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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Page
Anton Pavolich Chekhov
(1860-1904)

A Quick Overview

Chekhov was born on. Jan. 29 [Jan. 17, Old Style], 1860, in Taganrog, Russia and died. on July 14/15   [July 1/2], 1904, Badenweiler, Germany  He is regarded as a major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters. Chekhov's best plays and short stories lack complex plots and neat solutions. Concentrating on apparent trivialities, they create a special kind of atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical. Chekhov described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices, and he is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.

  "Chekhov, Anton (Pavlovich)" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/119/53.html>
[Accessed 23 October 1998].

 

His Life
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His Works

Short Stories

Plays

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Related Internet Links

The Seagull: The Hamptons 1990's (Theatre 3)
Information about the Off-Broadway production of the play. Includes theater and ticket listings, show times, a synopsis, and production notes.

 An Updated Seagull, Grounded in the Hamptons
Review by Peter Marks of Jeff Cohen's The Seagull: The Hamptons: 1990's, published in The New York Times on Dec. 19, 1997.

 The Sisters Return, Withdrawn and Steely
Review by Peter Marks of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, published in The New York Times on Feb. 9, 1998.

 Sleepy-Eye
Story by Anton Chékhov.

His Life

Boyhood and youth.

                   Chekhov's father was a struggling grocer and pious martinet who had
                   been born a serf. He compelled his son to serve in his shop, also
                   conscripting him into a church choir, which he himself conducted. Despite
                   the kindness of his mother, childhood remained a painful memory to
                   Chekhov, although it later proved to be a vivid and absorbing
                   experience that he often invoked in his works.

                   After briefly attending a local school for Greek boys, Chekhov entered
                   the town gimnaziya (high school), where he remained for 10 years.
                   There he received the best standard education then available--thorough
                   but unimaginative and based on the Greek and Latin classics. During his
                   last three years at school Chekhov lived alone and supported himself by
                   coaching younger boys; his father, having gone bankrupt, had moved
                   with the rest of his family to Moscow to make a fresh start.

                   In the autumn of 1879 Chekhov joined his family in Moscow, which was
                   to be his main base until 1892. He at once enrolled in the university's
                   medical faculty, graduating in 1884 as a doctor. By this time he was
                   already the economic mainstay of his family, for his father could obtain
                   only poorly paid employment. As unofficial head of the family Anton
                   showed great reserves of responsibility and energy, cheerfully supporting
                   his mother and the younger children through his free-lance earnings as a
                   journalist and writer of comic sketches--work that he combined with
                   arduous medical studies and a busy social life.

                   Chekhov began his writing career as the author of anecdotes for
                   humorous journals, signing his early work pseudonymously. By 1888 he
                   had become widely popular with a "lowbrow" public and had already
                   produced a body of work more voluminous than all his later writings put
                   together. And he had, in the process, turned the short comic sketch of
                   about 1,000 words into a minor art form. He had also experimented in
                   serious writing, providing studies of human misery and despair strangely
                   at variance with the frenzied facetiousness of his comic work. Gradually
                   this serious vein absorbed him and soon predominated over the comic.

Literary maturity.

Chekhov's literary progress during his early 20s may be charted by the first appearance of his work in a sequence of publications in the capital, St. Petersburg, each successive vehicle being more serious and respected than its predecessor. Finally, in 1888, Chekhov published his first work  in a leading literary review, Severny vestnik ("Northern Herald"). With the work in question--a long story entitled "Steppe"--he at last turned his back on comic fiction. "Steppe," an autobiographical work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a child, is the first among more than 50 stories published in a variety of journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904. It is on this corpus of later stories, but also on his mature dramas of the same period, that Chekhov's main reputation rests.

                   Although the year 1888 first saw Chekhov concentrating almost
                   exclusively on short stories that were serious in conception,
                   humour--now underlying--nearly always remained an important
                   ingredient. There was also a concentration on quality at the expense of
                   quantity, the number of publications dropping suddenly from over a
                   hundred items a year in the peak years 1886 and 1887 to only 10 short
                   stories in 1888. Besides "Steppe," Chekhov also wrote several
                   profoundly tragic studies at this time, the most notable of which was "A
                   Dreary Story" (1889), a penetrating study into the mind of an elderly and
                   dying professor of medicine. The ingenuity and insight displayed in this
                   tour de force was especially remarkable, coming from an author so
                   young. The play Ivanov (1887-89) culminates in the suicide of a young
                   man nearer to the author's own age. Together with "A Dreary Story," this
                   belongs to a group among Chekhov's works that have been called
                   clinical studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically
                   ill in a spirit that reminds one that the author was himself a qualified--and
                   remained a sporadically practicing--doctor.

