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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (, Anton Pavlovič Čehov) was a Russian physician, short story writer, and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on , and died of tuberculosis at the health spa of Badenweiler, Germany, on . His brief playwriting career produced four classics of the repertoire, while his best short stories are regarded as masterpieces by many writers and critics.For example: “Greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Raymond Carver (quoted in Rosamund Bartlett’s introduction to About Love and Other Stories, p XX); “Quite probably the best short-story writer ever.” William Boyd; "Stories…which are among the supreme achievements in prose narrative." George Steiner Chekhov continued to practise as a doctor throughout his life: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress".Letter to A.S. Suvorin, 11 September 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Early life

Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a small provincial port on the Sea of Azov, southern Russia. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, was a grocer, amateur painter, religious fanatic, and the choirmaster of the local church; a keen flogger of his children, Pavel Chekhov may be seen as the original of all Chekhov's great portraits of hypocrites.Wood, p 78. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, who told the children tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia and of the bombardment of Tagenrog during the Crimean War.Payne, p XVII; Simmons, p 18. Chekhov himself said: "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother."From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

As an adult, Chekhov was to criticise his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of their own father's behaviour towards their mother:

Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool.Letter to brother Alexander, 2 January 1889, quoted in Malcom, p 102.

Chekhov later wrote to his publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin, "From my childhood I have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave up thrashing me was tremendous." Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 27 March 1894. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys and was sent aged eight to the Taganrog gymnasium for boys, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at the age of fifteen for failing a Greek exam.Bartlett, p 4-5. He sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs. In a letter of 1892, he summed up his childhood with the word "suffering" and wrote:

When my brothers and I used to stand in the middle of the church and sing the trio "May my prayer be exalted," or "The Archangel's Voice," everyone looked at us with emotion and envied our parents, but we at that moment felt like little convicts.Letter to I.L.Shtcheglov, 9 March 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

For all their faults, Chekhov's parents fostered a sense of culture and creativity in the household, to the benefit of all their offspring.Alexander was to become a journalist and writer, Nikolai an artist, Ivan a teacher, Mihail a jurist and writer, and Mariya (Masha) a teacher and artist. Simmons, p 18. For example, Chekhov played the part of Gorodnitchy in a performance of Gogol's The Government Inspector put on by the children, in which he reviewed an imaginary squad of Cossacks.Biographical Sketch. He also edited a family magazine called The Stammerer; and stories written when he was twelve show him already in command of the Russian language, with the same simple, direct style as that of his maturity.Payne, introduction to Forty Stories, p XIX.

After attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène at Taganrog City Theatre on 4 October 1873, Chekhov began spending virtually all his savings at the theatre, where, among other plays, he saw Hamlet, The Government Inspector, and Griboyedov's Woe from Wit. At the age of fifteen, he was invited to take part in charity amateur theatricals, and scored a hit as an old crone in Grigoriev's piece The Coachman, or the Prank of a Hussar.Simmons, p 21.

In 1875, facing bankruptcy, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov was forced to escape from creditors to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending the university. For the next several years the family lived in poverty in Moscow, Chekhov's mother physically and emotionally broken.Letter to cousin Mihail, 10 May 1877.Letters of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his education.

Chekhov remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man called Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.Malcom, p 25. Chekhov paid for his education by private tutoring and by catching and selling goldfinches, as well as by selling short sketches to the newspapers.Payne, p XX. He sent every rouble he could spare to Moscow, along with letters full of jokes to cheer up the family.Payne, pXX. During this time he read widely and analytically, including Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer;Letter to brother Mihail, 1 July 1876. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Also Simmons, p 26. and he completed a full-length comedy drama Fatherless, which his brother Alexander called "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication".Simmons, p 33. Chekhov also enjoyed a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.Payne, p XX.

Many of Chekhov's mature stories are about children separated from their families: for example, The Steppe concerns a boy, Yegorushka, sent away from home to live with strangers;The Steppe. Sleepy tells of the thirteen-year-old nursemaid Varka, left in charge of a baby; Sleepy. while in Vanka a nine-year-old orphan who has been sent far away from his village as an apprentice to a cruel shoemaker writes to his grandfather begging to be taken home, "and when I grow up to be a man I will look after you and I will not let anyone hurt you…" Vanka.

