Chekhov’s influence on the modern short story and the modern play was immense. Among his innovation were his brevity at usage of narrative resources, his concentration on character as mood rather than action, his impressive adoption of particular points of view, his dispensing with a traditional plot, and usage of atmosphere as an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection. Inall regards, Chekhov made an immediate and direct impact on the viewers as well as on his readers.
Chekhov mastered the art of using broken conversations, off stage events and absent characters, as catalyst of tension, but still retained a strict impression of realism. In Chekhov’s mature plays, realism extended to the strict co-incidence of stage time and real time, so that it was the elapsed time between acts, sometimes extended over months or years, that showed the changes taking place in characters. At the same time, Chekhov’s realism was not a simple transcription of life but a highly structured portrait, subtly held together by complex networks of verbal imagery, repeated sounds and phrases, ambiguously suggestive or simply enigmatic props, all of which make up to what has come to be known as the ‘subtext’ of Chekhov’s plays.
Chekhov’s exlusive style of writing in which what is left unsaid often seems so much more important than what is said. Chekhov brought both, the short story and the drama to a new prominence in Russia and eventually in the West. Taking a cool objective stance towards his characters, Chekhov conveys their inner lives and feelings indirectly. His plots are usually simple and endings of both stories and plays tend toward openness rather than finality. His works create the effect of profound experience taking place beneath the surface in the ordinary lives of unexceptional people.
Nearly all his commentators concur that Chekhov was a master of irony, but not all agree on just when he was being ironic. Anton Pavolovich Chekhov, a lyricist and a realist, a comedian and a tragedian, an ironist and a progressive, perhaps a tantalizing phenomenon – a Chekhov character.
Early Years
On January 17, 1860, Anton Pavalovich Chekhov, the third of six children, was born in the Russian port town of Taganrog near the Black Sea. He was the son of Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a grocer, and grandson of a serf who had bought his family’s freedom, before emancipation.
The six children were as in order - Alexander (Sasha), Nikolai, Anton (Antosha), Ivan, Mariya (Masha), and Mikhail (Misha).
Little Anton, the third in the sequence, was plump with a pale, rotund face, dimpled cheeks, large brown eyes with close-cropped hair. His demeanor puzzled everyone. He was shy and reserved yet mingled with spontaneity when the need arose. His image of a ‘good little boy’ had everyone impressed.
Anton’s mother, Evgeniya, was a devout and a thrifty housekeeper. Her love and devotion for her husband remained despite his overbearing behavior. His father’s behavior left a scar on Chekhov’s mind. He never forgot the terrible scenes at the dinner table, provoked by some trifle situations like over-salted soup. However, both mother and father shared an ambition to help their children advance in the world and enjoy the better things of life, which circumstances had denied them. His father never wearied of trying and took great pains to impart to them his own love of music and art. In his later life, Chekhov once wrote, "We got our talent from our father and our soul from our mother."
There was a time when Anton’s father used to listen to the Greek hangers-on in his grocery store, and especially Vuchina, the teacher of the parish school at the local Greek church. Pavel Yegorovich had no experience with foreign languages and was naive in matters of educational programs. But his imagination willingly nurtured the vision of his sons earning a salary of 1000 Roubles or more through the simple expediency of learning modern Greek. Only the tuition fees of 25 Roubles a year, stood in the way. But a customer’s unexpected payment of a large grocery bill solved the problem. The father’s mind was made up. He selected Anton with his fourth son Nikolai to enter the Greek parish school against the will of his wife and certain family friends.
This Greek parish school was a kind of prison camp for the tough youngsters of Greek sailors, craftsmen and petty grain brokers, who wanted to keep their children off the streets and away from the docks.
The school building had a single room, which accommodated about 70 boys between the ages of 6 and 20. There were five rows of dirty,
variously carved benches that symbolically represented the school’s five classes.
A sixth bench in front was for beginners. Modern Greek, syntax, history and a bit of arithmetic were the only subjects offered. Vuchina, amiable and unsparing taught all the five classes by turns with a part-time assistant.
The Chekhov brothers found themselves in an alien world when they heard Greek all around them. Once, their teacher Vuchina gave them each a book of Greek alphabets. He pronounced a few letters from the book and told them to learn the rest, and straddled back to his office. By the next day, the Chekhov brothers had been unable to learn the alphabets. Their shrewd teacher scolded them and paid no attention to them from that time onwards.
Punishments were frequent. The slightest mistake would invite strikes by a ruler on the hand or head, kneeling on rock salt for lengthy periods or being locked up in the schoolroom till evening without lunch. From nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, Anton and Nikolai would sit with folded hands at the beginner’s bench. Apart from the occasional shoves and kicks by the older boys, no one ever took notice of them.
