Chekhov, Anton

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CHEKHOV, ANTON

CHEKHOV, ANTON (1860–1904), Russian playwright and short story writer.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia, on 29 January (17 January, old style) 1860, the grandson of an emancipated serf. His father failed as owner of a small shop; to escape his creditors, he fled to Moscow. Chekhov was left on his own to finish school. He did so brilliantly and won a scholarship to medical school. While still a student, he began publishing (under one or another of several pseudonyms) comic sketches for popular journals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He did not at this early stage perceive his writing as "literature." As the major provider for his parents and siblings, he wrote simply to supplement his income as a doctor.

From 1880 on, Chekhov wrote numberless jokes, gossip pieces, parodies, and humorous anecdotes for such rags as Dragonfly and the weekly magazine Fragments. For the next five years his publications (with the exception of two rather unremarkable novel-length pieces) consisted of short, pointed vignettes, pithy and funny, but sometimes with a tinge of the melancholy that would become more apparent in his later work.

In 1885 (after finishing his medical degree) Chekhov visited St. Petersburg, where he was received with deep admiration by some of the most respected names in Russian literature. Chekhov was amazed and chastened by this turn, and he began to write longer and more carefully crafted stories. These were not suitable for the ephemeral publications where his previous work had appeared. But he became a friend of Alexei Suvorin, the powerful and wealthy publisher of the leading Russian daily newspaper, New Times. Chekhov's longer and more serious works became a staple of Suvorin's vast publishing empire, to the mutual advantage of both men.

Chekhov now began writing plays: Ivanov, a study of that archetypal creature, the Russian superfluous man, was successfully produced in 1887 and 1889. The Wood Demon had less success when staged in 1888 but was later reworked into one of Chekhov's late masterpieces, Uncle Vanya (1899). In this new phase of his career Chekhov also began publishing longer prose works, such as "The Steppe" (1888), which brought him attention in the more serious journals of the day. The stories of this period are marked by close attention to the natural landscape and detailed descriptions of people in crisis. In "Name-Day Party" (1888) he describes a woman undergoing a miscarriage, while in "A Dreary Story" (1889) a distinguished professor is brought low by old age as he approaches death. These stories reflect Chekhov's experience as a practicing physician and have the form of brilliant case histories.

By this time Chekhov defined himself as a writer, rather than a doctor, but not without some guilt. In the great tradition of Russian writers who felt they owed a debt to their society, Chekhov in 1890 made a journey across Siberia to the Pacific island of Sakhalin, where he applied his diagnostic eye and clinical descriptive skills to describing the community of native tribes and Russian convicts who inhabited the island (published as The Island of Sakhalin in 1893). He continued to treat peasants on his estate, and was active in famine relief. His high morals attracted him to Leo Tolstoy in the late 1880s, but by 1890 Chekhov became disillusioned with the religious aspect of Tolstoy's system. Chekhov, a believer in the Enlightenment and a much-traveled cosmopolitan, regarded Tolstoy's contempt for medical science as a sign of dangerous ignorance.

Chekhov's insistence on the clinical truth can be painful: Nikolai Stepanovich, the hero of "A Dreary Story," forces his beloved ward, an aspiring actress, to admit finally that she has no talent. And then, in a characteristic Chekhovian stroke, the old man says to Katya, "Let's go to lunch." The revelation of secret weaknesses—the human, all too human, aspect of Chekhov's best stories—results from his pitiless eye and his unsentimental recognition of the power of the quotidian.

In 1899 Chekhov prepared a complete edition of his works, entirely rewriting some of the earlier stories. But his last years were primarily occupied with his activity in the theater. The first performance of The Seagull in 1896 had been a failure. The cast and audience simply were not prepared for the novelty of Chekhov's revolutionary drama of indirect action, in which most of the action occurs offstage. But two years later Chekhov started his epochal collaboration with Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater (MAT), and a new chapter in the history of European drama began. The 1898 MAT production of The Seagull was a huge success, as was the 1899 production of Uncle Vanya, destined to become a staple in theaters all over the world. Three Sisters, produced in 1901, once again illustrated Chekhov's ability to find tragedy and high drama in the subtlest psychological effects. Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, was first performed on his final birthday, 29 January 1904. A profound historical commentary on changes in Russian society, it is as well an exquisite, if muted, comedy.

During his last years, Chekhov battled with tuberculosis. He found some happiness, nevertheless, in his magnificent house overseeing Yalta harbor and in his marriage to the MAT actress Olga Knipper. He died at the spa in Badenweiler, Germany, on 15 July (2 July, old style) 1904. In a final irony (that he would have appreciated), his body was conveyed back to Russia in a special railroad car used to transport oysters.