Anton Chekhov

• 1. Introduction

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  Anton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming him in a spa hotel in the Black Forest. In between those two dates, he produced four plays that permanently changed how theatre works and a body of short stories that writers still argue about today. He was also a working physician who treated the poor free of charge and wrote under pseudonyms just to keep his family fed. How does a man who considered medicine his real profession become, according to literary critic Daniel S. Burt, one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time? And why did Chekhov himself think people might read his work for only seven years?

• 2. A Childhood Built on Tyranny

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  Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store in Taganrog and directed the parish choir -- and he beat his children. Some historians have read him as the model for the many portraits of hypocrisy that appear throughout his son's fiction. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, offered a different inheritance: she was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels across Russia. Chekhov himself put it plainly: "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother."

  At fifteen, the young Chekhov was held back a year at the Taganrog Boys Gymnasium for failing an examination in Ancient Greek. He sang in his father's choirs and at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog. In a letter of 1892, he used the word "suffering" to describe those years, recalling how he and his brothers, while singing in church, felt like "little convicts" even as the congregation envied their parents.

  In 1876, Pavel was declared bankrupt after being cheated by a contractor named Mironov. He fled to Moscow to avoid debtor's prison, leaving the teenage Anton behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his schooling. Chekhov boarded with a man named Selivanov, who had acquired the family house in exchange for bailing them out -- exactly as Lopakhin does in The Cherry Orchard. He paid his own way through school by tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to newspapers. He sent every spare ruble to his family in Moscow. It was during these years alone in Taganrog that he fell in love with the theatre, attending productions of vaudevilles, Italian operas, and popular comedies on a regular basis.

• 3. The Physician Who Wrote

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  In 1879, Chekhov gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University and moved to Moscow to join his family. To pay tuition and support the entire household, he wrote daily short humorous sketches under pseudonyms including "Antosha Chekhonte" and "Man Without Spleen." By 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by one of the leading publishers of the time, Nikolai Leykin.

  In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician. He considered it his principal profession, though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. That same year and the next, he began coughing blood; by 1886 the attacks had worsened. He did not tell his family or friends he had tuberculosis. To Leykin he confessed: "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."

  Early in 1886, an invitation arrived from Novoye Vremya (New Times), a popular St. Petersburg paper owned by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin. Suvorin paid double Leykin's rate per line and gave Chekhov three times the space. Suvorin would become, in Chekhov's words, a lifelong friend -- perhaps the closest he had.

  Later that year, the sixty-four-year-old celebrated Russian writer Dmitry Grigorovich wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story "The Huntsman": "You have real talent, a talent that places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He urged the young writer to slow down and concentrate on quality. Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and admitted he had written his stories "the way reporters write up their notes about fires -- mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." In 1888, with some assistance from Grigorovich, the collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth." The twenty-six-year-old who had been selling sketches to survive was now a prize-winning literary figure -- though his lungs were already failing him.

• 4. Chekhov's Gun and the Sakhalin Journey

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  In 1887, exhausted and ill, Chekhov travelled to Ukraine, where the beauty of the steppe reawakened him. The result was "The Steppe", a novella-length story that drifts with the thought processes of a young boy sent away from home, a priest, and a merchant crossing the open plains. He called it "something rather odd and much too original." Critics later named it a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics."

  That same autumn, a theatre manager named Korsch commissioned a play. Chekhov wrote Ivanov in a fortnight; it was staged that November and, to Chekhov's bemusement, praised as original. His brother Mikhail considered Ivanov a key turning point in Anton's intellectual development. From this period also comes the dramatic principle now known as Chekhov's gun: every element in a narrative must be necessary and irreplaceable. As Chekhov stated it, "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."

  The death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 struck Chekhov deeply. Mikhail recorded his brother's depression and restlessness. Then, in 1890, Chekhov undertook a journey that surprised everyone who knew him: by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer, he crossed Siberia to the katorga (penal colony) on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. What he witnessed -- floggings, embezzlement of supplies, forced prostitution of women -- shook him. He wrote: "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation." He was especially moved by children living in the colony alongside their parents, describing a six-year-old girl scrambling after her convict father, holding on to his fetters as he moved about the ship. Chekhov concluded that charity was not the answer; the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science rather than literature. The Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about the experience, "Chekhov on Sakhalin", collected in the volume Station Island.

