THE AUTHOR
Born on January 29, 1860, in the small seaport of Taganrog, Ukraine, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf who had bought his freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. When Pavel’s grocery store failed, he moved the family except for Anton to Moscow. Young Chekhov stayed behind to finish school and try to make a living. He lived in the corner of a house and scraped out a meager existence by tutoring family friends. He later called his adolescence a "never-ending toothache."
After being graduated from high school, Chekhov left for Moscow to study medicine. While he was in school, he began writing for humor magazines to earn money for his family and himself. He produced hundreds of short, funny stories in his spare time and later admitted that it had been a relief to write in the evenings after spending the day pouring over chemistry and anatomy.
For years, though, Chekhov couldn't decide whether to devote his life to medicine or literature, so he split his efforts between the two. In 1884, he received his medical degree and began a career as a doctor, which he continued until 1892. He later referred to this period as his "sporadic second career which was to bring much hard work but little income." He treated mostly peasants whose poverty reminded him of his childhood, and he rarely asked for payment. He set up free clinics in provincial Russia, and he fought the cholera and famine epidemics of 1891 and 1892.
Chekhov was embarrassed about his love for writing and wrote for years under a number of pseudonyms. He once told a friend, "Medicine takes itself seriously; the game of literature requires nicknames." After receiving his degree from medical school, he continued to write stories for weekly magazines and newspapers. His friends encouraged him to try writing something more ambitious, but he didn't think he was good enough.
The magazines he wrote for gave him strict limits on the number of words per story, and he often started and finished a short piece in a single sitting. He wrote to a friend, saying that he thought of writing "frivolously, casually [and] nonchalantly." It wasn't until he received encouraging advice from an editor that he began to take writing seriously and to use his real name.
One of the inventors of the modern short story, Chekhov fills his works with passive characters and light plots. While his stories lack overly emotional, grandiose climaxes, they usually end with a moment that reveals something profound about the lives of his protagonists.
During his career, he produced several hundred stories. Palata No. 6 (Ward No. Six), written in 1892, is his classic story of the abuse of psychiatry. In it, Gromov is convinced that anyone can be imprisoned. He develops a persecution mania and is incarcerated in a horrific asylum, where Doctor Ragin becomes interested in his case. Their relationship attracts attention, and the doctor is tricked into becoming a patient in his own ward. He dies after being beaten by a worker. The symmetrical story offers numerous similarities to the works of Samuel Fuller's film, The Shock Corridor (1963), and Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Chekhov's first play, The Seagull, opened in 1885. It was so bad that the author walked out on it at intermission, vowing never to write another. But two years later, it was produced again, this time to rave reviews. Thankfully, that success inspired him to go on to write other plays, including Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904), all now considered classics.
Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhove in 1892. There, he wrote several of his best stories, including Neighbours, Ward Number Six, The Black Monk, The Murder, and Ariadne. He also served as a volunteer census taker, participated in famine relief, and worked as a medical inspector during the cholera epidemics. In 1897, he was stricken by tuberculosis and lived the remainder of his life either abroad or in the Crimea.
In Yalta, Chekhov wrote his famed stories, The Man in the Shell, Gooseberries, About Love, Lady with the Dog, and In the Ravine. His last story, The Betrothed, is an optimistic tale of a young woman who escapes from provincial dullness to gain personal freedom.
In 1901, Chekhov married Moscow Art Theater actress Olga Knipper (1870-1959). She had played several of Chekhov's leading roles over the years. She enjoyed his plays because--like his short stories--they reflected a multitude of possible viewpoints. Surprise and tension, staples in most dramas of the day, were foreign elements in Chekhovian theater, where the dramatic movement is subdued, the characters are harmonious, and the players endure their fate with stoic patience. In the end, they usually learn something about themselves and their false hopes.
Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is regarded as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater. As if mirroring the philosophy behind his own characters, the author once said, "Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."
The words proved to be prophetic. By 1903, the health of the author/playwright was failing. Anton Chekhov died on July 15, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany, and was buried in the cemetery of the Novodeviche Monastery in Moscow next to his father.
THE ETHICIST
Although Chekhov originally started writing to earn money, his artistic aspirations led to formal innovations that influenced the evolution of the modern-day short story. He made no pretenses for the difficulties his writing posed for his readers, insisting that the role of an artist is not to answer questions but rather to ask them. In that, most critics agree, he was wildly successful.
As a child, Chekhov was a devout orthodox Christian and a member of his church choir. His father Pavel is viewed by some historians as the model for his son's numerous portraits of hypocrisy. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya (Morozova), 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," Anton often recalled, "but our soul from our mother.” In adulthood, Chekhov condemned the way his brother Alexander treated his wife and children, reminding him of 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, following Pavel’s bankruptcy while constructing a new house with a contractor who cheated him out of his life’s savings, Pavel fled to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison. There, he joined his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, who attended university there. Chekhov's mother was devastated by the experience and, no doubt, by the family’s desertion of her youngest son until he could finish school and join them in Moscow.
During his three years alone in Taganrog, Chekhov boarded with a man who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house. Working at odd jobs, Chekhov sent every ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up. During this time, he read widely and analytically, including the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer. He also experienced a series of love affairs, including one with the wife of a teacher.
After leaving Taganrog for Moscow with his doctor’s degree in hand, Chekhov became the prime source of his family’s income. But, in 1884 and 1885, he found himself coughing up blood, attacks that escalated in time, although he refused to admit his tuberculosis to his family or friends. He confessed to one of them, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues." He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money from that to move the family into progressively better accommodations while providing his medical services to the poor free of charge.
The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 foreshadowed what Anton knew of the disease at the time and influenced A Dreary Story, depicting a man who confronts the end of a life that has been without purpose. Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded Anton’s depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton, in a search for more meaning to his own life, became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.
The following year, Chekhov embarked upon an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the Russian Far East and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. There, he spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. Much of what Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and the forced prostitution of women. He wrote of his experiences, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."
In March 1897, Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage while on a visit to Moscow. His doctors convinced him to enter a clinic, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change to his lifestyle. Following 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--two of his life’s greatest influences.
By May 1904, the author-doctor had become terminally ill. His brother Mikhail 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." On June 3, Chekhov set off with wife Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in Germany’s Black Forest from where he wrote outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha, 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 German women dressed.
In 1908, Olga wrote her 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 (I'm dying). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: "It's a long time since I drank champagne." He drained it and 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 ...
Chekhov once said, “For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.”
In his own case, Chekhov’s “well” is the treasury of great, insightful, reflective literature he wrote in pursuit of immortality and the very mortal nature of life. And for that, humanity will be indebted to him forever.
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“Even in Siberia there is happiness.”