Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n
short-storyA short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format or medium tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels or books...
writer,
playwrightA playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors...
and
physicianA physician — also known as medical practitioner, doctor of medicine, medical doctor, or simply doctor — practices the ancient profession of medicine, which is concerned with maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease or injury...
, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of 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 SeagullThe Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. The Seagull was written in 1895 and first produced in 1896...
in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's
Moscow Art TheatreThe Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1897. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
, which subsequently also produced
Uncle VanyaUncle Vanya is a tragicomedy by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov published in 1899. Its first major performance was in 1900 under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski.-Background:...
and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays,
Three SistersThree Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. It was written in 1900 and first produced in 1901.-The Prozorovs:...
and
The Cherry OrchardThe Cherry Orchard is Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last play. It premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov intended this play as a comedy and it does contain some elements of farce; however, Stanislavski insisted on...
. These four works present a special challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."
Chekhov had at first written stories only for the 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 adopted by
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
and other
modernistsModernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism, especially High modernism.Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary...
, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.
Life
Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the
Sea of AzovThe Sea of Azov is the world's shallowest sea, linked by the Strait of Kerch to the Black Sea to the south. It is bounded on the north by Ukraine, on the east by Russia and on the west by the Crimean peninsula. The Don River flows into it.-Geology and bathymetry:The sea is long and wide and has...
in southern
RussiaThe Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia, and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
where his father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former
serfSerfdom is the socio-economic status of unfree peasants under feudalism, and specifically relates to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe...
, ran a grocery store. A director of the parish choir, devout Orthodox Christian, and 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, 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 was to criticise his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel’s tyranny:
Chekhov attended a school for
GreekThe Greeks , also known as Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighbouring regions, who can also be found in diaspora communities around the world....
boys, followed by the Taganrog
gymnasiumA gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools...
, now renamed the
Chekhov GymnasiumThe Chekhov Gymnasium in Taganrog on Ulitsa Oktyabrskaya 9 is the oldest gymnasium in the South of Russia. Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov spent 11 years in the school, which was later named after him and transformed into a literary museum...
, where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam. He sang at the
Greek OrthodoxThe Greek Orthodox Church is the body of several churches within the larger communion of the Orthodox Church, sharing a common cultural tradition and whose liturgy is traditionally conducted in Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament....
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:
In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after over-extending his finances building a new house, and to avoid the
debtor's prisonA debtors' prison is a prison for those who are unable to pay a debt.Prior to the mid 19th century debtors' prisons were a common way to deal with unpaid debt...
fled to
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending university. 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.
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 had to pay for his own education, which he managed by—among other jobs—private tutoring, catching and selling
goldfinchGoldfinch may refer to any of the following species of bird from the genus Carduelis* American Goldfinch, Carduelis tristis* European Goldfinch, Carduelis carduelis* Lawrence's Goldfinch, Carduelis lawrencei...
es, and selling short sketches to the newspapers. He sent every
rubleThe ruble or rouble is a unit of currency. It is currently the currency unit of Belarus, Russia, and Transnistria, and was the currency unit of several other countries, notably countries influenced by Russia and the Soviet Union...
he could spare to Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer up the family. During this time he read widely and analytically, including
CervantesMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, often considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature and is regularly regarded among the best novels ever written. His work is considered among the most important in all...
,
TurgenevIvan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.-Life:...
,
GoncharovIvan Alexandrovich Goncharov , Ivan Aleksandrovič Gončarov was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov . He was born in Simbirsk ; his father was a wealthy grain merchant...
, and
SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his atheistic pessimism and philosophical clarity...
; and he wrote a full-length comedy drama,
Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication." Chekhov also enjoyed a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.
In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at
Moscow UniversityM. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University , for a time the Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be the oldest university in Russia and the tallest educational building in the world...
.
Early writings
Chekhov 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
pseudonymA pseudonym is a fictitious name used by a person, or sometimes, a group.Pseudonyms are often used to hide an individual's real identity, as with writers' pen names, graffiti artists, resistance fighters' or terrorists' noms de guerre and computer hackers' handles. Actors, musicians, and other...
s such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a
satiricalSatire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although in practice it is also found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods,...
chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for
Oskolki (
Fragments), owned by Nikolai Leikin, 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
physicianA physician — also known as medical practitioner, doctor of medicine, medical doctor, or simply doctor — practices the ancient profession of medicine, which is concerned with maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease or injury...
, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor for free. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened; but he would not admit
tuberculosisTuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria...
to his family and friends, confessing to Leikin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues." He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodation. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg,
Novoye VremyaNovoye Vremya was a Russian newspaper published in St. Petersburg from 1868 to 1917. Until 1869 it came out five times a week; thereafter it came out every day, and from 1881 there were both morning and evening editions...
(
New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid per line a rate double Leikin's and allowed him 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 GrigorovichDmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich was a Russian writer....
, 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 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 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection
At Dusk (
V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted
Pushkin PrizeThe Pushkin Prize was established in 1881 by the Russian Academy of Sciences to honor one of the greatest Russian poets Alexander Pushkin . The prize was awarded to the Russian who achieved the highest standard of literary excellence. The prize was discontinued during the Soviet period...
"for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."
Turning points
That year, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
which reawakened him to the beauty of the
steppeThe Pontic-Caspian steppe is the vast steppeland stretching from the north of the Black Sea as far as the east of the Caspian Sea, from central Ukraine across the Southern Federal District and the Volga Federal District of Russia to western Kazakhstan, forming part of the larger Eurasian steppe,...
. On his return, he began the novella-length short story
The Steppe, "something rather odd and much too original," eventually published in
Severny Vestnik (
The Northern Herald). In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a
chaiseA chaise, sometimes called chay or shay, was a formerly popular, light two- or four-wheeled traveling or pleasure carriage, usually of a chair-backed type, with a movable hood or calash top. The name came from the French for chair, through a transference from a sedan-chair to a wheeled vehicle...
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, 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 theater manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being
IvanovIvanov is a four-act drama by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.Ivanov was first performed in 1887, when Fiodor Korsh, owner of the Korsh Theatre in Moscow, commissioned Chekhov to write a comedy. Chekhov, however, responded with a four-act drama, which he wrote in ten days. Despite the success...
, 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. Mikhail Chekhov considered
Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's which has become known as "
Chekhov's GunChekhov's gun is the literary technique whereby an element is introduced early in the story, but its significance does not become clear until later on...
," noted by Ilia Gurliand from a conversation: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act."
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 which he realizes 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 Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.
Sakhalin
In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the far east of Russia and the
katorgaKatorga was a system of penal servitude of the prison farm type in Imperial Russia. Prisoners were sent to remote camps in vast uninhabited areas of Siberia—where voluntary labourers were never available in satisfactory numbers—and forced to perform hard labour...
, or penal colony, on
Sakhalin IslandSakhalin , also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45°50' and 54°24' N. It is part of Russia and is its largest island, administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast. The indigenous peoples of the island are the Sakhalin Ainu, Oroks, and Nivkhs...
, north of
Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, where he spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to Sakhalin are considered among his best. His remarks to his sister about
TomskTomsk is a city on the Tom River in the southwest of Siberian Federal District, Russia, the administrative centre of Tomsk Oblast. One of the oldest towns in Siberia, Tomsk celebrated its 400
th anniversary in 2004...
were to become notorious.
The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting a mocking statue of Chekhov.
What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and
forced prostitutionSexual slavery is the organized coercion of unwilling people into different sexual practices. Sexual slavery may include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced...
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:
Chekhov later concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer, but that the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as
Ostrov Sakhalin (
The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science, not literature, and worthy and informative rather than brilliant. 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, longing for home.
Melikhovo
In 1892, Chekhov bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles south of Moscow, where he lived until 1899 with his family. "It's nice to be a lord," he joked to Shcheglov; but he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and soon made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief for victims of the
famineA famine is a widespread scarcity of food that may apply to any faunal species, which phenomenon is usually accompanied by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality...
and
choleraCholera, sometimes known as Asiatic or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Transmission to humans occurs through eating food or drinking water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae from other cholera patients...
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.
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. Chekhov’s work as a doctor, however, 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."
Chekhov began writing his play
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
horticultureHorticulture is the industry and science of plant cultivation. Some would say that horticulture is the process of preparing soil for the planting of seeds, tubers, or cuttings. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, crop production, plant...
, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, he "looked after… as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his
Three SistersThree Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. It was written in 1900 and first produced in 1901.-The Prozorovs:...
, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."