In 1879, Chekhov completed schooling at the gymnasium and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at Moscow State University and earned a scholarship of twenty-five roubles from Taganrog to aid him in his studies.Simmons, p 34.

Early writings

Chekhov calmly, and with a "strange, sourceless maturity",Wood, p 79. now assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he daily wrote short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as Antosha Chekhonte (Антоша Чехонте) and Man without a Spleen (Человек без селезенки). His output was prodigious during this period, and he rapidly earned a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life.

By the age of twenty-six, Chekhov had published more than four hundred short stories, sketches and vignettes, as well as two books of collected narratives; but much of his early work remains untranslated and, owing to his many pseudonymous or anonymous contributions to obscure newspapers, uncollected. Nicolas Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time and the owner of Oskolki (Fragments), to which Chekhov began submitting some of his choicer works, recognized the writer's talent but limited him to sketches of a page and a half in length. Some believe this discipline stimulated the development of Chekhov's trademark concise style.

Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher and more mocking than in his mature fiction. In 2001 George Steiner reviewed the early stories translated in The Undiscovered Chekhov:

There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty. This can take the form of physical assault, of lacerating accidents. More subtly, there is the unctuous sadism of money and of social rank. Young women are simply sold off to rheumy, ageing bidders. Alcoholics are mocked and tormented when they cannot scrounge the kopek needed for their next drink. The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/critics/reviews/0,,489891,00.html George Steiner, Vodka miniatures, belching and angry cats, 2001.] Retrieved 31 October 2006.

Chekhov wrote his first full-length play, variously called the "untitled play", That Worthless Fellow Platonov or simply Platonov in 1880 and tried without success to have it staged. That year he also wrote The Little Apples, which may be considered his first fully realised story, in which cruel beatings intrude on an earthly paradise, destroying a state of innocence.Payne, p XXIII.The influence of Dostoevsky has been detected in Little Apples.In the essay Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden by Robert Louis Jackson, 1993. Chekhov's early stories have been considered juvenilia and until recently were often omitted from collections; but from The Little Apples on, a steady power is evident in Chekhov's best work, and a mind already formed.Payne, p XXIV.

In 1884 Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession, though he made little money from it and treated the poor for free.Malcom, p 26. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, however, and earned enough money to move the family to progressively better accommodation. In 1885 he began submitting to the Peterburgskaya Gazeta (The Petersburg Gazette) longer works of a more sombre nature, which were rejected by Leykin; but in the same year he was invited to write for one of the most respected papers in Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexei Suvorin.

By 1886, Chekhov was not only a well-known writer but was attracting critical attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitri Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman,The Huntsman. "You have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation". He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality.

Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and admitted, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself". Malcom, p 32-3. Chekhov may have done himself a disservice with these words, since surviving early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending.Payne, p XXIV. But Grigorevich's advice undoubtedly inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old writer.

In a prolific year Chekhov wrote over a hundred stories and published his first collection "Motley Tales" (Pestrye rasskazy) with support from Suvorin; and in the following year the short story collection "At Dusk" (V sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize. This marked the beginnings of a highly productive career for the writer.

In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov had found himself coughing blood, and this worsened in 1886, though he would not admit tuberculosis at first.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.In April, however, he confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."Letter to N.A.Leykin, 6 April 1886. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Early maturity

In 1887, under strain from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to the Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe."There is a scent of the steppe and one hears the birds sing. I see my old friends the ravens flying over the steppe." Letter to sister, Masha, 2 April 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. On his return, he started writing the novella-length short story The Steppe, eventually published in Severny Vestnik (Northern Herald) in 1888. This masterpiece represented another turning point for Chekhov: it not only won him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper but achieved much of the mature form of his later fiction. Chekhov describes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe has been described as a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics".Michael Finke, quoted by Malcom, p 147. Chekhov's narrative drifts with the arbitrary thought processes of the characters, an innovation later taken up by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf."This use of stream-of-consciousness would, in later years, become the basis of Chekhov's innovation in stagecraft; it is also his innovation in fiction." Wood, p 81.

