Celebrating the birth & legacy of

ANTON CHEKHOV

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

— Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. As a playwright, he wrote four classics that continue to be produced all over the world, over 100 years after his death. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre.

Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860 in southern Russia.  His parents influenced his writing in varied ways: his father was physically abusive and some historians believe Chekhov used him as the model for his portraits of hypocrisy; his mother was an excellent storyteller who entertained her 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 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor.  To avoid debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience.  Chekhov, just 16 years old at the time, was left behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education.

During this time, he read widely (including Turgenev, Cervantes and Schopenhauer) and wrote a full-length comic drama, Fatherless.  In 1879 he completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, where he began medical school.  It was then he assumed responsibility for his whole family by writing and selling daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, gaining a reputation as a satirist. 

“I wanted to tell people honestly: ‘Look at yourselves. See how badly you live and how tiresome you are.’ The main thing is that people should understand this. When they do, they will surely create a new and better life for themselves.”

— Anton Chekhov

Five years later (1884), he became a physician, though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge.  He continued writing for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg (New Times) and before long he was attracting attention for his work at just 26 years of age.

In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine and was inspired to write the short story, The Steppe, called “a dictionary of Chekhov’s poetics” and representing a shift toward the mature fiction for which he remains known.

Many consider Chekhov to be the founder of the modern short story and his influence is observed in a diverse group of writers including Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, William Somerset Maugham, Raymond Carver and John Cheever. 

Having suffered from tuberculosis for many years, a physical set-back forced him to move to Yalta in 1899. During this time, his plays began to attract serious attention writing The Three Sisters (1900) and The Cherry Orchard (1903), both for the Moscow Art Theatre. (The Cherry Orchard was first performed just six months before Chekhov’s death.)

Though celebrated by the Russian literary public in his lifetime, he would not attain international fame until after his death.  He died of tuberculosis on July 15, 1904 at the age of 44.

“Chekhov’s powers of observation and his honesty permitted him to create characters readily recognizable as human, characters sharply individualized yet representative. He was convinced of the need for unceasing striving, a belief that pervaded his life and work; and he had a faith that the future would bring a better life for humankind.”

— Literariness.org

Portions of this biography were provided by britannica.com and literariness.org

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