Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia, and died on 15 July 1904. He became one of Russia’s great playwrights and short story writers, while also working as a physician by profession. Chekhov once described the division of his life with dry wit: “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.” His writing career belongs to a period when theatre and fiction were changing, and he is often named with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre.

Chekhov was the third of six surviving children. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store, directed the parish choir, and was a devout Orthodox Christian. He was also physically abusive, and Chekhov later wrote with horror about the “despotism and lying” that damaged the family’s childhood. His mother, Yevgeniya Morozova, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with accounts of her travels across Russia with her cloth-merchant father. Chekhov later summed up that inheritance simply: “Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother.”

His early life mixed hardship, discipline, and a growing appetite for art. He attended the Greek School in Taganrog and the Taganrog Boys Gymnasium, sang in church and in his father’s choirs, and as a teenager became enchanted by the Taganrog Theatre, where he watched vaudevilles, Italian operas, and popular comedies. In 1876, after his father was declared bankrupt, the family fled to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison. Chekhov stayed behind in Taganrog for three years to finish his education, selling family possessions, tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and writing sketches for newspapers while sending money and humorous letters to his family.

In 1879, Chekhov moved to Moscow and entered the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. He took responsibility for supporting his family and paying his tuition by writing daily short humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, often under pseudonyms such as “Antosha Chekhonte” and “Man Without Spleen.” By 1882 he was writing for Oskolki, and in 1884 he qualified as a physician, a profession he considered his principal one, though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. In 1886 he began writing for Novoye Vremya, where Alexey Suvorin paid him more and gave him more space.

Chekhov’s fame rests especially on his short stories and on four plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. After the poor reception of The Seagull in 1896, he renounced the theatre, but Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre revived the play to acclaim in 1898, then produced Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays. These works challenged actors and audiences by replacing conventional action with a “theatre of mood” and a “submerged life in the text.” Chekhov’s fiction also changed as his ambition grew; he made formal innovations that influenced the modern short story. His belief that writers need not solve problems, but should state them correctly, helps explain why his plain, searching sentences still feel close to ordinary life.