Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a physician who became one of the two or three greatest short-story writers in any language and the most influential playwright since William Shakespeare. In more than five hundred stories — from the comic sketches with which he supported his family to masterpieces like “The Lady with the Dog”, “Ward No. 6”, “The Kiss”, “Gooseberries” and “The Bishop” — he abandoned neat plots, climaxes and morals for the texture of ordinary lives, ending not with resolution but at the moment when “the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning”. In four great plays — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard — he moved the drama beneath the surface: characters talk about the weather, play cards, drink tea and philosophise about the future, while their lives quietly go to waste. His ideal was the writer as an “impartial witness”, compassionate but unsentimental, who poses questions without answering them. He died of tuberculosis at 44.

Life

Taganrog: “In my childhood I had no childhood”

Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860 (17 January Old Style) in Taganrog, a decaying port on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather, Yegor, had been a serf who bought his family’s freedom in 1841. His father, Pavel, ran a grocery store, was a religious fanatic and choirmaster who forced his sons to sing in the church choir at dawn, and beat them regularly. “Despotism and lies so mutilated our childhood that it makes me sick and frightened to think about it,” Chekhov wrote. His mother, Yevgenia, was a gifted storyteller.

In 1876, Pavel went bankrupt and fled to Moscow to escape his creditors; the family followed. Anton, sixteen, was left behind in Taganrog for three years to finish school, supporting himself by tutoring and selling the family’s household goods. He read widely — Cervantes, Turgenev, Schopenhauer, Goncharov — and wrote plays and comic pieces.

Moscow: medicine and comic sketches

In 1879 he joined his family in Moscow and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. To support his parents and five siblings in their cramped basement flat, he wrote comic sketches, anecdotes and parodies for humorous magazines — The Dragonfly, The Alarm Clock, Fragments — paid by the line, under pseudonyms like Antosha Chekhonte, “The Man Without a Spleen” and “My Brother’s Brother”. He wrote hundreds: short, funny, sharply observed. “The Death of a Government Clerk” (1883), in which a clerk sneezes on a general in the theatre, apologises obsessively, and dies of fright, is typical.

He qualified as a doctor in 1884 and practised medicine all his life, often without charge. The same year he coughed blood — the first sign of the tuberculosis he would deny for years.

Recognition

In 1886, the veteran writer Dmitry Grigorovich wrote to him that he had real talent and was wasting it on hackwork. Chekhov, deeply moved, began to take himself seriously. The publisher Alexei Suvorin of the conservative newspaper New Times became his friend and patron and gave him more space. “The Steppe” (1888), a long story of a boy’s journey across the Ukrainian steppe, appeared in a prestigious “thick journal”, and the same year he won the Pushkin Prize.

His first full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889), were mixed successes.

Sakhalin

In 1890, to the bewilderment of friends, the thirty-year-old writer travelled across Siberia — 6,000 kilometres by cart, sledge and river boat, in spring floods and mud — to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Over three months he conducted a census of nearly 10,000 convicts and settlers, filling out index cards for each, and documented flogging, prostitution, child misery and disease. His book Sakhalin Island (1893–95) helped bring reforms. He wrote: “I am convinced that in 50 or 100 years’ time people will look upon the life-sentences we hand down in the same bewilderment and dismay with which we now regard the cutting of nostrils.”

He travelled on via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon, returning in December 1890.

Melikhovo

In 1892, he bought a run-down estate at Melikhovo, south of Moscow, and lived there with his parents, sister Masha and brother Misha. He planted orchards, built schools, fought the cholera epidemic of 1892 as an unpaid district doctor, treated thousands of peasants, and wrote some of his greatest stories: “Ward No. 6” (1892), “The Black Monk” (1894), “The Student” (1894), “Peasants” (1897), “The Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries” and “About Love” (the “little trilogy”, 1898).

The premiere of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in October 1896 was a disaster: the audience laughed and jeered at the wrong moments. Chekhov fled the theatre and vowed never to write for the stage again.

The Moscow Art Theatre and Yalta

In 1898 the new Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko revived The Seagull, with a naturalistic style of acting and ensemble playing. It was a triumph; the seagull became the theatre’s emblem. Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) followed. Chekhov often quarrelled with Stanislavski, who staged them as tragedies full of sound effects (crickets, frogs, dogs); Chekhov insisted they were comedies.

Haemorrhaging badly in 1897, he was forced to admit his illness and moved to the warm climate of Yalta in Crimea, where he built a white villa. Visitors included Tolstoy, Gorky, Bunin and Rachmaninoff. In 1901 he married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Art Theatre; she mostly remained in Moscow, and their marriage was carried on largely by letter.

In June 1904, gravely ill, he travelled with Olga to the spa of Badenweiler in Germany. On the night of 15 July, he woke, said to the doctor “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”), was given a glass of champagne, said “It’s a long time since I drank champagne”, drank it, lay on his side and died. His body was returned to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for oysters.

The stories

The art of the story

Chekhov’s stories abandoned the conventions of the nineteenth-century tale — exposition, climax, resolution, moral. They begin in the middle and end in the middle. “When I write,” he said, “I rely fully on the reader, presuming that he will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.” “Brevity is the sister of talent.” He advised a young writer to tear out the first half of his story.

His principles, from a letter to his brother Alexander (1886):

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature.
2. Total objectivity.
3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects.
4. Extreme brevity.
5. Audacity and originality; flee the stereotype.
6. Compassion.

