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Anton Chekhov

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File:Anton Tschechow - Ölskizze von Lewitan.jpg
Portrait of Anton Chekhov by Isaac Levitan (1886)

Anton Pavlovich ChekhovTemplate:Family name footnote (Template:IPAc-en;<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Template:Lang-rus; 29 January 1860Template:Efn – 15 July 1904Template:Efn) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.Template:Efn<ref name="Boyd 2004-07-03">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Steiner 2001-05-13">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.Template:Sfn Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress."Template:Sfn<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensembleTemplate:Efn as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience.<ref name="Hingley 2022">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Chekhov began writing stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations that influenced the evolution of the modern short story.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn<ref>"Tchehov's breach with the classical tradition is the most significant event in modern literature," John Middleton Murry, in Athenaeum, 8 April 1922, cited in Bartlett's introduction to About Love.</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

BiographyEdit

File:Chekhov Birthhouse.jpg
Birth house of Anton Chekhov in Taganrog, Chekhova street, Russia
File:Taganrog gymnasium boys.jpg
The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.

ChildhoodEdit

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great (17 January Old Style) 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov – on Politseyskaya (Police) street, later renamed Chekhova street – in southern Russia. He was the third of six surviving children; he had two older brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, and three younger siblings, Ivan, Maria, and Mikhail. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf and his wife,<ref>Template:Harvnb: Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov and Efrosinia Emelianovna</ref> was from the village Olkhovatka (Voronezh Governorate) and ran a grocery store. He was a director of the parish choir, a devout Orthodox Christian, and a physically abusive father. Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.<ref name = "Wood 78">Template:Harvnb</ref> Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya (Morozova), was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels all over Russia with her cloth-merchant father.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov recalled, "but our soul from our mother."<ref name = "Bio">From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.</ref>

Young Chekhov attended the Greek School in Taganrog and The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium (since renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium). There he was held back for a year at fifteen for failing an examination in Ancient Greek.<ref name = "Bartlett 4-5">Bartlett, pp. 4–5.Template:Incomplete short citation</ref> 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:

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When my brothers and I used to stand in the middle of the church and sing the trio "May my prayer be exalted", or "The Archangel's Voice", everyone looked at us with emotion and envied our parents, but we at that moment felt like little convicts.<ref name="multiref1">Letter to I.L. Shcheglov, 9 March 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Later, in his adulthood, Chekhov criticized his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of their father Pavel's tyranny: "Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool."Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

In 1876, Chekhov's father Pavel was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov.Template:Sfn To avoid debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience.<ref>Letter to cousin Mihail, 10 May 1877. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref>

Chekhov was left behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education. He remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man by the name of Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.Template:Sfn Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs. He sent every ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.Template:Sfn

As a teenager Chekhov fell in love with the Taganrog Theatre. He attended the theatre on a regular basis and became enchanted and inspired by productions of vaudevilles, Italian operas and popular comedies.<ref>Chekhov and Taganrog: [1]</ref><ref>Taganrog Theatre: [2]</ref>

During that time, Chekhov read widely and analytically, including the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer,<ref name = "Mihail 1876">Letter to brother Mihail, 1 July 1876. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref>Template:Sfn and wrote a full-length comic drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication."Template:Sfn Chekhov also experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.Template:Sfn In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling in Taganrog and moved in with his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University.Template:Sfn

Early writingsEdit

Chekhov then assumed responsibility for the whole family.Template:Sfn To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man Without 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 Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time.Template:Sfn Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.<ref name="Obs">"There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty ... The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature." "Vodka Miniatures, Belching and Angry Cats", George Steiner's review of The Undiscovered Chekhov in The Observer, 13 May 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref><ref name="SS1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

File:Anton P Chekhov.jpg
Portrait of young Chekhov in country clothes
File:Chekhov with brother 1882.jpg
Anton Chekhov (left) with brother Nikolai in 1882
File:Young Chekhov 1880s.jpg
Anton Chekhov in 1880s

In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge.Template:Sfn

In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit his tuberculosis to his family or his friends.<ref name = "Bio"/> He confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."<ref>Letter to N.A.Leykin, 6 April 1886. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref> He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodations.

Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three times the space.Template:Sfn Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.<ref>Template:Harvnb: They only ever fell out once, when Chekhov objected to the anti-Semitic attacks in New Times against Dreyfus and Zola in 1898.</ref><ref name = "Wood 79">In many ways, the right-wing Suvorin, whom Lenin later called "The running dog of the Tzar" (Payne, XXXV), was Chekhov's opposite; "Chekhov had to function like Suvorin's kidney, extracting the businessman's poisons."Template:Harvnb</ref>

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" that<ref>The Huntsman.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref> "You have real talent, a talent that 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."Template:Sfn The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising.Template:Sfn Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1888, 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."Template:Sfn

Turning pointsEdit

File:Chekhov family.jpg
Chekhov's family and friends in 1890: (top row, left to right) Ivan, Alexander, father; (second row) Mariya Korniyeeva, Lika Mizinova, Masha, Mother, Seryozha Kiselev; (bottom row) Misha, Anton

In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine, which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.<ref name = "Masha 1887">"There is a scent of the steppe and one hears the birds sing. I see my old friends the ravens flying over the steppe." Letter to sister Masha, 2 April 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref> On his return, he began the novella-length short story "The Steppe", which he called "something rather odd and much too original", and which was eventually published in Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald).<ref>Letter to Grigorovich, 12 January 1888. Quoted by Template:Harvnb.</ref> In a narrative that 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, and his companions, a priest and a merchant. "The Steppe" has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", and it 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.<ref>"'The Steppe,' as Michael Finke suggests, is 'a sort of dictionary of Chekhov's poetics,' a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come." Template:Harvnb.</ref>

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.<ref name=autogenerated3>From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.</ref> 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 and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality.<ref name = "Alexander 1887">Letter to brother Alexander, 20 November 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref>

Although Chekhov did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such as The Seagull (written in 1895), Uncle Vanya (written in 1897), The Three Sisters (written in 1900), and The Cherry Orchard (written in 1903) served as a revolutionary backbone to what is common sense to the medium of acting to this day: an effort to recreate and express the realism of how people truly act and speak with each other. This realistic manifestation of the human condition may engender in audiences reflection upon what it means to be human.

This philosophy of approaching the art of acting has stood not only steadfast, but as the cornerstone of acting for much of the 20th century to this day. Mikhail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career.<ref name = "Bio"/> From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's that has become known as Chekhov's gun, a dramatic principle that requires that every element in a narrative be necessary and irreplaceable, and that everything else be removed.<ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref name="marble">Template:Citation</ref>

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Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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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 that he realises has been without purpose.<ref name="Dreary">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Sfn Mikhail Chekhov recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death. Mikhail was researching prisons at that time as part of his law studies. Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.<ref name = "Bio"/>

SakhalinEdit

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Anton Chekhov in 1893

In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer across Siberia to the Russian Far East and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He spent three months there 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 to be among his best.Template:Sfn His remarks to his sister about Tomsk were to become notorious.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

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Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too.Template:Sfn{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Chekhov witnessed much on Sakhalin that shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and forced prostitution of women. He wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:

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On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict who had murdered his wife and wore fetters on his legs. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.Template:Sfn{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Chekhov later concluded that charity was 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.Template:Sfn<ref name = "Simmons 229">Template:Harvnb: Such is the general critical view of the work, but Simmons calls it a "valuable and intensely human document."</ref> Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of Sakhalin" in his long short story "The Murder",<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> the last section of which is set on Sakhalin, where the murderer Yakov loads coal in the night while longing for home. Chekhov's writing on Sakhalin, especially the traditions and habits of the Gilyak people, is the subject of a sustained meditation and analysis in Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84.<ref>Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2011.</ref> It is also the subject of a poem by the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, "Chekhov on Sakhalin" (collected in the volume Station Island).<ref>Heaney, Seamus. Station Island Farrar Straus Giroux: New York, 1985.</ref> Rebecca Gould has compared Chekhov's book on Sakhalin to Katherine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook (1907).<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 2013, the Wellcome Trust-funded play 'A Russian Doctor', performed by Andrew Dawson and researched by Professor Jonathan Cole, explored Chekhov's experiences on Sakhalin Island.