                   By the late 1880s many critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov, now
                   that he was sufficiently well known to attract their attention, for holding
                   no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with
                   a sense of direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was
                   unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted. In early 1890 he suddenly
                   sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a
                   one-man sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin. This is
                   situated nearly 6,000 miles (9,650 km) east of Moscow, on the other
                   side of Siberia, and was notorious as an imperial Russian penal
                   settlement. Chekhov's journey there was a long and hazardous ordeal by
                   carriage and riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local
                   conditions, and conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to
                   publish his findings as a research thesis, which retains an honoured place
                   in the annals of Russian penology: The Island of Sakhalin (1893-94).

                   Chekhov paid his first visit to western Europe in the company of A.S.
                   Suvorin, a wealthy newspaper proprietor and the publisher of much of
                   Chekhov's own work. Their long and close friendship caused Chekhov
                   some unpopularity, owing to the politically reactionary character of
                   Suvorin's newspaper, Novoye vremya ("New Time"). Eventually
                   Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the attitude taken by the paper
                   toward the notorious Alfred Dreyfus affair in France, with Chekhov
                   championing Dreyfus.

                   During the years just before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov
                   had continued his experiments as a dramatist. His Wood Demon
                   (1888-89) is a long-winded and ineptly facetious four-act play, which
                   somehow, by a miracle of art, became converted--largely by
                   cutting--into Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya) one of his greatest stage
                   masterpieces. The conversion--to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural
                   manor house--took place some time between 1890 and 1896. Other
                   dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act
                   farces known as vaudevilles: Medved (The Bear), Predlozheniye (The
                   Proposal), Svadba (The Wedding), Yubiley (The Anniversary), and
                   others.

Melikhovo period: 1892-98.

                   After helping, both as doctor and as medical administrator, to relieve the
                   disastrous famine of 1891-92, Chekhov bought a country estate in the
                   village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Moscow. This
                   was his main residence for about six years, providing a home for his aging
                   parents, as also for his sister Mariya, who acted as his housekeeper and
                   remained unmarried in order to look after her brother. The Melikhovo
                   period was the most creatively effective of Chekhov's life so far as short
                   stories were concerned, for it was during these six years that he wrote
                   "The Butterfly," "Neighbours" (1892), "An Anonymous Story" (1893),
                   "The Black Monk" (1894), "Murder," and "Ariadne" (1895), among
                   many other masterpieces. Village life now became a leading theme in his
                   work, most notably in "Peasants" (1897). Undistinguished by plot, this
                   short sequence of brilliant sketches created more stir in Russia than any
                   other single work of Chekhov's, partly owing to his rejection of the
                   convention whereby writers commonly presented the Russian peasantry
                   in sentimentalized and debrutalized form.
 
 
 

                   Continuing to provide many portraits of the intelligentsia, Chekhov also
                   described the commercial and factory-owning world in such stories as "A
                   Woman's Kingdom," (1894) and "Three Years" (1895). As has often
                   been recognized, Chekhov's work provides a panoramic study of the
                   Russia of his day, and one so accurate that it could even be used as a
                   sociological source.
 
 
 

                   In some of his stories of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked by
                   implication the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, the well-known novelist and
                   thinker, and Chekhov's revered elder contemporary. Himself once (in
                   the late 1880s) a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also
                   of nonresistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now
                   rejected these doctrines. He illustrated his new view in one particularly
                   outstanding story: "Ward Number Six" (1892). Here an elderly doctor
                   shows himself nonresistant to evil by refraining from remedying the
                   appalling conditions in the mental ward of which he has charge--only to
                   be incarcerated as a patient himself through the intrigues of a subordinate.
                   In "My Life" (1896) the young hero, son of a provincial architect, insists
                   on defying middle-class convention by becoming a house painter, a
                   cultivation of the Tolstoyan simple life that Chekhov portrays as
                   misconceived. In a later trio of linked stories, "The Man in a Case,"
                   "Gooseberries," and "About Love" (1898), Chekhov further develops
                   the same theme, showing various figures who similarly fail to realize their
                   full potentialities. As these pleas in favour of personal freedom illustrate,
                   Chekhov's stories frequently contain some kind of submerged moral,
                   though he never worked out a comprehensive ethical or philosophical
                   doctrine.
 
