ANTON CHEKHOVChekhov is remembered as a playwright and one of the masters of the modern short story.

Birth house of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov’s Childhood

Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia where his father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store.

Chekhov’s father is described as a religious fanatic who was drunk all the time, and who beat his children. He has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.

Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia. "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother." In adulthood, Chekhov criticized his brother Alexander's, treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel’s tyranny.

Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog

gymnasium, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam. 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.

Doctor and Writer After he finished grammar school Chekhov enrolled in

the Moscow University Medical School, where he would eventually become a doctor. 

While attending medical school Chekhov began to publish comic short stories and used the money to support himself and his family and by 1886 he had gained wide fame as a writer.

While practicing medicine in 1886 he became a regular contributor to St. Petersburg daily Novoe vremya and it was during this time that he developed his style of the dispassionate, non-judgmental author.

His short stories and plays are considered among the greatest ever written; his work revolutionized dramatic literature.

He began his writing career by writing short, comedic stories for newspapers and magazines. His first plays were one act farces.

The first production of The Seagull, at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, booed by the audience. Chekhov actually left the auditorium during the second act and vowed never to write for the theatre again. 

However, In 1898, when the Moscow Art Theater produced the same play, Chekhov enjoyed his first overwhelming success.

“His audience demanded laughter above all things, and, with his deep

sense of the ridiculous, Chekhov asked nothing better. His stories, though often based on themes profoundly

tragic, are penetrated by the light and subtle satire that has won him his

reputation as a great humourist. But though there was always a smile on his

lips, it was a tender one, and his sympathy with suffering often brought

his laughter near to tears.”Plays by Anton Tchekoff. Trans. Marian Fell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912

A passionate enemy of all lies and oppression, he already foreshadows in these early writings the protest against conventions and rules, which he afterward put into Treplieff's reply to Sorin in "The Sea-Gull":

"Let us have new forms, or else nothing at all."

Success was now rapidly overtaking the young author; his first collection of stories appeared in 1887, another one in the same year had immediate success, and both went through many editions; but, at the same time, the shadows that darkened his later works began to creep over his light-hearted humor.

When he was thirty, Anton Chekhov had taken it in his head to trek out to Sakhalin Island at the far reaches of the Russian empire, to investigate the prison camps the tsarist regime had recently planted way out there.

It was a long, difficult journey (in those pre-Trans-Siberian Railway days a journey of two and a half months).

He spent three months there making a census of the convicts and recording their plight; he called Sakhalin "utter hell."   He had thought about writing a dissertation on this relatively new and seemingly escape-proof island dumping-ground for convicts, but in the end, he abandoned the idea of a dissertation and "settled" for putting his findings in a book, The Island of Sakhalin. 

Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova was among the 39 original members of the Moscow Art Theatre when it was formed by Constantin Stanislavski in 1898. She played Arkadina in The Seagull (1898), and was the first to play Masha in Three Sisters (1901) and Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard(1904). Knipper married Anton Chekhov, the author of these plays, in 1901. 

While rehearsing for The Seagull on the 9th of September, Olga's 30th birthday, she met Russia's most eligible literary bachelor and playwright of The Seagull, Anton Chekhov, then 38. Knipper and Chekhov exchanged telegrams and letters for the next few years, while Olga became more familiar with Chekhov's younger sister, Masha. Random letters of teasing and playfulness became letters of love and deep remorse that they lived so far apart from each other. Olga's true colors shone throughout her letters of correspondence. Her ill-moods, volatile tempers, combined with her sporadic high spirits, kept Chekhov on his toes. 

Chekhov’s four masterpieces:

The Seagull Uncle Vanya

The Three Sisters The Cherry Orchard

Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1888. The next year he was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

The Chekhov House Museum where Chekhov wrote such late masterpieces as Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard and the story “The Bishop”

A museum since 1905, Chekhov’s sister Masha was the main custodian until her death in 1957. The house survived the Russian Revolution, Civil War and Nazi occupation.

Chekhov remained rather unknown internationally until the years after World War I, when his works were translated into English. As a writer Chekhov was extremely fast, often

producing a short story in an hour or less, overall during his career he

authored several hundred stories.

In March of 1897, he had suffered a lung hemorrhage, and although he still made

occasional trips to Moscow to participate in the productions of his plays, he was forced

to spend most of his time in the Crimea where he had gone for his health.

A friend who saw him in Moscow on the eve of departure 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.

He died of tuberculosis on July 14, 1904, at the age of forty-four. Since his death, Chekhov's plays have become famous worldwide and he has come to be considered the greatest Russian storyteller and dramatist of modern times.

All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'"