of Chekhov’s works, in 10 volumes, after the author had himself rejected many of his juvenilia. Even so, that publication, reprinted in 1903 with supplementary material, was unsatisfactory in many ways.

Chekhov’s Yalta period saw a decline in the production of short stories and a greater emphasis on drama. His two last plays— Tri sestry ( Three Sisters ), first performed in 1901, and Vishnyovy sad ( The Cherry Orchard ), first performed in 1904—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre’s two founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstanin Stanislavsky , he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays as he was able to witness. Repeatedly insisting that his mature drama was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew distressed when producers insisted on a heavy treatment, overemphasizing the—admittedly frequent—occasions on which the characters inveigh against the boredom and futility of their lives. Despite Stanislavsky’s reputation as an innovator who had brought a natural, nondeclamatory style to the hitherto overhistrionic Russian stage, his productions were never natural and nondeclamatory enough for Chekhov, who wished his work to be acted with the lightest possible touch. And though Chekhov’s mature plays have since become established in repertoires all over the world, it remains doubtful whether his craving for the light touch has been satisfied except on the rarest of occasions. Yet oversolemnity can be the ruin of Three Sisters , for example—the play in which Chekhov so sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women. Insisting that his The Cherry Orchard was “a comedy, in places even a farce,” Chekhov offered in that last play a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. The play was first performed in Moscow on January 17, 1904 (Old Style), and less than six months later Chekhov died of tuberculosis.

Though already celebrated by the Russian literary public at the time of his death, Chekhov did not become internationally famous until the years after World War I , by which time the translations of Constance Garnett (into English) and of others had helped to publicize his work. Yet his elusive , superficially guileless style of writing—in which what is left unsaid often seems so much more important than what is said—has defied effective analysis by literary critics, as well as effective imitation by creative writers.

It was not until 40 years after his death, with the issue of the 20-volume Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem A.P. Chekhova (“Complete Works and Letters of A.P. Chekhov”) of 1944–51, that Chekhov was at last presented in Russian on a level of scholarship worthy—though with certain reservations—of his achievement. Eight volumes of that edition contain his correspondence, amounting to several thousand letters. Outstandingly witty and lively, they belie the legend—commonly believed during the author’s lifetime—that he was hopelessly pessimistic in outlook. As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov’s letters have been rated second only to Aleksandr Pushkin ’s by the literary historian D.S. Mirsky. Although Chekhov is chiefly known for his plays, his stories—and particularly those that were written after 1888—represent, according to some critics, an even more significant and creative literary achievement.

Anton Chekhov

• Born January 29 , 1860 · Taganrog, Russian Empire [now Rostov Oblast, Russia]
• Died July 15 , 1904 · Badenweiler, Baden, Germany (complications from lung tuberculosis)
• Birth name Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
• Antosha Chekhonte
• Height 6′ 1¼″ (1.86 m)
• Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years. While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov , he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888. In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera. Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova , became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy , Maxim Gorky , Ivan Bunin , and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Shelokhonov
• Spouse Olga Knipper-Chekhova (May 25, 1901 - July 15, 1904) (his death)
• Uncle of Olga Tschechowa and Michael Chekhov .
• His drama, Uncle Vanya performed at the Donmar Warehouse, was awarded the 2003 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Revival of 2002.
• When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.
• Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred of something.
• The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
• If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease, it means the disease is incurable.
• A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages: first an acquaintance, then a mistress, and only then a friend.

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Anton chekhov biography.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Russia, on January 29, 1860. The grandson of a serf, Chekhov was the third of seven children. Chekhov said of his early days, “There was no childhood in my childhood,” largely because of his father, Pavel, who frequently forced Chekhov to tend the family’s unheated food and hardware store until late at night. Chekhov’s father beat his children and taught them how to cheat customers, yet he was in his own eyes a religious man. He forced his children into a religious choir that rehearsed frequently and sang at various churches. Chekhov disliked these duties. It is not surprising that in later life he was not a religious man, that he spent his life trying to “burn the slave” out of himself and become a man of culture, and that he became convinced that work was useless unless it improved humankind’s lot.

Chekhov’s home life was disrupted in 1876 when his father’s business went into bankruptcy and his father fled to Moscow to escape debtors’ prison. His mother sold the house, took the younger children, and joined her husband. Chekhov stayed behind to finish his schooling and became, at sixteen, the main support of the family, providing income by tutoring. He finished school in 1879, rejoined his family, and tried to provide material and moral support, lecturing at times on the need to avoid lies, affirm human worth, and be fair, all values that would be of great importance in his later work.

In Moscow, Chekhov studied medicine and supported the family by writing stories in humorous magazines under the name Antosha Chekhonte. His first story was published in 1880 in the magazine Strekoza (dragonfly), and in 1881, he finished his first full-length play, Platonov , though it was not performed or published in his lifetime. In October of 1882, he met Nicolai Leikin, the owner of the weekly magazine Oskolki (fragments); they became friends, and soon scarcely a week went by without a Chekhov story appearing in the magazine. These early ventures saw him through medical school, and in 1884, Chekhov finished his medical studies and took up practice. By December 10 of that year, however, Chekhov became ill, coughing up blood, his first attack of tuberculosis, the disease that would kill him twenty years later. For the rest of his life, no year would go by without similar attacks.

Chekhov recovered rapidly and managed to ignore the implications of his symptoms, resuming his normal life. In December, 1885, he accompanied Leikin to St. Petersburg, the literary center of Russia at the time, meeting Aleksei Suvorin, owner of the powerful daily newspaper Novoye vremya (new times), and Dimitry Grigorovich, a noted novelist. After his return to Moscow, he received a letter from Grigorovich urging him to respect his talent and write seriously; Chekhov responded that Grigorovich’s letter was “like a thunderbolt,” making him believe in his talent for the first time. Suvorin also wrote, inviting Chekhov to contribute to Novoye vremya . Chekhov accepted, beginning a long relationship with the newspaper and with Suvorin.

In 1887, Chekhov completed the full-length play Ivanov , which was a popular success. In 1888, he experimented with longer prose forms and produced the much-acclaimed novella “The Steppe”; he was also awarded the Pushkin Prize for the best literary work of the year for his collection of stories V sumerkakh . In drama, he achieved financial success with two popular one-act comedies, A Bear and A Marriage Proposal .

In June, 1889, Chekhov’s brother Nicolai died of tuberculosis as Chekhov tended him, and late in the year, his full-length play The Wood Demon , at first rejected as “too tedious,” was finally performed but was an almost complete failure. Chekhov began to doubt his dramatic ability, and, except for the one-act comedy The Jubilee , he abandoned drama until 1896. Indeed, Chekhov underwent a crisis of self-examination in 1889, doubting his literary and...

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