In Autumn 1887, Chekhov was commissioned by a theatre manager called Korsh, who knew him as a humorous writer, to write a play; he responded by writing Ivanov in a fortnight, which was produced that November.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the shambolic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, "Korsh promised me ten rehearsals, but gave me only four, of which only two could be called rehearsals, for the other two were tournaments in which messieurs les artistes exercised themselves in altercation and abuse. Davydov and Glama were the only two who knew their parts; the others trusted to the prompter and their own inner conviction." Letter to brother Alexander, 20 November 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality."If you read the play you will not understand the excitement I have described to you; you will find nothing special in it. Nikolay, Shehtel, and Levitan—all of them painters—assure me that on the stage it is so original that it is quite strange to look at. In reading one does not notice it." Letter to brother Alexander, 20 November 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Mihail Chekhov believed that Ivanov represented a key moment in his brother's mental development and literary career.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. Chekhov quickly followed up with The Bear and The Wood Demon, the latter eventually rewritten as Uncle Vanya, one of his four great works for the stage.

In 1888 and 1889, he spent the summers with his family at Luka, in the province of Harkov, where he delighted in the garden, the woods, the pond full of carp, and a river full of fish and crayfish.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. But the second of those summers was darkened by the death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, an event which which influenced Chekhov's writing of A Dreary Story, A Dreary Story finished that September, about a professor who confronts the end of his life and realises it has been without purpose. Biographer Ernest Simmons speculated that Nikolai's death forced Chekhov to face up to the real possibility of his own death from the same disease.

Sakhalin

In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the far east of Russia and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, where he spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers. His brother Mihail, who recorded Chekhov's restlessness and depression after Nikolai's death, was at the time studying prisons as part of his law studies, and Chekhov had soon become intensely interested in the issue subject himself.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to Sakhalin are among his best.Malcom, p 129. But his remarks to his sister about Tomsk became notorious.

Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull too.Letter to sister, Masha, 20 May 1890. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting an ironic statue of Chekhov, mocking his peevish complaints about the weather.

What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and appalled him: "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."Quoted by Wood, p 85. He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:

On the Amur steamer going to Sahalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.Letter to A.F.Koni, 16 January 1891. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer and that the government should pay for humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin). This work was written as social science rather than literature and is worthy and informative rather than brilliant.Malcom, p 125. Chekhov found literary expression for the hell that was Sakhalin in his long short story The Murder, which tells of a domestic murder in an Old Believers' household; the last section of the story is set on Sakhalin, where a gang of fettered convicts is forced to load coal in the night, among them Yakov, the murderer of the title:

Yakov Ivanitch had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then he was punished by flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each occasion they were stolen from him. The longing for home had begun from the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window, had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He had no one with whom to talk of home.The Murder.

In 1892, Chekhov depicted the horrors of internment in one of his grimmest stories, Ward no. 6, in which a Marcus Aurelius quoting doctor, Ragin, ends up confined with his former patients in a psychiatric ward, tyrannised by a brutal gaoler.Ward no.6.Vladimir Lenin confessed that when he read this story, he felt terrified, as if he himself were locked up with the inmates.Polotskaya, Emma, Chekhov and his Russia, in The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, p 20. "The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes," Janet Malcom has written; "Ward No. 6 stabs."Malcom, p 183.

Social conscience

Chekhov always claimed that he was apolitical and once said, "I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist."Letter to A.N Pleshtcheyev, 4 October 1889. Letters of Anton Chekhov. The philosopher Lev Shestov suggested that Chekhov's work murmers a quiet "I don't know" to every problem.Quoted by Wood, p 86.In the same vein, Vladimir Nabokov observed the typical Chekhov anti-hero to be:

…a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets…[who] combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action…Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.Quoted by Malcom, p 104.

After 1890, the middle-class characters in Chekhov's stories increasingly wring their hands about what is to be done with Russia, whether they are revolutionaries like Sasha in Betrothed,Betrothed (in The Schoolmaster and Other Stories). or liberal activists from the landowning classes like Natalya Gavrilovna in The Wife. In A Doctor's Visit, a factory owner's daughter suffers a psychosomatic illness as a symptom of the injustice of her position;A Doctor's Visit. in A Woman's Kingdom,A Woman's Kingdom (in The Party and Other Stories). a wealthy factory owner performs a random and counter-productive act of charity towards a poor family. In An Anonymous Story,An Anonymous Story. a nobleman-turned-revolutionary gradually loses his sense of purpose.