The first night of
The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a fiasco, booed by the audience, and the play's reception stung Chekhov into renouncing the theatre. But the play so impressed the theatre director
Vladimir Nemirovich-DanchenkoVladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgian born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, and playwright, who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his famous colleague, Konstantin Stanislavski, in 1898.In 1919 he established the Musical Theatre of the Moscow Art Theatre, which...
that he convinced his colleague Constantin Stanislavski to direct it for the innovative
Moscow Art TheatreThe Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1897. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
in 1898. 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.
Yalta
In March 1897 Chekhov suffered a major hemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow and, with great difficulty, was persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner of life.
After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of
YaltaYalta is a city in Crimea, southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea.The city is located on the site of an ancient Greek colony, said to have been founded by Greek sailors who were looking for a safe shore on which to land. It is situated on a deep bay facing south towards the Black...
and built a villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers in Yalta, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as
Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist...
and
Maxim GorkyAleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist...
, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot
SiberiaSiberia , is the vast region constituting almost all of Northern Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the USSR from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the...
" 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 SistersThree Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. It was written in 1900 and first produced in 1901.-The Prozorovs:...
and
The Cherry OrchardThe Cherry Orchard is Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last play. It premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov intended this play as a comedy and it does contain some elements of farce; however, Stanislavski insisted on...
.
On 25 May 1901 Chekhov married
Olga KnipperOlga Leonardovna Knipper was a Russian stage actress. She was married to Anton Chekhov. Knipper was among the 39 original members of the Moscow Art Theatre when it was formed by Constantin Stanislavski in 1898...
—quietly, owing to his horror of weddings—a former protegée and sometime lover of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for
The Seagull. Up to that point, Chekhov, called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor", had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment; he had once written to Suvorin:
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
miscarriageMiscarriage or spontaneous abortion is the spontaneous end of a pregnancy at a stage where the embryo or fetus is incapable of surviving, generally defined in humans at prior to 20 weeks of gestation...
; and
Donald RayfieldDonald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...
has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart, although Russian scholars have conclusively refuted that claim. The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence which 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"The Lady with the Dog" is a short story by Anton Chekhov first published in 1899. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young lady he meets while vacationing in Yalta...
(also called
Lady with Lapdog), which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a married man and a married woman in Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting from the encounter, but they find themselves drawn back to each other, risking the security of their family lives.
Death
By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with
tuberculosisTuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria...
. "Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off," Mikhail 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
BadenweilerBadenweiler, a health resort and spa of the Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald district of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, historically in the Markgräflerland. It is 28 kilometers by road and rail from Basel, 10 kilometers from the French border, and 20 kilometes away from Mulhouse...
in the
Black ForestThe Black Forest is a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany. It is bordered by the Rhine valley to the west and south. The highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres ....
, 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 the German women dressed.
Chekhov’s death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history", retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story
Errand by
Raymond CarverRaymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....
. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband’s last moments:
Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh
oysterThe word oyster is used as a common name for a number of distinct groups of bivalve molluscs which live in marine or brackish habitats. The valves are highly calcified....
s, a detail which 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 CemeteryNovodevichy Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Moscow, Russia, situated next to the World Heritage Site, the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site...
.
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."
Always modest, Chekhov could hardly have imagined the extent of his posthumous reputation. The ovations for
The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death showed him how high he had risen in the affection of the Russian public—by then he was second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years—but after his death, Chekhov's fame soon spread further afield.
Constance GarnettConstance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian Literature...
's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
,
Virginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, and
Katherine MansfieldKathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction from New Zealand who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.-Biography:-Early life:...
. The issues surrounding the close similarities between Mansfield's 1910 story
The Child Who Was Tired and Chekhov's
Sleepy are summarised in William H. New's
Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform, McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-7735-1791-2, 15–17. The Russian critic D.S. Mirsky, who lived in
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, explained Chekhov's popularity in that country by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values." In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the
revolutionThe Russian Revolution is the collective term for the series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. In the first revolution of February 1917 the Czar was deposed and replaced by a Provisional government...
but was later adapted to the
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
agenda, with the character Lopakhin, for example, reinvented as a hero of the new order, taking an axe to the cherry orchard.
One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays was
George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays...
, who subtitled his
Heartbreak House "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" and noted 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 Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of
subtextSubtext is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts and motives of...
