Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a small port town in southern Russia — the kind of place where nothing much happened, and yet everything did, if one looked carefully enough. His father sold groceries and beat his children; his grandfather had been a serf. The family moved to Moscow, but there was no money, so young Anton stayed behind to finish school alone. He began writing short, funny sketches for magazines to pay for his medical studies, and before long he discovered that he was two things at once: a doctor and a writer. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” he once said, “and literature is my mistress.” He never quite gave up either one.

His early stories were comic, sometimes silly, but gradually they grew quieter, stranger, more honest. Stories like “The Lady with the Dog,” “Ward No. 6,” “Gooseberries,” and “The Darling” did something no one had quite done before — they ended without ending, left their characters mid-thought, mid-life, still hoping or still failing to hope. He wrote about doctors, teachers, landowners, servants, children, and lonely people at parties. He did not judge them. He simply noticed everything. His plays — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard — changed the theatre forever, though audiences at first were not always sure what had happened, since nobody died heroically and nobody gave a satisfying speech.

Chekhov himself was tall, gentle, and often ill. He had tuberculosis for much of his adult life. He built schools, treated peasants for free, and travelled to a prison island called Sakhalin to document the suffering there, because he believed a writer should be useful. He married the actress Olga Knipper late in life. He died in 1904, at forty-four, in a hotel room in Germany. The doctor ordered champagne. Chekhov drank it, said “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne,” turned on his side, and was gone. It was, one might say, a very Chekhov ending — quiet, ordinary, and somehow unbearable.