Anton Chekhov was born January 29, 1860 in the Russian Empire. His father had been a serf, in the medieval sense, but ran a grocery store by the time Anton was born. The family spoke Ukranian as well as Russian at home, and Anton’s mother was said to be an excellent storyteller who entertained all six children with her tales.
The school, or Gymnasium, Chekhov attended as a child still exists, and is now named the Chekhov Gymnasium. He was not a remarkable student, and had to repeat a year after failing an exam. When he was 16, his parents and two older brothers had to escape to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison (he’d been trying to build a new house, but was cheated out of all his money by a contractor). Chekhov stayed behind to sell off the remaining possessions of the family and to finish his education. He had to pay for his schooling, too, which he did by tutoring younger students (he probably kept that repeating a grade thing quiet), catching and selling birds, and as many other odd jobs as he could find. He also started reading widely, and wrote his first play, Fatherless. It was a full-length comic drama, but his brother Alexander later scoffed at it, calling it an “inexcusable though innocent fabrication.”
In 1879 Chekhov joined his family in Moscow, where he entered medical school. In Moscow he took responsibility for supporting the whole family, which he mostly did by selling daily short stories, many of them humorous. He published them under various pen names, including “Man Without Spleen.” He also kept up his studies, and qualified as a doctor in 1884. He always considered it his profession, and writing just a sideline — even though he may have earned more money from writing. He always treated poor patients for free.
In the early 1880s Chekhov contracted tuberculosis, which he kept secret from his family and most friends. He kept writing, though, and in 1888 published a collection of short stories, At Dusk. It won the Pushkin Prize, which was awarded for “the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth.” Around the same time, a theatre manager commissioned Chekhov to write a play — probably his first return to writing plays since Fatherless. He wrote to his brother Alexander that he found the experience “sickening,” but then (apparently to his amazement), the play Ivanov turned into a big success. Possibly without intending to, Chekhov’s plays represented a major change in drama and acting. His characters interacted with each other realistically, and spoke the way real people would talk. It was around the same time that he came up with Chekhov’s Gun, a dramatic principle that’s still relevant. The idea is that every element in a narrative should be necessary, and everything else removed. “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.”
In 1897 Chekhov suffered a severe attack of tuberculosis and was finally argued into consulting doctors about it. They ordered him to change the way he was living, and he actually listened. He built a villa outside Yalta. It’s called the White Dacha and is now a museum. While living in Yalta he got married, but quietly — he apparently had a “horror” of fancy weddings. The marriage was unconventional; Chekhov remained in Yalta but his wife Olga, who was an actress, lived in Moscow.
Chekhov’s tuberculosis worsened, and he died in 1904 during a trip to Germany. A few months earlier he had told a friend that he thought his work would be read for perhaps another seven years. “That’s not bad,” he said, “I’ve got six years to live.” He might have been surprised to learn that he’s still, more than a century later, considered one of the greatest writers of all time. Critics are still arguing about whether his plays or his short stories are better. As the editor of B.C. BookWorld wrote, “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.”