: "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 playwrightsTheater of the United States is based in the Western tradition, mostly borrowed from the performance styles prevalent in Europe. Regional or resident theatres in the United States are professional theatre companies outside of New York City that produce their own seasons.- Early history:The birth of...
, screenwriters, and actors, including
Clifford OdetsClifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia of immigrant parents, Lou Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high school to pursue acting...
,
Elia KazanElia Kazan, , was a Turkish-born American film and theatre director, film and theatrical producer, screenwriter, novelist and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio in New York in 1947...
and, in particular,
Lee StrasbergLee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with director Harold Clurman, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the...
. In turn, Strasberg's
Actors StudioThe Actors Studio is a membership organization for professional actors, theatre directors and playwrights at 432 West 44th Street in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded October 5, 1947 by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis and Anna Sokolow who taught...
and the
"Method" actingMethod acting is a technique in which actors try to engender in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to create lifelike performances. It can be contrasted with more classical forms of acting, in which actors simulate thoughts and emotions through external means,...
approach influenced many actors, including
Marlon BrandoMarlon Brando, Jr. was an American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute, and part of Time magazine's Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century He is widely considered one of the...
and
Robert De NiroRobert Mario De Niro, Jr. is an American actor, director, and producer.De Niro is well-known for his method acting and portrayals of conflicted, troubled characters and for his enduring collaboration with director Martin Scorsese...
, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism. In 1981, the playwright
Tennessee WilliamsTennessee Williams , né Thomas Lanier Williams, was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama...
adapted
The Seagull as
The Notebook of TrigorinThe Notebook of Trigorin is Tennessee Williams' free adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull.The play was first produced in 1981 by the Vancouver Playhouse in Vancouver, British Columbia...
.
Despite Chekhov's eminence as a playwright, some writers believe his short stories represent the greater achievement.
Raymond CarverRaymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....
, who wrote the short story
Errand about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov the greatest of all short-story writers:
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer." And
Vladimir NabokovVladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer....
once complained of Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions." But he also 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 BoydWilliam Boyd, CBE is a Scottish novelist and screenwriter.-Biography:Of Scottish descent, William Andrew Murray Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7 March 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor, and he was in Nigeria during...
, Chekhov's breakthrough was to abandon what
William GerhardieWilliam Alexander Gerhardie was a British novelist and playwright.Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s . H.G. Wells also championed his work...
called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life."
Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in
The Common Reader (1925):
See also
- Bibliography of Anton Chekhov
- Plays :*That Worthless Fellow Platonov - provided the source material for Michael Frayn's Wild Honey...
- List of short stories by Anton Chekhov
- Flash fiction
Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as 300, while others consider stories as long as 1000 words to be flash fiction.-Terms:Other names for flash fiction...
- Physician writer
External links
Biographical
Misc
Works
- http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20-contributor%3Agutenberg%20AND%20%28subject%3A%22Chekhov%2C%20Anton%20Pavlovich%2C%201860-1904%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Chekhov%2C%20Anton%20Pavlovich%2C%201860-1904%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Anton%20Pavlovich%20Chekhov%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Anton%20Pavlovich%20Chekhov%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Anton%20Pavlovich%20Chekhov%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Chekhov%2C%20Anton%201860-1904%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Chekhov%2C%20Anton%2C%201860-1904%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Anton%20Chekhov%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Anton%20Chekhov%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Anton%20Chekhov%22%29Works by and about Anton Chekhov] at Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
. Scanned books, color, some illustrated, original editions.
- Recorded Stories of Anton Chekhov at Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
. Translated by Constance Garnett, Marion Fell, and others. Presented in mp3 and ogg format.. All Constance GarnettConstance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian Literature...
's translations of the short stories and letters are available, plus the edition of the Note-book translated by S. S. KotelianskyS.S. Koteliansky, or Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky, was born in the small Jewish shtetl of Ostropol in the Ukraine, where his first language almost certainly was Yiddish. He was educated and attended university in Russia.-Biography:By 1911, he had moved to London, where he became a great friend...
and Leonard WoolfLeonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, perhaps best known as the widower of author Virginia Woolf.-Life:...
- see the "References" section for print publication details of all of these. Site also has translations of all the plays.
- 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett presented in chronological order of Russian publication with annotations.
- Антон Павлович Чехов Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian. Retrieved 16 February 2007.