Chekhov believed there would never be a revolution in Russia."Life creates such characters as the dare-devil Dymov [The Steppe] not to be dissenters nor tramps, but downright revolutionaries…There never will be a revolution in Russia, and Dymov will end by taking to drink or getting into prison. He is a superfluous man." Letter to A.N.Pleshtcheyev, 9 February 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov. But the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had left Russian society in a state of social and political vulnerability which he constantly lay bare in his work."The spectre of serfdom, abolished in 1861, haunts Chekhov's plays." The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed Martin Banham, Cambridge University, 1995, ISBN 0521434378, p 949. Without a cheap labour-force of serfs, most landlords struggled to survive economically, while the peasants, cut adrift from their traditional role, often found themselves abandoned to market forces. At the end of The Cherry Orchard, when the family leaves the house after selling up, their old retainer, Firs, an ex-serf who calls the emancipation "the disaster", is left behind, locked in the nursery, the family assuming he had been taken to hospital.The Cherry Orchard.

Melikhovo

In 1892, Chekhov himself became a landowner, having bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles south of Moscow, where he lived until 1900 with his family. "It's nice to be a lord," he joked to Shtcheglov;Letter to I.L.Shtcheglov, 9 March 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov. but from the start he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief for victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks of 1892, he went on to build three schools, a fire station, and a clinic, and to donate his medical services to peasants for miles around, despite frequent recurrences of his tuberculosis.Malcom, p 26; Wood, p 78; Payne, p XXXI.

Mihail Chekhov, part of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:

From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melikhovo the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

Chekhov’s expenditure on drugs was considerable; and the hardest sacrifice was to make journeys of several hours to visit the sick, reducing the time for writing.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. But Chekhov’s work as a doctor, by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society, often informed his writing. For example, he witnessed at first hand the unhealthy and cramped living conditions of many peasants. In the short story Peasants, he describes a family's sleeping arrangements: "They began going to bed. Nikolay, as an invalid, was put on the stove with his old father; Sasha lay down on the floor, while Olga went with the other women into the barn." Peasants. In Rothschild’s Fiddle, a peasant who lives with his wife in a one-room hut makes a coffin for her while she lies dying beside him. Rothschild's Fiddle. Chekhov visited the upper classes too, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."Note-Book.

Some of his stories grew directly from his experiences as a doctor; for example, the idea for A Dead BodyA Dead Body.came from an autopsy he had conducted in a field near Voskresensk.Payne, p XXVII. And his story The PartyThe Party. describes a problematic pregnancy from a female character's point of view. "It really isn't bad to be a doctor and to understand what one is writing about," he told Suvorin. "The ladies say the description of the confinement is true.” Letter to Suvorin, 15 November 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov often chose doctors as protagonists, usually, like Ragin from Ward no. Six, depicted in a state of impotent despair. In Ionitch, an idealistic young doctor misses his opportunities in life, and in middle-age turns disillusioned and greedy.Ionitch. In The Grasshopper, a specialist in diphtheria deliberately infects himself with the disease in response to his wife’s long-term infidelity.The Grasshopper.

Doctors appear in both the plays Chekhov finished at Melikhovo. In Uncle Vanya, Dr Astrov casually seduces the woman the title character has set his heart on; while in The Seagull, Eugene Dorn, another doctor, observes the tragi-comic events in the role of a detached outsider. Chekhov had written to Suvorin that he did not fear death. Letter to Suvorin, 25 November, 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov. In The Seagull, Dorn says, "The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death."The Seagull.

Chekhov began writing The Seagull in 1894, in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees from seed, which, according to Mihail, he "looked after…as though they were his children, and, like Colonel Vershinin in his Three Sisters, dreamed as he looked at them of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

Late plays

The first night of The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a disaster, booed by the audience. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who some considered the best actor in Russia, and who, according to Chekhov, had moved people to tears as Nina in rehearsal, was intimidated by the hostile audience and lost her voice.Letter to A.F.Koni, 11 November 1896. Letters of Anton Chekhov. The next day, Chekhov, who had taken refuge backstage for the last two acts, announced to Suvorin that he was finished with writing plays.Letter to Suvorin, 18 October 1896.Letters of Anton Chekhov. When supporters assured him that later performances were more successful, Chekhov assumed they were just being kind.