 
 

                   Chayka (The Seagull) is Chekhov's only dramatic work dating with
                   certainty from the Melikhovo period. First performed in St. Petersburg
                   on Oct. 17, 1896 (O.S.), this four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was
                   badly received; indeed, it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was
                   greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act, having
                   suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing
                   never to write for the stage again. Two years later, however, the play
                   was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying
                   considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist.
                   The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger
                   generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the
                   details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov's
                   friends. (see also Index: "Seagull, The," )
 

Yalta period: 1899-1904.

                   In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by
                   tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably
                   earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-invalid, Chekhov
                   sold his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta, the Crimean coastal
                   resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French
                   Riviera, cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
                   This was all the more galling since his plays were beginning to attract
                   serious attention. Moreover, Chekhov had become attracted by a young
                   actress, Olga Knipper, who was appearing in his plays, and whom he
                   eventually married in 1901; the marriage probably marked the only
                   profound love affair of his life. But since Knipper continued to pursue her
                   acting career, husband and wife lived apart during most of the winter
                   months, and there were no children of the marriage.

                   Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize
                   his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works,
                   excluding plays, to the publisher A.F. Marx for 75,000 rubles, an unduly
                   low sum. In 1899-1901 Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of
                   Chekhov's works, in 10 volumes, after the author had himself rejected
                   many of his juvenilia. Even so, this publication, reprinted in 1903 with
                   supplementary material, was unsatisfactory in many ways.

                   Chekhov's Yalta period saw a decline in the production of short stories
                   and a greater emphasis on drama. His two last plays-- Tri sestry (1901;
                   Three Sisters) and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard)--were
                   both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed
                   to the theatre's two founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and
                   Konstanin Stanislavsky, he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and
                   performances of his plays as he was able to witness. Repeatedly insisting
                   that his mature drama was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew
                   distressed when producers insisted on a heavy treatment,
                   overemphasizing the--admittedly frequent--occasions on which the
                   characters inveigh against the boredom and futility of their lives. Despite
                   Stanislavsky's reputation as an innovator who had brought a natural,
                   nondeclamatory style to the hitherto overhistrionic Russian stage, his
                   productions were never natural and nondeclamatory enough for
                   Chekhov, who wished his work to be acted with the lightest possible
                   touch. And though Chekhov's mature plays have since become
                   established in repertoires all over the world, it remains doubtful whether
                   his craving for the light touch has been satisfied except on the rarest of
                   occasions. Yet oversolemnity can be the ruin of Three Sisters, for
                   example--the play in which Chekhov so sensitively portrays the longings
                   of a trio of provincial young women. Insisting that his The Cherry
                   Orchard was "a comedy, in places even a farce," Chekhov offered in
                   this last play a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in
                   decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very
                   poignancy. This play was first performed in Moscow on Jan. 17, 1904
                   (O.S.), and less than six months later Chekhov died of tuberculosis.

                   Though already celebrated by the Russian literary public at the time of his
                   death, Chekhov did not become internationally famous until the years
                   after World War I, by which time the translations of Constance Garnett
                   (into English) and of others had helped to publicize his work. Yet his
                   elusive, superficially guileless style of writing--in which what is left unsaid
                   often seems so much more important than what is said--has defied
                   effective analysis by literary critics, as well as effective imitation by
                   creative writers.

                   It was not until 40 years after his death, with the issue of the 20-volume
                   Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem A.P. Chekhova ("Complete
                   Works and Letters of A.P. Chekhov") of 1944-51, that Chekhov was
                   at last presented in Russian on a level of scholarship worthy--though with
                   certain reservations--of his achievement. Eight volumes of this edition
                   contain his correspondence, amounting to several thousand letters.
                   Outstandingly witty and lively, they belie the legend--commonly believed
                   during the author's lifetime--that he was hopelessly pessimistic in outlook.
                   As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov's letters have been
                   rated second only to Aleksandr Pushkin's by the literary historian D.S.
                   Mirsky. Although Chekhov is still chiefly known for his plays, critical
                   opinion shows signs of establishing the stories--and particularly those that
                   were written after 1888--as an even more significant and creative literary
                   achievement.

                   R.F.Hi. Ronald Francis Hingley. Fellow of St. Antony's College,
                   Oxford; Lecturer in Russian, University of Oxford. Author of
                   Chekhov: A Biographical and Critical Study; Russian Writers and
                   Society; Nihilists; and others; editor and translator of The Oxford
                   Chekhov.

"Chekhov, Anton (Pavlovich)" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/119/53.html>
[Accessed 23 October 1998].