Anton Chekhov Biography and List of Works

Russian playwright, one of the great masters of modern short story. In his work Chekhov combined the dispassionate attitude of a scientist and a doctor with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist. Chekhov portrayed often life in the Russian small towns, where tragic events occur in a minor key, as a part of everyday life. His characters are passive, filled with the feeling of hopelessness and the fruitlessness of all efforts.

"There is not, or there hardly is, a single Russian gentleman or university man who does not boast of his past. The present is always worse than the past. Why? Because Russian excitability has one specific characteristic: it is quickly followed by exhaustion"
(from Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and other Literary Topics, 1924)

Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Ukraine, as the son of a grocer and grandson of a serf who had bought his freedom in 1841. His mother was Yevgenia Morozov, the daughter of a cloth merchant. Chekhov's childhood was shadowed by his father's tyranny and religious fanaticism. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog (1867-68) and Taganrog grammar school (1868-79). The family was forced to move to Moskow following his father's bankruptcy. Chekhov remained for some time alone in his native town, supporting himself through private tutoring.

In 1879 Chekhov entered the Moskow University Medical School. While in the school he started to publish hundreds of comic short stories to support himself and his mother, sisters and brothers. By 1886 he had gained wide fame as a writer. Chekhov published his works in St. Petersburg daily papers, Peterburskaia gazeta from 1885, and Novoe vremia from 1886.

Chekhov graduated in 1884, and practiced medicine until 1892. In 1886 Chekhov met H.S. Suvorin, who invited him to become a regular contributor for the St. Petersburg daily Novoe vremya. His friendship with Suvorin ended in 1898 because of his objections to the anti-Dreyfus campaign conducted by the daily. But during these years Chechov developed his concept of the dispassionate, non-judgemental author and was criticized because of avoidance of offering solutions to his serious social and moral themes.

"I'm not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that's all..."
(Chekhov in 1888)

In 1890 Chekhov travelled across Siberia to remote Island, Sakhalin, where he conducted a detailed census of some 10 000 convicts and settlers condemned to live their lives on that harsh island. From this journey was born his famous travel book The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin (1893-94). Chekhov returned to Russia via Singapore, India, Ceylon, and the Suez Canal. From 1892 to 1899 Chekhov worked in Melikhovo, and in Yalta from 1899. Chekhov's fist book of stories (1886) was a success, and gradually he became a full-time writer.

"My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy, discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman - why do you live so tamely and take so little from life?"
(from The House with the Mezzanine, 1986)

Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1888. In 1889 he was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. In 1900 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, but resigned his membership two years later as a protest against the cancellation by the authorities of Gorky's election to the Academy. Later, in 1900, Gorky wrote to him: "After any of your stories, however insignificant, everything appears crude, as if written not by a pen, but by a cudgel."

Although Chekhov wrote several hundred stories, his fame today rests primarily on his plays. His first full-lenght plays were failures. When The Seagull was revised in 1898 by Stanislavsky at the Moskow Art Theatre, he gained also fame as a playwright. Among his masterpieces from this period is Uncle Vanya (1900), a melancholic story of Sonia and his brother-in-law Ivan (Uncle Vanya) who see their dreams and hopes passing in drudgery for others. The Three Sisters (1901) was set in a provincial garrison town. The talented Prozorov sisters, whose hopes have much in common with the Brontë sisters, recognize the uselessness of their lives and cling to one another for consolation.

In The Cherry Orchard (1904) Mme Ranevskaias returns to her estate and finds out that the family house, together with the adjoining orchard, is to be auctioned. Her brother Gaev is too impractical to help in the crisis. The businessman Lopakhin purchases the estate and the orchard is demolished. "Everything on earth must come to an end..."

In these three famous plays Chekhov blended laughter and tears, leaving much room for imagination - his plays like stories reflect a multitude of possible viewpoints. Usually in Chechov's dramas surprise and tension are not key elements, the dramatic movement is subdued, his characters do not fight, they endure their fate with patience.

"Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day." (from Uncle Vanya, 1897) - "When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair'."
(from Uncle Vanya)

In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhove, where his best stories were written, including 'Neighbours' (1892), 'Ward Number Six' (1892), 'The Black Monk' (1894), 'The Murder' (1895), and 'Ariadne' (1895). In 1897 he fell ill with tuberculosis and lived since either abroad or in the Crimea. In 1901 he married the Moskow Art Theater actress Olga Knipper (1870-1959), who had on stage several years central roles in his plays. Chekhov died on July 14/15, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany. He was buried in the cemetary of the Novodeviche Monastery in Moskow.

Though celebrated figure by the Russian literary public at the time of his death, Chekhov remained rather unknown internationally until the years after World War I, when his works were translated into English.

For further reading: Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study by William Gerhardie (1923); Chekhov: A Life by David Magarshack (1952); Anton Chekhov by Walter Horace Bruford (1957), Chekhov: A Biography by Ernest J. Simmons (1962); A New Life of Anton Chekhov by Ronald Hingley (1976); Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays by Beverly Hahn (1977); Chekhov: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Viktor Emeljanow (1981); Anton Chekhov by Irina Kirk (1981); Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays by Richard Peace (1983); A Chekhov Companion, ed. by Toby W. Clayman (1985); Anton Chekhov: A Reference Guide to Literature by K.A. Lantz (1985); Anton Chekhov by Laurence Senelick (1985); Chekhov on Women by Carolina de Maegd-Soëp (1987); 'The Cherry Orchard': A Catastrophe and Comedy by Donald Rayfield (1994); Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' by Gordon McVay (1995); Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' and 'The Wood Demon' by Donald Rayfield (1995); Anton Chekhov: A Life by Donald Rayfield (1997); Understanding Chekhov by Donald Rayfield (1998).

Palata No. 6 (1892, Ward Six) - the classical story of the abuse of psychiatry. Gromov is convinced that anyone can be imprisoned. He developes 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 charge hand. - The symmetrical story has many similarities with such works as Samuel Fuller's film The Shock Corridor (1963), and Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over Cockoo's Nest (1975).

See also: Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin - Other masters of short story: Katherine Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, O.Henry - Note: Chekhov's brother Aleksandr had problems with alcohol. His son Mihail moved in the 1920s first to Germany and then in the Unites States, where worked as an actor and teacher of acting. During WW II the German army saved Chechov's house in Jalta because Mihail's wife Olga had herself photographed with Adolf Hitler, and she also knew Stalin.

DRAMA NA OKHOTE, (1884)