The Seagull impressed the playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, who said Chekhov should have won the Griboyedev prize that year instead of himself.Benedetti, p 16. And it was Nemirovich-Danchenko who convinced Konstantin Stanislavski to direct the play for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.Benedetti, p 25.Chekhov's collaboration with Stanislavski proved crucial to the creative development of both men: Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the play and revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage; while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the script forced Stanislavski to dig beneath the surface of the text in ways that were new in theatre.Chekhov and the Art Theatre, Stanislavsky saw, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage". Allen, p 11. In My Life in Art, Stanislavski recorded that after his own performance as Trigorin, Chekhov had said, "It was wonderful. Only you need torn shoes and check trousers." Stanislavski grasped that Trigorin was glamorous solely in Nina's imagination; in reality, he was seedy and second rate.Benedetti, p 25.

In 1899, Stanislavski directed Uncle Vanya, to such acclaim that Chekhov was bombarded with phone calls in the night, "the first time that my own fame has kept me awake".Letter to Olga Knipper, 30 October 1899, Letters of Anton Chekhov. When he had rewritten The Wood Demon as Uncle Vanya is not clear, but in December 1898 he had told Gorky: "Uncle Vanya was written long, long ago; I have never seen it on the stage. Of late years it has often been produced at provincial theatres."Letter to Gorky, 3 December 1898, Letters of Anton Chekhov.

In 1900, entering the last stages of his tuberculosis, Chekhov moved from Melikhovo to the Crimean resort of Yalta, where he completed two more plays for the Art Theatre. In his remaining years, he composed with greater difficulty than in the days when he "wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now", and he took a year each over The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.Malcom, p 170-1. Chekhov disliked Yalta: his letters reveal a longing for Moscow, echoed by the three sisters of his play, who also felt trapped in a small provincial town. Mihail Chekhov suggested that The Three Sisters was informed by the summers the Chekhov family had spent at Voskresensk, a military town like the one in the play.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. Chekhov found himself well enough to assist in the rehearsals of his last play The Cherry Orchard, which was rapturously received at its premiere on 17 January 1904. Two days later he wrote to F.D.Batyushkov, "they gave me an ovation, so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected, that I can't get over it even now."Letter to F.D.Batyushkov, 19 January 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Longer stories

Chekhov wrote most of his best stories in the 1890s. He largely moved away from very short fiction and allowed his stories whatever length they needed, though his attempts to write a full-length novel appear to have come to nothing.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. His story The Duel,The Duel. for example, was serialised in eleven issues of Suvorin's Novoye Vremya in 1891 and afterwards published by Suvorin as a book in twenty-one chapters.Seven Short Novels, tr. Makanowitzky, p 10. Several of the longer stories were, in effect, short novels, which attempted a more varied portrait of Russian society at all its social levels. The longest was My Life,My Life. the story of a young man who, in revolt against his harsh father, deserts his middle-class lifestyle and prospects to work as a housepainter. Another long story, Three Years,Three Years.follows the industrial heir Laptev, who at first rejects the factory he inherits and marries a woman who does not return his love but later resigns himself to the factory and becomes emotionally numbed. In 1900 Chekhov wrote the long story In the Ravine,In the Ravine. which depicts an entire rural community, with its social, economic, and religious dynamics, centred on the troubled Tsybukin family that runs the village store. "There's everything in it," Chekhov told Olga Knipper.Letter to Olga Knipper, 2 January 1900. Letters of Anton Chekhov. In the Ravine includes perhaps Chekhov's most evil character, Malcom, p 124.the ruthless Aksinya, "who looked at the horses' teeth like a peasant", who in a fit of jealous rage scalds her sister-in-law’s baby to death with a ladle of boiling water. Another of Chekhov's ambitious long stories was An Anonymous Story, in which a revolutionary nobleman spies on a government minister's son by working as his valet.

I helped him to dress, and he let me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence; then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and munching rusks.An Anonymous Story.

Yalta

[[Image:Tolstoy+chekhov.jpg|frame|right|100px|thumb|With Leo Tolstoy at Yalta in 1900]]

In March 1897 Chekhov suffered a sudden haemorrhage from the lungs while on a visit to Moscow and was, not without some difficulty, persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered him to change his manner of life.Letter to Suvorin, 1 April 1897. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

After the death of his father in 1898, he bought a plot of land at Autka, in Yalta, and began building a white villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. He also bought a small property at Kutchuka, a wild spot twenty-four miles from Yalta, where, according to Mihail, "he wanted to have hens, cows, a horse and donkeys, and, of course, all of this would have been quite possible and might have been realized if he had not been slowly dying".From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

Chekhov disliked Yalta as much as ever and intended to move to his home town of Taganrog, further along the coast, as soon as a mains water supply was installed there. Bartlett, p 2. Though he planted trees and gardens at Autka, kept animals, and received guests such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, he was always relieved to leave Yalta for travels abroad or to visit Moscow and was never entirely convinced of the health benefits claimed for the Crimean air.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.