MelikhovoEdit

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Melikhovo, now a museum

Mikhail Chekhov, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:

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Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, but the greatest cost was making journeys of several hours to visit the sick, which reduced his time for writing.<ref name=autogenerated2>From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.</ref> However, Chekhov's work as a doctor enriched his writing by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society: for example, he witnessed at first hand the peasants' unhealthy and cramped living conditions, which he recalled in his short story "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."<ref name="note">Template:Cite book</ref> In 1893/1894 he worked as a Zemstvo doctor in Zvenigorod, which has numerous sanatoriums and rest homes. A local hospital is named after him.

In 1894, Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since he had moved to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended the orchard and the pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, 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 would be like in three or four hundred years."<ref name = "Bio"/>

The first night of The Seagull, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on 17 October 1896, was a fiasco, as the play was booed by the audience, stinging Chekhov into renouncing the theatre.Template:Sfn But the play so impressed the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced his colleague Konstantin Stanislavski to direct a new production for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.<ref name = "Ben">Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, 25.</ref> Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting.<ref>Chekhov and the Art Theatre, in Stanislavski's words, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage."Template:Harvnb</ref> The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year staged Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.<ref>Template:Harvnb: Rayfield draws from his critical study Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the "Wood Demon" (1995), which anatomised the evolution of the Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya—"one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements."</ref> In the last decades of his life he became an atheist.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

YaltaEdit

In March 1897, Chekhov suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow. With great difficulty he was persuaded to enter a clinic, where doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner of life.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

File:Tolstoy and chekhov.jpg
Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900

After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Yalta and built a villa (The White Dacha), into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers, 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.<ref>Olga Knipper, "Memoir", in Template:Harvnb</ref><ref name = "Bartlett 2">Bartlett, 2.Template:Incomplete short citation</ref> In Yalta 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.Template:Sfn

On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of weddings. She was a former protégée and sometime lover of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull.<ref>"I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around, glass in hand with an endless grin on your face." Letter to Olga Knipper, 19 April 1901.</ref>Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Harvnb</ref> Up to that point, Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor",<ref>Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov's Leading Lady, quoted in Template:Harvnb.</ref> had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment.<ref>"Chekhov had the temperament of a philanderer. Sexually, he preferred brothels or swift liaisons."Template:Harvnb</ref> He had once written to Suvorin:

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By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.<ref>Letter to Suvorin, 23 March 1895. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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File:Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, 1901.jpg
Chekhov and Olga, 1901, on their honeymoon

The letter proved prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart, although other Russian scholars have rejected that claim.<ref>Template:Harvnb</ref><ref name = "Simmons Benedetti">There was certainly tension between the couple after the miscarriage, though Template:Harvnb, and Template:Harvnb, put this down to Chekhov's mother and sister blaming the miscarriage on Olga's late-night socialising with her actor friends.</ref> The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints about Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.Template:SfnTemplate:Page needed

In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> "The Lady with the Dog"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> (also translated from the Russian as "Lady with Lapdog"),<ref>Greenberg, Yael. "The Presentation of the Unconscious in Chekhov's Lady With Lapdog." Modern Language Review 86.1 (1991): 126–130. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 November 2011.</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting from the encounter. Unexpectedly though, they gradually fall deeply in love and end up risking scandal and the security of their family lives. The story masterfully captures their feelings for each other, the inner transformation undergone by the disillusioned male protagonist as a result of falling deeply in love, and their inability to resolve the matter by either letting go of their families or of each other.<ref>"Overview: 'The Lady with the Dog'." Characters in 20th-Century Literature. Laurie Lanzen Harris. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 November 2011.</ref>

DeathEdit

In May 1903, Chekhov visited Moscow; the prominent lawyer Vasily Maklakov visited him almost every day. Maklakov signed Chekhov's will. By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Mikhail Chekhov recalled that "everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off, but the nearer [he] was to the end, the less he seemed to realise it".<ref name = "Bio"/> On 3 June, he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest in Germany, 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 German women dressed.<ref>Letter to sister Masha, 28 June 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.</ref> Chekhov died on 15 July 1904 at the age of 44 after a long fight with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his brother.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history"Template:SfnTemplate:Mdashretold, embroidered, and fictionalized many times since, notably in the 1987 short story "Errand" by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband's last moments:

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Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ('I'm dying'). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: 'It's a long time since I drank champagne.' He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child ...<ref>Olga Knipper, Memoir, in Template:Harvnb</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway-car meant for oysters, a detail that offended Gorky.<ref>"Banality revenged itself upon him by a nasty prank, for it saw that his corpse, the corpse of a poet, was put into a railway truck 'For the Conveyance of Oysters'." Maxim Gorky in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref> Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military band.<ref>Chekhov's Funeral. M. Marcus.The Antioch Review, 1995</ref> Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.<ref>Template:Harvnb; Alexander Kuprin in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

LegacyEdit

File:Anton Chekhov museum Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky file 3.jpg
Anton Chekhov museum in Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, Russia. It is the house where he stayed in Sakhalin during 1890.

A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin that he thought people might go on reading his writings 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."Template:Sfn Chekhov's posthumous reputation greatly exceeded his expectations. The ovations for the play The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death served to demonstrate the Russian public's acclaim for the writer, which placed him second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years. Tolstoy was an early admirer of Chekhov's short stories and had a series that he deemed "first quality" and "second quality" bound into a book. In the first category were: Children, The Chorus Girl, A Play, Home, Misery, The Runaway, In Court, Vanka, Ladies, A Malefactor, The Boys, Darkness, Sleepy, The Helpmate, and The Darling; in the second: A Transgression, Sorrow, The Witch, Verochka, In a Strange Land, The Cook's Wedding, A Tedious Business, An Upheaval, Oh! The Public!, The Mask, A Woman's Luck, Nerves, The Wedding, A Defenceless Creature, and Peasant Wives.Template:Sfn

Chekhov's work also found praise from several of Russia's most influential radical political thinkers. If anyone doubted the gloom and miserable poverty of Russia in the 1880s, the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin responded, "read only Chekhov's novels!"<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Raymond Tallis further recounts that Vladimir Lenin believed his reading of the short story Ward No. 6 "made him a revolutionary".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Upon finishing the story, Lenin is said to have remarked: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!"<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In Chekhov's lifetime, British and Irish critics generally did not find his work pleasing; E. J. Dillon thought "the effect on the reader of Chekhov's tales was repulsion at the gallery of human waste represented by his fickle, spineless, drifting people" and R. E. C. Long said "Chekhov's characters were repugnant, and that Chekhov revelled in stripping the last rags of dignity from the human soul".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> After his death, Chekhov was reappraised. Constance Garnett's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, whose story "The Child Who Was Tired" is similar to Chekhov's "Sleepy".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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".Template:Sfn In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the revolution, but it was later incorporated into the Soviet canon. The character of Lopakhin, for example, was reinvented as a hero of the new order, rising from a modest background so as eventually to possess the gentry's estates.Template:Sfn<ref name = "Danchenko">"They won't allow a play which is seen to lament the lost estates of the gentry." Letter of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, quoted by Anatoly Smeliansky in "Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre", from The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, 31–32.</ref>

File:Chekhov 1898 by Osip Braz.jpg
Osip Braz, Anton Chekhov, 1898, oil on canvas; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Despite Chekhov's reputation as a playwright, William Boyd asserts that his short stories represent the greater achievement.<ref name = "Boyd">"The plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity, but the parts appear greater than the whole." A Chekhov Lexicon, by William Boyd, The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref> Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story "Errand" about Chekhov's death, believed that Chekhov was the greatest of all short story writers:

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Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.<ref>Bartlett, "From Russia, with Love", The Guardian, 15 July 2004. Retrieved 17 February 2007.</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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According to literary critic Daniel S. Burt, Chekhov was one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.<ref name=":8">Template:Cite book</ref>

StyleEdit

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 pointed out 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".<ref>Anna Obraztsova in "Bernard Shaw's Dialogue with Chekhov", from Miles, 43–44.</ref>

Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer."<ref>Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, 1925 (from Selected Letters, p. 179), in Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Ed Larry W. Phillips, Touchstone, (1984) 1999, Template:ISBN, 101.</ref> Comparing Chekhov to Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage […], but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet."<ref>Wikiquote quotes about Chekhov</ref> Nabokov called "The Lady with the Dog" "one of the greatest stories ever written" in its depiction of a problematic relationship, 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".<ref>From Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, quoted by Francine Prose in Learning from Chekhov, 231.</ref>

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's historical accomplishment was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".<ref>"For the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life was made the form of the fiction. Before Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions." William Boyd, referring to the novelist William Gerhardie's analysis in Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study, 1923. "A Chekhov Lexicon" by William Boyd, The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref>

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader (1925):

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But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.<ref>Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, Template:ISBN, 172.</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Michael Goldman has said of the elusive quality of Chekhov's comedies: "Having learned that Chekhov is comic ... Chekhov is comic in a very special, paradoxical way. His plays depend, as comedy does, on the vitality of the actors to make pleasurable what would otherwise be painfully awkward—inappropriate speeches, missed connections, faux pas, stumbles, childishness—but as part of a deeper pathos; the stumbles are not pratfalls but an energized, graceful dissolution of purpose."<ref>Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama, p72.</ref>

Influence on dramatic artsEdit

In the United States, 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."<ref>Reynolds, Elizabeth (ed), Stanislavski's Legacy, Theatre Arts Books, 1987, Template:ISBN, 81, 83.</ref><ref name = "Eßlin">"It was Chekhov who first deliberately wrote dialogue in which the mainstream of emotional action ran underneath the surface. It was he who articulated the notion that human beings hardly ever speak in explicit terms among each other about their deepest emotions, that the great, tragic, climactic moments are often happening beneath outwardly trivial conversation." Martin Esslin, from Text and Subtext in Shavian Drama, in 1922: Shaw and the last Hundred Years, ed. Bernard. F. Dukore, Penn State Press, 1994, Template:ISBN, 200.</ref> 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.<ref name="Tovstonogov 1968 pp. 146–155">Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1981, the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin. One of Anton's nephews, Michael Chekhov, would also contribute heavily to modern theatre, particularly through his unique acting methods which developed Stanislavski's ideas further.

Alan Twigg, the chief editor and publisher of the Canadian book review magazine B.C. BookWorld wrote:

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One can argue Anton Chekhov is the second-most popular writer on the planet. Only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov in terms of movie adaptations of their work, according to the movie database IMDb. ... We generally know less about Chekhov than we know about mysterious Shakespeare.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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Chekhov has also influenced the work of Japanese playwrights including Shimizu Kunio, Yōji Sakate, and Ai Nagai. Critics have noted similarities in how Chekhov and Shimizu use a mixture of light humour as well as an intense depictions of longing.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Sakate adapted several of Chekhov's plays and transformed them in the general style of nō.<ref name=Clayton>Template:Cite book</ref> Nagai also adapted Chekhov's plays, including Three Sisters, and transformed his dramatic style into Nagai's style of satirical realism while emphasising the social issues depicted in the play.<ref name=Clayton/>

Chekhov's works have been adapted for the screen, including Sidney Lumet's Sea Gull and Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. Laurence Olivier's final effort as a film director was a 1970 adaptation of Three Sisters in which he also played a supporting role. His work has also served as inspiration or been referenced in numerous films. In Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror, characters discuss his short story "Ward No. 6". Woody Allen has been influenced by Chekhov and references to his works are present in many of his films including Love and Death (1975), Interiors (1978) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Plays by Chekhov are also referenced in François Truffaut's 1980 drama film The Last Metro, which is set in a theatre. The Cherry Orchard has a role in the comedy film Henry's Crime (2011). A portion of a stage production of Three Sisters appears in the 2014 drama film Still Alice. The 2022 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Drive My Car, is centered on a production of Uncle Vanya.

Several of Chekhov's short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1986 Indian anthology television series Katha Sagar. Another Indian television series titled Chekhov Ki Duniya aired on DD National in the 1990s, adapting different works of Chekhov.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep was adapted from the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

PublicationsEdit

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See alsoEdit

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Explanatory notesEdit

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CitationsEdit

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General and cited sourcesEdit

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