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Further reading

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Anton Chekhov, by Osip Braz, 1898.
Born	29 January [O.S. 17 January] 1860 Taganrog, Russia
Died	15 July [O.S. 2 July] 1904 Badenweiler, Germany
Occupation	Doctor, short-story writer, playwright

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, Anton Pavlovič Čehov) was a Russian physician, short story writer, and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on 29 January [O.S. 17 January] 1860, and died of tuberculosis at the health spa of Badenweiler, Germany, on 15 July [O.S. 2 July] 1904. His brief playwriting career produced four classics of the repertoire, while his best short stories are highly valued by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress".

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was taken up by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, who subsequently also revived Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These works present a unique challenge to an acting ensemble: in the words of actor Ian McKellen, “Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if they ever make it to the summit." The plays also challenge audiences because, as Stanislavski came to appreciate, in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text". Among those less impressed was Leo Tolstoy, who reportedly told Chekhov, "You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse."

Tolstoy did, however, admire Chekhov's short stories, and called him the Pushkin of prose. Chekhov at first wrote only for money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later exploited by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. Chekhov habitually removed the opening and ending of a finished story, the places where he believed writers are least honest, and he preferred inconclusive endings. He made no apologies for the difficulties posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Chekhov was famously enigmatic about the meaning of his stories, explaining no further than: "There's no making out anything in this world".Maxim Gorky interpreted Chekhov's viewpoint as, "You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that".

The house in Taganrog where Chekhov was born

Early life

Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, southern Russia, where his father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store. A choirmaster, religious fanatic, and keen flogger of his children, Pavel has been seen as the model for Chekhov’s many portraits of hypocrites. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, who told the children tales of travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia. In Chekhov's view: "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother."

In adulthood, Chekhov criticised his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel’s treatment of 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.

The Assumption Cathedral in Taganrog, Russia, where Anton Chekhov was christened on 10 February 1860.

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. He sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs. In a letter of 1892, he described his childhood as "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.

For all his faults, Pavel Chekhov fostered a sense of culture and creativity in his children which had a lasting influence on their lives. Chekhov, for example, 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. He also edited a family magazine called The Stammerer. Stories written when he was twelve reveal the same simple, direct style as in his maturity.

After attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène at Taganrog City Theatre on 4 October 1873, Chekhov began spending most of 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 amateur theatricals for charity and scored a hit as an old crone in Grigoriev's piece The Coachman, or the Prank of a Hussar.

In 1876, disaster struck the family. Pavel Chekhov was declared bankrupt, after over-extending his finances building a new house, and to avoid the debtor’s prison fled 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. Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his education.

Taganrog Gymnasium in the late nineteenth century

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. Chekhov paid for his education by private tutoring and by catching and selling goldfinches, as well as by selling short sketches to the newspapers. He sent every rouble he could spare to Moscow, along with joky letters to cheer up the family. During this time he read widely and analytically, including Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer; and he wrote a full-length comedy drama, Fatherless, reviewed by his brother Alexander as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication". Chekhov also enjoyed a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.

Some of Chekhov's mature stories depict children separated from their families: The Steppe, for example, concerns a boy, Yegorushka, sent away from home to live with strangers; Sleepy tells of the thirteen-year-old nursemaid Varka, left in charge of a baby; while in Vanka a nine-year-old orphan, apprenticed far away from his village 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…"

In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at Moscow State University.

Early writings

Chekhov calmly, and with a "strange, sourceless maturity", 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 prodigious output rapidly earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life.

Chekhov published more than four hundred short stories and sketches by the age of twenty-six, but much of his early work remains uncollected, owing to his many pseudonyms and contributions to obscure newspapers. Nicolas Leikin, one of the leading publishers of the time and the owner of Oskolki (Fragments), to which Chekhov began submitting his choicer works, recognized the writer's talent but limited him to sketches a page and a half long. Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than in his mature fiction. Reviewing the early stories translated in The Undiscovered Chekhov, George Steiner observed:

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.

In 1880, Chekhov wrote his first full-length play, variously called the "untitled play", That Worthless Fellow Platonov, or simply Platonov, 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 the earthly paradise of two young lovers. Chekhov's early stories have until recently been omitted from collections as juvenilia; but from The Little Apples on, a steady power is evident in Chekhov's best work, and a fully formed sensibility.

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. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, however, and earned enough money to move the family into 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 Leikin; 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 popular writer but attracting critical 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, "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". The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since surviving early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending. But Grigorevich's advice inspired in the twenty-six-year-old a more serious, artistic ambition. In 1886, Chekhov wrote over a hundred stories and, with support from Suvorin, published his first collection, Motley Tales (Pestrye rasskazy). In the following year, with a little string-pulling by Grigorevich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) landed Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize “for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth”.

In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov had found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 this worsened, though he would not admit tuberculosis to his family and friends.In April, he confessed to Leikin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."

Turning points

In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to the Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe. On his return, he began the novella-length short story The Steppe, eventually published in Severny Vestnik (Northern Herald) in 1888. In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes an interminable 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, which has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", represented a significant advance for Chekhov, achieving 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 called Korsh, who knew Chekhov as a humorous writer, commissioned him to write a play: the result was Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November. Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the shambolic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit, praised as a work of originality, much to Chekhov's bemusement . Mihail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. Chekhov, who afterwards signed a letter "Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe", followed up quickly 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, Chekhov 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. But the second of those summers was darkened by the death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, a blow which influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life which he realises has been without purpose. Mihail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Chekhov soon became obsessed with the subject himself. Mania Sachalinosa, as he called it, now had him in its grip.

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 for a census.

File:Anton Chekhov in Tomsk.jpg

Statue of Chekhov in Tomsk.