On 25 May 1901, after a particularly dangerous bout of ill health, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, a former acting student of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull. Up to that point, Chekhov, who has been called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor",Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov's Leading Lady, quoted in Malcom, p 59. had preferred visits to brothels and swift liaisons to commitment;"Chekhov had the temperament of a philanderer. Sexually, he preferred brothels or swift liaisons." Wood, p 78. he had once written to Suvorin:

By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.Letter to Suvorin, 23 March 1895. Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Such was exactly the pattern of Chekhov's subsequent marriage to Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, while she lived in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. The marriage may have been unconventional in other ways. In 1902, Olga became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that the conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart.Carol Rocamora, 2005, Olga, my doggie. Retrieved 19 November 2006. The legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence between Chekhov and Olga which contains gems of theatre history, including Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays and shared complaints about Stanislavski's methods.Carol Rocamora, 2005, Olga, my doggie. Retrieved 19 November 2006.

Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories at Yalta, The Lady and the Little Dog,The Lady and the Little Dog. which describes what at first seems a brief liaison between a married woman on vacation in Yalta and a married man passing through; neither expects anything lasting from the encounter, but later they find themselves drawn back to each other and risk the security of their family lives. At Yalta Chekhov also wrote The Bishop,The Bishop. "one of the most autobiographical of his stories", Payne, p XXXV. a long, elegiac portrait a dying bishop, whose family, even his mother, has come to respect rather than love him. Chekhov’s final story, Betrothed,Betrothed (in The Schoolmaster and Other Stories). depicts a decaying household, run by three women from different generations of the landowning class: the grandmother who retreats into religion, the mother who "was interested in spiritualism and homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts to which she was subject", and the daughter, Nadya, who comes under the influence of the revolutionary student Sasha, renounces her betrothal, and leaves the old order behind for a new life in the city.

Death

By May 1904, Chekhov was seriously ill. "Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off," Mihail Chekhov recalled, "but the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the less he seemed to realize it."From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, from where he wrote letters to his sister Masha jovially describing the food and surroundings, and assuring her and his mother that he was getting better. In his last letter, he complained about the way the German women dressed.Letter to sister Masha, 28 June 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.He died five days later.

Chekhov’s death is one of "the great set pieces of literary history", Malcom, p 62. retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote the seminal account of her husband’s last moments:

Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): "Ich sterbe". The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child.Quoted by Malcom, p 63.

Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which offended Gorky."Banality revenged itself upon him by a nasty prank, for it saw that his corpse, the corpse of a poet, was put into a railway truck 'For the Conveyance of Oysters'." Maxim Gorky in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. Some of the mourners followed the wrong funeral procession, that of a General Keller, to the tune of a military band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichie Cemetery.Malcom, p 91.

"You ask me what is life?" Chekhov once said. "That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that's all there is to it."William Boyd, 2004, Brief Encounters. Retrieved 19 November 2006.

Influence

A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin he thought people might go on reading him for seven years. "Why seven?" asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half," Chekhov replied. "That’s not bad. I’ve got six years to live."Payne, p XXXVI.

Modesty aside, Chekhov could hardly have imagined the extent of his posthumous reputation. The ovations for The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death revealed how far had come in the affections of the Russian public; by then he was second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years. But after his death, Chekhov's fame soon spread further afield. The English translations by Constant Garnett after the first world war won him an English-language readership which took him to its heart. The Russian critic D.S. Mirsky, who lived in England, suggested that Chekhov was popular in that country because of his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values".Quoted by Wood, p 77.In America, Chekhov's reputation grew partly through the influence of Stanislavski's acting method.

Among the first English-language writers to appreciate Chekhov's originality were Katherine Mansfield, who came close to plagiarising him, and Virginia Woolf, who wrote in 1918:

He is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful, and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme.Quoted by Bartlett, From Russia, with Love. Retrieved 21 November 2006.