Though they did not dare complain to their father, they poured out everything to their mother. Pavel was unaware of the goings on and not until Christmas vacation did he learn the sad truth.
Since Pavel had already paid the full tuition fees, he insisted that the children complete the year. Later, he decided to follow his wife’s counsel and got admitted young Anton in the preparatory class of the Taganrog School for Boys.
This school was the typical provincial institution like many others, which was the backbone of the Russian educational system. Young Chekhov entered the preparatory class in August 1868, at the age of eight, and was promoted to the first regular class the following year. Being kept back twice for failing in certain subjects in the third and the fifth grade, he did not finish schooling until June 1879. Although, he was not a brilliant student, he graduated at 11th position overall, with a B-minus average. His performance would easily have crossed this level had it not been for some more ideal domestic conditions conducive to study.
Many household chores and interminable long hours at the grocery store played spoilsports in Chekhov’s undistinguished scholarly record. Schoolwork was really a burden in the little time that was at his disposal. Apart from tending the shop, the chores that cut most of young Chekhov’s time were churchgoing and choir singing, which his father organized. Homework, play and sleep would be sacrificed to choir rehearsals, performances and church attendance.
During the long summer vacations, the children were allowed to escape into the joyous realm of youthful play and sports. Summers in Taganrog were extremely hot. Young Anton would go all around barefoot. He used to spend his nights under an arbor of wild grapes in a small garden. There he would scribble verses because he imagined it as Job under the Banyan tree. A little girl, who lived in the cottage near the Chekhov garden, shyly courted him through touching verses written in chalk on the garden wall. Young Anton advised her, "It is better for girls to play with dolls than to be writing verses on the garden wall." One day while he was working in the garden, the girl called him ‘a peasant’. He got angry and banged her head with a dusty charcoal bag putting an end to the romance.
Fishing, swimming at the seashore, and walks in the public garden occupied whatever free time youngChekhov had. Yet, the favorite pastime of the Chekhov siblings was domestic play-acting. Here, young Chekhov’s qualities of inventiveness and his sense of comedy blossomed. On his first visit to the theatre, young Chekhov was fascinated by classical works like Hamlet, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gogol's The Inspector General, etc. For a school going boy to attend theatre, he had to have permission from the school and had to be accompanied by a parent. Young Anton with some of his friends found a way out of it. They would make themselves up in dark glasses and their father’s overcoats. The power and mystery of disguise intrigued young Chekhov and he acquired considerable skill at it, as well as in mimicry. He would imitate the characters he saw on stage.
Real play entered the house instead of domestic performances. Parents, relatives and neighbors would enjoy the performances. Anton’s abilities as an actor and writer began to spread beyond his family circle. At the age of 15, he was invited by some of the amateur theatres, which were organized for charity. If Chekhov’s passion for theatre and dramatic writing began in his boyhood so did his special literary bent of mind to discover the comic in the banality and absurdity of life.
Unfortunately, their stint with theatre ended in 1875. Pavel Yegorovich had himself to blame for the financial misfortune that overtook his family towards the end of 1875. A year before that, he had built a house on his father’s plot in Taganrog. He was badly cheated and all his available capital was swiped off and he had to borrow 500 Roubles. In the preceding year, the grocery store went from bad to worse. The family soon began to feel the sharp pinch of the falling income. By mid-April of 1876, Pavel Yegorovich was forced to declare himself bankrupt, unable to pay back the borrowed money and the interest. Pavel Yegorovich was sued for the money. He furtively slipped into a railroad car and escaped to Moscow.
The 50-year-old father had become a failure in the eyes of his six children. Later, Mrs Chekhov set out for Moscow to join her husband. Young Chekhov was left to guard the old home and set it right. The new owner offered him a room and board in exchange of tutoring his nephew. Chekhov agreed, for he wanted to finish his schooling and graduation.
Youth
In beginning a new phase of life in such trying circumstances must have been tough for young Anton. Yet, he was free, free of tending the shop, of choir rehearsals, of endless churchgoing, and above all free from the tyranny of his father. There were large and depressing responsibilities thrust upon the youth of 16. He did odd jobs but most of the time he would do his tutoring. He would send some of his hard-earned money to his mother, because his father remained unemployed in Moscow.
It was hard trying to ‘earn and learn’. As the saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going," Chekhov’s character strenghthened and his self-reliance developed in those three years. His attitude towards school and intellectual self-improvement became more serious and his grades improved.
