Everything about Anton Chekhov totally explained
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (– ) () was a
Russian
short-story writer and
playwright. His playwriting career produced four classics:
The Seagull,
Uncle Vanya,
Three Sisters, and
The Cherry Orchard; 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 Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim by
Konstantin Stanislavsky's
Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced
Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays,
Three Sisters and
The Cherry Orchard. 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
Virginia Woolf and other
modernists, 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.
Biography
Early life
Anton Chekhov was born on
29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in
Taganrog, Russia, a port on the
Sea of Azov in 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 Chekhov has been seen as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrites. 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:
Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog
gymnasium, now renamed the
Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at 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 used the word "suffering" to describe his childhood and recalled:
debtor's prison fled to
Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending the 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
goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers. He sent every
rouble he could spare to Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer up the family. 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.
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
pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a
satirical 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
physician, 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 wouldn't admit
tuberculosis 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 respected papers in Petersburg,
Novoye Vremya (
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 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 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 Prize "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
Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the
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 (
Northern Herald). In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a
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, 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 theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being
Ivanov, 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, praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality. Mihail 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 Gun", noted by Ilia Gurliand from a conversation: "If in Act I you've 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 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, in a search for purpose in his own life, soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform himself.
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. 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
Tomsk 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 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:
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
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, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:
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'd built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to the estate, he'd refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and
horticulture, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mihail, he "looked after… as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his
Three Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they'd 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 playwright
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced
Constantin Stanislavski to direct it for the innovative
Moscow Art Theatre 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 haemorrhage 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 at
Alushta, near
Yalta, and built a villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers at Alushta, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as
Leo Tolstoy and
Maxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot
Siberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was installed there. At Alushta 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 Sisters and
The Cherry Orchard.
On
25 May 1901 Chekhov married
Olga Knipper—quietly, owing to his horror of weddings—a former protegée and sometime lover of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he'd first met at rehearsals for
The Seagull. Up to that point, Chekhov, who has been called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor", had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment; he'd once written to Suvorin:
miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield 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.
At Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories,
The Lady with the Dog (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. "Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end wasn't 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 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 Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband’s last moments:
oysters, 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 Cemetery.
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'd 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 Garnett's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as
James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, and
Katherine Mansfield, the last arguably to the point of plagiarism. The Russian critic
D.S. Mirsky, who lived in
England, 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
revolution but was later adapted to the
Soviet 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 Shaw, 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
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. In turn, Strasberg's
Actors Studio and the
"Method" acting approach influenced many actors, including
Marlon Brando and
Robert De Niro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been 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 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:
Ernest Hemingway, another of Carver's influences, was more grudging: "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". 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 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 mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in
The Common Reader (1925):
Bibliography
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