One of the first non-Russians to grasp the significance of Chekhov's plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes". Shaw noticed similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian equivalents, as depicted by Chekhov: "the same nice people, the same utter futility".Anna Obraztsova, Bernard Shaw's Dialogue with Chekhov, in Miles, p 43-44.

Chekhov's reputation has now risen to the point where he is widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern short story. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and William Trevor have consciously followed his lead. Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story Errand about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov the greatest of all short-story writers:

Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.Quoted by Bartlett, From Russia, with Love. Retrieved 21 November 2006.

Some writers believe that Chekhov’s short stories represent a greater achievement than his dramatic works,"Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short-story writer ever." William Boyd. A Chekhov Lexicon. Retrieved 14 November 2006. but Chekhov is perhaps better known for his plays in the English-speaking world, where he is the most popular playwright after Shakespeare,Rosamund Bartlett, From Russia, with Love. Retrieved 21 November 2006. his reputation resting on his last four plays. American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets are among those who have used Chekhovian techniques.

See also

• Bibliography of Anton Chekhov

Notes

References

• Allen, David, Performing Chekhov, Routledge (UK), 2001, ISBN 0415189349
• Bartlett, Rosamund, and Anthony Phillips (translators), Chekhov: A Life in Letters, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN 0140449221
• Bartlett, Rosamund, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, Free Press, ISBN 0743230744
• Benedetti, Jean (translator), Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1998, ISBN 0413723909
• Benedetti, Jean, Stanislavski: An Introduction, Methuen Drama, 1989 edition, ISBN 0-413-50030-6
• Chekhov, Anton, About Love and Other Stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0192802607
• Chekhov, Anton, A Journey to Sakhalin, translated by Brian Reeve, Sutton Publishing, 1992, ISBN 185763005X
• Chekhov, Anton, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Fifty New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine, Duck Editions, 2001, ISBN 0715631063
• Chekhov, Anton, Forty Stories, translated and with an introduction by Robert Payne, New York, Vintage, 1991 edition, ISBN 0-679-73375-2
• Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch, translated by Constance Garnett, New York, Macmillan, 1920. Full text at Gutenberg.
• Chekhov, Anton, Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, New York, B.W.Heubsch, 1921.Full text at Gutenberg.
• Chekhov, Anton, Seven Short Novels, translated by Barbara Makanowitzky, W.W.Norton & Company, 2003 edition, ISBN 0393005526
• Finke, Michael, Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapoetic Journey, an essay in Anton Chekhov Rediscovered, ed Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, East Lansing, Michigan Russian Language Journal, 1988, ISBN 9999838855
• Gerhardie, William, Anton Chekhov, Macdonald, 1974 edition, ISBN 0356046095
• Gorky, Maksim, Alexander Kuprin, and I.A.Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.S.Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, New York, B.W.Huebsch, 1921. Read at eldritchpress.
• Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0521589177
• Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden—'Because of Little Apples', in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0804721203
• Nabokov, Vladimir, Anton Chekhov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/HBJ Books, [1981] 2002 edition, ISBN 0156027763.
• Malcom, Janet, Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey, London, Granta Publications, 2004 edition, ISBN 1-86207-635-9
• Miles, Patrick (ed), Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0521384672
• Pitcher, Harvey, Chekhov's Leading Lady: Portrait of the Actress Olga Knipper, J Murray, 1979, ISBN 0719536812
• Rayfield, Donald, Anton Chekhov: A Life, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1998, ISBN 0805057471
• Shestov, Lev, Anton Chekhov: Creation from the Void, in All Things Are Possible and Penultimate Words and Other Essays, Ohio University Press, 1991 edition, ISBN 0821402374. Read 1977 edition. Retrieved 13 November 2006
• Simmons, Ernest.J., Chekhov: A Biography, University of Chicago Press, (1962) 1970 edition, ISBN 0-226-75805-2
• Stanislavski, Konstantin, My Life in Art, Methuen Drama, 1980 edition, ISBN 0413462005
• Styan, John Louis, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1981, ISBN 052129628
• Troyat, Henri, Chekhov, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Corner House Pub, 1986, ISBN 0525244069
• Wood, James, What Chekhov Meant by Life, in The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief, London, Pimlico, 2000 edition, ISBN 0-7126-6557-9

External links

• Chekhov Lexicon. An ABC of Chekhov by the novelist William Boyd. Retrieved 14 November 2006.
• Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian
• A collection of 201 stories translated into English
• Chekhov's short stories.

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