• 5. The Seagull's Fall and Rise

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  In 1894, Chekhov began writing The Seagull in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo, his country estate. Life at Melikhovo was not solitary. Mikhail Chekhov described peasant women and children arriving from twenty miles around each morning, waiting at the door for the doctor's attention. Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, and journeys of several hours to visit the sick cut into his writing time. Yet he also observed the lives of the wealthy, noting in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."

  On the 17th of October 1896, The Seagull opened at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and was booed. Chekhov renounced the theatre. But the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was so struck by the play that he persuaded his colleague Konstantin Stanislavski to mount a new production for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing drew out the buried subtleties of the text and restored Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage. The Art Theatre went on to produce Uncle Vanya and to premiere Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

  These four plays offered what Chekhov called a "theatre of mood" in place of conventional action, with a "submerged life in the text." Stanislavski later wrote that Chekhov "often expressed his thought not in speeches, but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word." That subtextual approach would eventually travel to the United States through Stanislavski's system, influencing the Group Theatre and, through Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, actors including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

• 6. Yalta, Love, and Last Stories

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  In March 1897, Chekhov suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs while visiting Moscow. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis and ordered a change in his way of life. After his father's death in 1898, he bought land on the outskirts of Yalta and built a villa called the White Dacha. He planted trees and flowers, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests including Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. He called Yalta his "hot Siberia" and was always relieved to leave it.

  On the 25th of May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper quietly, owing to what he described as a horror of weddings. She was an actress he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull, and formerly a protégée of Nemirovich-Danchenko. Chekhov had previously been known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor", and the marriage reflected his habits: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. Their letters form a remarkable correspondence that preserves shared complaints about Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's direct advice to Olga about performing his plays.

  At Yalta he wrote "The Lady with the Dog", a story about a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting. Gradually, and unexpectedly, they fall deeply in love. Vladimir Nabokov called it "one of the greatest stories ever written" for its depiction of a problematic relationship. He also described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice."

  Chekhov took a full year each over Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, composing with greater difficulty than in earlier days when he had written "serenely, the way I eat pancakes now."

• 7. Death and Afterlife

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  By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill. On the 3rd of June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest. He wrote outwardly cheerful letters to his sister Masha about the food and surroundings, assuring her he was recovering. His last letter complained about the way German women dressed.

  Chekhov died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four. Olga recorded his last moments in 1908: he sat up and said loudly and clearly, in German -- a language he barely knew -- "Ich sterbe" (I'm dying). The doctor gave him a camphor injection and ordered champagne. Chekhov took a full glass, examined it, smiled, and said: "It's a long time since I drank champagne." He drained it and lay quietly on his left side. His body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for oysters, a detail that offended Maxim Gorky. Among the thousands of mourners, some followed the wrong funeral procession -- that of a General Keller -- to the accompaniment of a military band. Chekhov was buried beside his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

  A few months before he died, Chekhov had told the writer Ivan Bunin he expected people might read his writings for seven years. "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well, seven and a half," Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live." He was wrong on both counts. The Cherry Orchard's ovations in the year of his death already placed him second in Russian literary celebrity only to Tolstoy. Tolstoy himself had bound a selection of Chekhov's stories into a book, sorted by quality, listing titles including Children, Misery, Sleepy, and The Darling in his first category. Raymond Carver, who wrote the story "Errand" about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov was the greatest of all short story writers, praising "the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces." Vladimir Lenin reportedly said that reading Ward No. 6 "made him a revolutionary." The anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin, when doubters questioned the misery of Russia in the 1880s, directed them to read Chekhov's fiction. The 2022 film Drive My Car, centered on a production of Uncle Vanya, won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film -- more than a century after Chekhov finished the play.