in
Taganrog, Chekhova street, Russia in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.
Childhood Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on the
feast day of
St. Anthony the Great on ) in
Taganrog, a commercial port city on the
Sea of Azov – on Politseyskaya (Police) street, later renamed Chekhova street – in southern
Russia. He was the third of six surviving children; he had two older brothers,
Alexander and
Nikolai, and three younger siblings, Ivan,
Maria, and
Mikhail. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former
serf and his wife, was from the village
Olkhovatka (
Voronezh Governorate) and ran a grocery store. He was a director of the parish choir, a devout
Orthodox Christian, and a physically abusive father. Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya (Morozova), was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels all over Russia with her cloth-merchant father. "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov recalled, "but our soul from our mother." Young Chekhov attended the
Greek School in Taganrog and
The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium (since renamed the
Chekhov Gymnasium). There he was held back for a year at fifteen for failing an examination in Ancient Greek. He sang at the
Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs. In a letter of 1892, he used the word "suffering" to describe his childhood and recalled: Later, in his adulthood, Chekhov criticized his brother
Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of their father Pavel's tyranny: "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." In 1876, Chekhov's father Pavel was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov. To avoid
debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons,
Alexander and
Nikolai, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience. Chekhov was left behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education. He remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man by the name of Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in
The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house. Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling
goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs. He sent every
ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up. As a teenager Chekhov fell in love with the
Taganrog Theatre. He attended the theatre on a regular basis and became enchanted and inspired by productions of
vaudevilles,
Italian operas and popular
comedies. During that time, Chekhov read widely and analytically, including the works of
Cervantes,
Turgenev,
Goncharov, and
Schopenhauer, and wrote a full-length comic drama,
Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication." Chekhov also experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher. In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling in Taganrog and moved in with his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at
I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University.
Early writings Chekhov then assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man Without Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a
satirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for
Oskolki (
Fragments), owned by
Nikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time. Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction. In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit his
tuberculosis to his family or his friends. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodations. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in
St. Petersburg,
Novoye Vremya (
New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate
Alexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three times the space. Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest. Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old
Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story "The Huntsman" that "You have
real talent, a talent that 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 confessed, "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." The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising. Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1888, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection
At Dusk (
V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted
Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."
Turning points In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine, which reawakened him to the beauty of the
steppe. On his return, he began the novella-length short story "
The Steppe", which he called "something rather odd and much too original", and which was eventually published in
Severny Vestnik (
The Northern Herald). In a narrative that drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a
chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, and his companions, a priest and a merchant. "The Steppe" has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", and it represented a significant advance for Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper. In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being
Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November. Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening" and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality. Although Chekhov did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such as
The Seagull (written in 1895),
Uncle Vanya (written in 1897),
The Three Sisters (written in 1900), and
The Cherry Orchard (written in 1903) served as a revolutionary backbone to what is common sense to the medium of acting to this day: an effort to recreate and express the realism of how people truly act and speak with each other. This realistic manifestation of the human condition may engender in audiences reflection upon what it means to be human. This philosophy of approaching the art of acting has stood not only steadfast, but as the cornerstone of acting for much of the 20th century to this day.
Mikhail Chekhov considered
Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced
A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life that he realises has been without purpose. Mikhail Chekhov recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death. Mikhail was researching prisons at that time as part of his law studies. Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform. Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of Sakhalin" in his long short story "
The Murder", the last section of which is set on Sakhalin, where the murderer Yakov loads coal in the night while longing for home. Chekhov's writing on Sakhalin, especially the traditions and habits of the
Gilyak people, is the subject of a sustained meditation and analysis in
Haruki Murakami's novel
1Q84. It is also the subject of a poem by the Nobel Prize winner
Seamus Heaney, "Chekhov on Sakhalin" (collected in the volume
Station Island).
Rebecca Gould has compared Chekhov's book on Sakhalin to
Katherine Mansfield's
Urewera Notebook (1907). In 2013, the Wellcome Trust-funded play 'A Russian Doctor', performed by Andrew Dawson and researched by Professor Jonathan Cole, explored Chekhov's experiences on Sakhalin Island.
Melikhovo , now a museum Mikhail Chekhov, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments: Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, but the greatest cost was making journeys of several hours to visit the sick, which reduced his time for writing. However, Chekhov's work as a doctor enriched his writing by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society: for example, he witnessed at first hand the peasants' unhealthy and cramped living conditions, which he recalled in his short story "Peasants". Chekhov visited the upper classes as well, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women." In 1893/1894 he worked as a
Zemstvo doctor in
Zvenigorod, which has numerous sanatoriums and rest homes. A local hospital is named after him. In 1894, Chekhov began writing his play
The Seagull in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since he had moved to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended the orchard and the pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, he "looked after ... as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his
Three Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years." Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting. The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year staged
Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896. In the last decades of his life he became an
atheist.
Yalta In March 1897, Chekhov suffered a major
haemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow. With great difficulty he was persuaded to enter a clinic, where doctors diagnosed
tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner of life. at
Yalta, 1900 After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of
Yalta and built a
villa (The White Dacha), into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as
Leo Tolstoy and
Maxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot
Siberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was installed there. In Yalta he completed two more plays for the Art Theatre, composing with greater difficulty than in the days when he "wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now". He took a year each over
Three Sisters and
The Cherry Orchard. On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married
Olga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of weddings. She was a former protégée and sometime lover of
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for
The Seagull. Up to that point, Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor", had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment. He had once written to Suvorin: , 1901, on their honeymoon The letter proved prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and
Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart, although other Russian scholars have rejected that claim. The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints about
Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays. In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories, "
The Lady with the Dog" (also translated from the Russian as "Lady with Lapdog"), which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in
Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting from the encounter. Unexpectedly though, they gradually fall deeply in love and end up risking scandal and the security of their family lives. The story masterfully captures their feelings for each other, the inner transformation undergone by the disillusioned male protagonist as a result of falling deeply in love, and their inability to resolve the matter by either letting go of their families or of each other.
Death In May 1903, Chekhov visited Moscow; the prominent lawyer
Vasily Maklakov visited him almost every day. Maklakov signed Chekhov's will. By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with
tuberculosis. Mikhail Chekhov recalled that "everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off, but the nearer [he] was to the end, the less he seemed to realise it". Chekhov died on 15 July 1904 at the age of 44 after a long fight with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his brother. Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history"retold, embroidered, and fictionalized many times since, notably in the 1987 short story "Errand" by
Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband's last moments: Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a
refrigerated railway-car meant for
oysters, a detail that offended
Gorky. Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral procession of a
General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the
Novodevichy Cemetery. ==Legacy==