The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to Sakhalin are among his best. But his remarks to his sister about Tomsk, where the long-moustached chief-of-police showed him a play he had written and led him on a tour of "revolting" brothels, 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.

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

What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and appalled him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and enforced prostitution of women: "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation." 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.

Chekhov later concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer, but 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. Chekhov gave literary form to the hell of Sakhalin in his long short story The Murder, about a domestic murder in an Old Believers' household; the last section of the story is set on Sakhalin, where a gang of fettered convicts, among them the murderer Yakov, loads coal in the night:

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.

In 1892, Chekhov depicted the horrors of internment in one of his grimmest stories, Ward no. 6, in which Ragin, a doctor who quotes Marcus Aurelius to his patients, ends up confined with his former charges in a psychiatric ward, tyrannised by a brutal gaoler. Where The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes, Janet Malcom has written, Ward No. 6 stabs.

Social conscience

Chekhov always claimed 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." But the catharsis of his journey across Russia and his experiences on Sakhalin left a mark on his social outlook. The philosopher Lev Shestov suggested that Chekhov's work murmers a quiet "I don't know" to every problem.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.

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, 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; in A Woman's Kingdom, a wealthy factory owner performs a random and counter-productive act of charity towards a poor family. In An Anonymous Story, a nobleman-turned-revolutionary gradually loses his sense of purpose.

Chekhov believed there would never be a revolution in Russia. 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. 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.

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 Shcheglov; 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.

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.

Chekhov at Melikhovo

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. 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." 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. 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."

Some of his stories grew directly from his experiences as a doctor; for example, the idea for A Dead Bodycame from an autopsy he had conducted in a field near Voskresensk. And his story The 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.”

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. In The Grasshopper, a specialist in diphtheria deliberately infects himself with the disease in response to his wife’s long-term infidelity.

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. 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."

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."

Late plays

File:Komissarjewska.jpg

The first Nina: Vera Komissarzhevskaya

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. The next day, Chekhov, who had taken refuge backstage for the last two acts, announced to Suvorin that he was finished with writing plays. 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. And it was Nemirovich-Danchenko who convinced Konstantin Stanislavski to direct the play for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.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. 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.

Konstantin Stanislavski as Vershinin in The Three Sisters

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". 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."

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. 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. 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."

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. His story 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. 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, 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,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, 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. In the Ravine includes perhaps Chekhov's most evil character, 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.

Yalta

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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.

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".

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. Though he planted trees and gardens at Autka, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, he was always desperate to leave Yalta for travels to Moscow or abroad. Nor was he ever entirely convinced of the health benefits claimed for the Crimean air.

On 25 May 1901, despite his horror of weddings, Chekhov quietly married Olga Knipper, a former protegée and lover 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", had preferred visits to brothels and swift liaisons to commitment; 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...give me a wife who, like the moon, won't

appear in my sky every day.

Such proved the pattern of Chekhov's subsequent marriage to Olga: he lived largely at Yalta—"hot Siberia"—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; and Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart. The legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence between "mythical husband" Chekhov and "your doggie" 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.

Chekhov and Olga, 1901, on honeymoon

Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories at Yalta, The Lady with the 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, "one of the most autobiographical of his stories", 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, 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." On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, from where he wrote apparently 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 the German women dressed.He died five days later.

Chekhov's grave, Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow

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

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. Anton took a full glass, examined it,, smiled at me and said: "It's a long time since I drank 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...

Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which offended Gorky. Some of the thousands of mourners followed the wrong funeral procession, that of a General Keller being buried to the accompaniment of a military band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery, alongside the "humble grave of the 'Cossak's widow, Olga Cookaretnikov'".

"You ask me: what is life?" Chekhov had written to Olga in April. "That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that's all there is to it."

Legacy

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."

Chekhov with Gorky at Yalta

Modesty aside, Chekhov could hardly have imagined the extent of his posthumous reputation and influence. The ovations for The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death revealed how far he had ascended 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 Chekhov's death, his fame soon spread further afield. The English translations by Constance Garnett won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, the last to the point of plagiarism. The Russian critic D.S. Mirsky, who lived in England, explained Chekhov's popularity there by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values". Chekhov's drama went out of fashion in Revolutionary Russia, but it was later adapted to the Soviet agenda, with Lophakin, for example, reinvented as a hero of the new order, taking an axe to the cherry orchard.

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" and pointed to similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: "the same nice people, the same utter futility".

In America, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of the Stanislavski System, with its notion of subtext. "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches," wrote Stanislavski, "but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word . . . the characters often feel and think things not expressed in the lines they speak". The Group Theatre, in particular, developed the subtextual approach to drama, influencing generations of American playwrights, screenwriters, and actors, including Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and, in particular, Lee Strasberg, whose Actors Studio and its "Method" acting approach in turn influenced many actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have become distorted by a preoccupation with realism. In 1981, the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin.

Chekhov is now the most popular playwright in the English-speaking world after Shakespeare; but some writers believe that his short stories represent the greater achievement. 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.

Ernest Hemingway, another of Carver's influences, was more grudging, saying: "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer". And Vladimir Nabokov once complained of Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions".. He was more in line with the critical majority when he declared The Lady with the Dog "one of the greatest stories ever written" and described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice."

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's breakthrough was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".

Virginia Woolf described the unique quality of a Chekhov story in her The Common Reader:

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.

See also

• Bibliography of Anton Chekhov

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, 2004, ISBN 0743230744
• Benedetti, Jean (editor and translator), Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1998 edition, 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, (1923) 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
• Prose, Francine, Learning from Chekhov, in Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini, UPNE, 1991, ISBN 0874515602
• 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

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