Major stories

• “The Kiss” (1887): Ryabovich, a shy, unattractive artillery officer, is kissed by mistake in a dark room by a woman expecting someone else. The accident fills his life with dreams — and later, the realisation of their emptiness.
• “The Steppe” (1888): nine-year-old Yegorushka’s journey across the vast steppe to school — a prose poem of landscape.
• “A Boring Story” (1889): an eminent, dying professor of medicine discovers he has no “general idea” uniting his life — and cannot help his beloved ward Katya, who asks him what to do.
• “Ward No. 6” (1892): Dr Ragin, director of a filthy provincial asylum, justifies his inaction with a Stoic philosophy — suffering is a matter of perception — until he befriends a patient, is declared insane himself, and is locked in the ward, where he is beaten and dies. Lenin said that when he finished it he felt “as if I myself was locked up in Ward No. 6”.
• “The Student” (1894): on Good Friday, a theology student tells two widows by a fire the story of Peter’s denial; the old woman weeps; he feels that the past is linked to the present “by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other”. Chekhov’s favourite of his stories.
• “Gooseberries” (1898): a man’s lifelong dream of an estate with gooseberry bushes, fulfilled — a parable of complacent happiness. “There ought to be behind the door of every happy man someone standing with a hammer, continually reminding him… that there are unhappy people.”
• “The Lady with the Dog” (1899): Gurov, a jaded Moscow banker and serial adulterer, has an affair at Yalta with Anna Sergeyevna, a young married woman walking a white Pomeranian. Back in Moscow, he cannot forget her; he finds her in a provincial theatre; they meet secretly. The story ends: “it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.” Nabokov called it one of the greatest stories ever written.
• “In the Ravine” (1900) and “The Bishop” (1902): late masterpieces of cruelty and of a dying bishop’s longing to be simply a man.

The plays

The Seagull (1896)

At a lakeside country estate, Konstantin Treplev, a young would-be writer, stages a symbolist play starring Nina, the neighbour’s daughter whom he loves, in front of his mother Arkadina, a famous, vain actress, and her lover Trigorin, a successful writer. Arkadina mocks the play. Nina, dazzled by fame, falls for Trigorin. Treplev shoots a seagull and lays it at Nina’s feet; Trigorin, seeing it, notes an idea for a story: a girl who lives by a lake like a seagull, until a man comes along and destroys her, “just like this seagull”. Two years later, Trigorin has seduced Nina, given her a child who died, and abandoned her; she is a struggling provincial actress. She visits Treplev, now a published writer, and tells him that what matters is “the capacity to endure”, and leaves. Treplev tears up his manuscripts and shoots himself offstage. The doctor Dorn tells Trigorin quietly to get Arkadina away: “Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself.”

Uncle Vanya (1899)

On a country estate, Vanya (Ivan Voynitsky) and his niece Sonya have slaved for twenty-five years to send money to Serebryakov, Sonya’s father, a retired professor whom they idolised. When Serebryakov arrives with his beautiful young second wife Yelena, Vanya realises the professor is a pompous mediocrity — “for twenty-five years he’s been lecturing and writing about art, and understands absolutely nothing about art”. Both Vanya and the idealistic doctor Astrov (who plants forests and despairs of human destruction of nature) fall for Yelena; Sonya loves Astrov hopelessly. When Serebryakov proposes to sell the estate, Vanya fires a pistol at him — twice — and misses. The visitors leave; the routine resumes. Sonya ends the play:

We shall live, Uncle Vanya… We shall rest! We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds…

Three Sisters (1901)

Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov, educated, cultured daughters of a dead general, live in a provincial garrison town and dream of returning to Moscow. “To Moscow! To Moscow!” Their brother Andrei, who was to become a professor, marries the vulgar Natasha, who gradually takes over the house. Masha, unhappily married to a pedantic schoolteacher, falls in love with Colonel Vershinin, who philosophises about how life will be beautiful in two or three hundred years. Irina tries work and finds it meaningless; she agrees to marry the plain Baron Tuzenbach, who is killed in a duel on the day before the wedding. The regiment leaves. The sisters stand together as the band plays: “If only we knew, if only we knew!”

The Cherry Orchard (1904)

Lyubov Ranevskaya returns from Paris to her family estate, famous for its vast cherry orchard, which is to be auctioned to pay her debts. Lopakhin, a merchant whose father and grandfather were serfs on the estate, proposes a practical solution: cut down the orchard and lease the land for summer villas. Ranevskaya and her brother Gayev — charming, feckless, sentimental — cannot bring themselves to act. At the auction, Lopakhin himself buys the estate: “I bought the estate where my grandfather and father were slaves.” The family leaves; the orchard is axed; the old servant Firs, forgotten and locked in the empty house, lies down to die. From the distance comes “the sound of a breaking string, dying away, sad”. Chekhov called it a comedy, “in places even a farce”. It is read as an elegy for the gentry and Russia’s passing order — and as a vision of the new.

Philosophy

Chekhov had no system and distrusted those who did. “I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing else.” His faith was in “the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom — freedom from violence and lies”.

He was a materialist and agnostic, yet his stories are full of a longing for meaning, and religious characters are treated with tenderness. He rejected Tolstoy’s moralising: “Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.” He believed in work, education, medicine, and the slow improvement of life.

Influence

• Theatre: Stanislavski’s acting method grew from staging Chekhov; his influence runs through Shaw (Heartbreak House), O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
• The short story: Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce (Dubliners), Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, William Trevor — the modern story is largely Chekhovian.
• Literary principle: “Chekhov’s gun” is a basic rule of narrative.

Key terms

Chekhov's gun

Every element in a story must be necessary.

Subtext

The drama beneath what characters actually say.

Open ending

Stories that end at a moment of unresolved transition.

Objectivity

The writer as impartial witness, not judge.

Using Chekhov in conversation

• On storytelling: if a gun hangs on the wall in act one, it must go off.
• On complacency: behind every happy man’s door there should stand a man with a hammer.
• On writing: “Brevity is the sister of talent.”
• On freedom: squeeze the slave out of yourself drop by drop.