BORN: 1860, Taganrog, Russia DIED: 1904, Badenweiler, Germany NATIONALITY: Russian GENRE: Drama, fiction MAJOR WORKS: The Cherry Orchard (1904) Uncle Vanya (1899) The Three Sisters (1901)
Overview
Anton Chekhov Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
Celebrated for his innovative methods in prose fiction and drama, Anton Chekhov is known for his ability to combine both tragedy and comedy in works that substitute dialogue for action and ambiguity for moral finality. While his most characteristic works begin with revelations of personal feelings and observations, they ultimately balance emotion with stylistic control. This detached, rational artfulness distinguishes his work from that of his Russian predecessors—namely, from the confessional abandons of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the psychological fantasies of Nikolai Gogol. Though praised as an early master of the short-story genre, Chekhov also helped initiate a new era in European theater, and his works continue to serve as models for the finest American and European writers of the twentieth century.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Early Responsibility Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 16, 1860, in Taganrog, a Russian port city. Unlike the majority of well-known Russian writers who preceded him (who were aristocrats), Chekhov was only one generation removed from serfdom, a background that troubled him for many years. Serfs were Russian peasants who, in essence, were like slaves in that their lives were completely controlled by the aristocratic landowners whose fields they worked. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861. Chekhov’s grandfather had bought freedom for his family, and had established himself as the keeper of a shop. According to a collection of letters edited by Simon Karlinsky, Chekhov wrote friend and publisher Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin in January 1889 about the difficulty of ‘‘squeez[ing] the slave’s blood out of himself’’ in order to attain self-respect and independence not only as a man, but also as an author.
When his grocery store went bankrupt in 1876, Chekov’s father moved to Moscow to escape debtors’ prison. The rest of the family soon joined him, with the exception of Anton, who remained until 1879 in Taganrog to complete his secondary education. Chekhov received a scholarship to Moscow University, where he studied medicine and, because his father was incarcerated, began to provide his family with their main source of income. He carried this moral and financial responsibility for the rest of his life.
Humor and Suffering Encouraged by his older brother, Chekhov began submitting short, humorous pieces to popular magazines to earn money. In 1880, his first story was published in Dragonfly, a St. Petersburg journal. ‘‘A Letter from the Don Landowner Stepan Vladimirovich N. to His Learned Neighbor Dr. Fridrikh’’ parodies ridiculous pseu-doscientific ideas held by the pompous, poorly educated gentry. For the next several years, Chekhov looked to the streets of Moscow for the characters and themes he would then capture in anecdotes, jokes, character sketches, dialogues, and spoofs on authors of romance and adventure for humor magazines in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Chekhov’s adoption of material from his own life, a method that he would use throughout his career, offended many of his friends and family.
After graduating in 1884, Chekhov went into medical practice, but because most of his patients lived in poverty, writing became increasingly important to him for financial reasons. From 1883 to 1886, Chekhov wrote more than three hundred pieces for Nikolai Aleksandrovich Leikin, the publisher of the St. Petersburg journal Fragments. Although he and Leikin often had editorial differences, Chekhov was maturing and developing his writing skills, as evidenced by a newfound seriousness in his stories. In fact, many scholars consider Chekhov’s time under Leikin as extremely valuable formative years, for it was during this time that Chekhov came to the conclusion that suffering is a part of everyday existence. Unfortunately, Chekhov was to become very familiar with suffering: during this time, he began to exhibit symptoms of the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Tuberculosis, also historically referred to as consumption, is an infectious and highly contagious disease that often causes bleeding lesions in the lungs, but can also affect most other parts of the body. In Chekhov’s time, the disease was one of the greatest health threats in Europe; as late as 1918, one in six deaths in France was caused by tuberculosis. Doctors did not fully understand how the disease was spread until the 1880s, and the disease was not curable until effective antibiotics were developed in 1946.
Serious Writing In 1885, Chekhov moved to St. Petersburg and became friends with A. S. Suvorin, editor of the influential journal New Times. Impressed by Chekhov’s literary talent, Suvorin encouraged the young writer to expand his gift with words, so Chekhov gave up writing for comic journals and began publishing more worldly stories in the New Times. In 1888, Chekhov published his first major literary short story, ‘‘The Steppe,’’ in the Northern Messenger. In addition to publishing short stories during the 1880s, Chekhov was also writing dramas, beginning with such popular one-act plays, or, as he referred to them, ‘‘jokes,’’ as The Bear (1888) and The Wedding Proposal (1888).
Social Responsibility In 1890, feeling restless and dissatisfied with his life, Chekhov traveled across Siberia to visit a penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Passionate about doing something practical to address the evils of Russian society, he based the book Sakhalin (1893), which calls for prison reform, on his observations there. Up to that point, the majority of Chekhov’s works had been profoundly influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s moral code, which included concepts of Christian love and nonresis-tance to evil; however, after his time on the island of Sakhalin, Chekhov rejected Tolstoy’s ideas on the grounds that they provided an insufficient, unrealistic answer to human suffering. Chekhov was impatient with intellectual groups who only philosophized instead of taking action.
Major Dramas Beginning in 1892, Chekhov worked on The Sea Gull, his first major dramatic work, while treating peasants outside of Moscow during a cholera epidemic. When The Sea Gull was produced in St. Petersburg in 1896, it was a complete failure, primarily because audiences, directors, and actors alike did not appreciate Chekhov’s concept of drama: that plot and action are secondary to mood and dialogue. In spite of this negative reception, Chekhov soon earned the reputation as the innovator of modern Russian drama, in part because of the formation of the Moscow Art Theatre.
The Moscow Art Theatre staged a new production of The Sea Gull in 1898 that proved highly successful. During rehearsals, Chekhov met actress Olga Knipper, whom he later married. He continued to write for the Moscow Art Theatre, which premiered The Three Sisters in 1901. Despite complications from tuberculosis and his doctor’s advice to rest, Chekhov pushed himself to complete The Cherry Orchard and then to attend rehearsals for the play. He suffered a complete collapse in the winter of 1903 and died on July 15, 1904, in a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany.
Works in Literary Context
While his short fiction owes much to such literary greats as Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev, Chekhov’s own influence on Western literature has proved vast. Writers from E. M. Forster to Virginia Woolf were inspired by Chekhov’s prose style, especially his mastery of mood and setting, and his methods of developing character sketches that highlight the character’s faults and human weaknesses. By developing innovative techniques, Chekhov reinvented the short-story genre. For example, he often ends stories with a ‘‘zero ending,’’ a conclusion born from realism that is anticlimactic. Other stories, however, have surprise endings. Because of Chekhov’s originality, readers for over one hundred years have admired his works, particularly for their humanity and authenticity.
Pages: 1 2
Anton Chekhov
Home
Download