Whatever dreams Chekhov may have nurtured about making a fortune, one can be certain that he would not try his hands at trade. When asked by schoolmates about his future plans, he would simply reply that he wanted to become a priest. However, the first hint that medicine might be his career, began to emerge in 1875. That summer, Chekhov visited one of the estates with the new owner of their house. There, he fell seriously ill from peritonitis. Chekhov recovered with difficulty under Dr Schremphf’s treatment. His illness and his friendship with Dr Schremphf, who told Chekhov of his own experiences as a medical student, ignited the idea of becoming a physician. He planned to go to the University of Zurich to study medicine.
In June 1879, Chekhov passed his final examination with good grades and graduated from the Taganrog School. He stayed in Taganrog for a part of the summer to collect a small scholarship of 25 Roubles a month, for further study. Finally, on August 6, 1879, Chekhov set out for Moscow, to his eagerly awaiting family.
After his experiences at Taganrog, Chekhov had confidence that he could fend for himself and study simultaneously. In Moscow, Chekhov sensed the lack of direction in the family affairs. His father lived apart due to his job and only visited them on Sundays. The whole family accepted Chekhov as their authority to everything, as his mother was used to taking orders and not giving. Chekhov seriously took these new responsibilities. He now became the head of the family.
In starting out in his career, there arose in Chekhov an irresistible urge to identify his family with himself in his struggle to grow out of poverty. The struggle was a difficult one for a 19-year-old youth. He demanded that all the family members contribute for their well being. He set an example by accepting the major financial burden of the household expenditure. Even with such responsibilities to be fulfilled, he started to prepare himself to enter the university.
In August 1879, Chekhov found his way to the Moscow University of Mokhavaya. He sought the registration for the first year of medical study. Chekhov had imagined the university as an elegant temple of learning, but found it a deteriorated and gloomy place. There were small dirty rooms with low ceilings and grimy walls. Chekhov took his studies seriously. He attended the lectures regularly and devoted time for all the required tasks. On his way back home from class, Chekhov would sometimes stop at a newsstand to buy some of the latest issues of the humorous magazines Alarm Clock and Dragonfly.
Here, he thought to write for the humorous magazines over which he used to pore with delight at the Taganrog library. Chekhov looked upon it as the most promising way of supplementing his limited resources.
On January 13, 1880, Chekhov read in Letter Box section of the St Petersburg weekly Dragonfly, the exciting news addressed to him.
"Not at all bad. Will print what was sent. Our blessings on your further efforts."
Thereafter, Chekhov received a letter from the editor, which said that he would receive an honorarium of five kopecks a line. His first story, A letter from the Don Landowner Stepan Vladimorovich N, to his learned neighbor Dr. Fredrich was published on March 9, 1880 in issue number 10. It was simply signed (‘…v’) The whole family rejoiced over the first success of Chekhov. The journey into the literary world for the 20-year-old Chekhov had begun.
Chekhov lost no time. Every moment that he could steal from his medical studies were spent on writing. He sent a number of manuscripts to the Dragonfly in the remaining months of 1880, nine more of which were printed. Most of these were signed under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte.
At Dragonfly many writers had failed. The Letter Box section of the magazine would not spare a single failure and would comment as though rubbing salt on one’s wound. Some of the comments on Chekhov’s rejected stories were,
"A few witticisms don’t wipe out hopelessly vapid verbiage."
"The Portrait will not be printed, it doesn’t suit us. You’ve obviously written it for another magazine."
"Very long and colorless, like the white paper ribbon a Chinaman pulls out of his mouth."
At the end of 1880, the Letter Box commented on his latest contribution,
"You don’t bloom – you are fading. Very sad. In fact it is impossible to write without some critical relation to the matter."
Chekhov lost all patience and decided to break off relations with Dragonfly. Discouraged and outraged, Chekhov stopped writing for several months and decided to leave it all for some time.
Chekhov passed the final examination of the first year doing well in all subjects except Anatomy. By summer of 1882, Chekhov had finished his third year of medical study. The next year, he graduated from the medical school. Chekhov received some experience in the practice of medicine under Dr Arkangelsly. On June 25, 1884, Chekhov finished his medical studies and signed his letter, ‘Doctor and District Physician A. Chekhov.’
When he finished medical studies and started off as a doctor, it never occurred to the 24- year-old Chekhov to attribute any special significance to the considerable amount of writing he had done.
First Fame as Writer
By 1886, the literary luminaries had started attracting Chekhov. He went to Petersburg on April 24. After renting a room in a fashionable hotel and buying new shoes, pants and an overcoat, Chekhov went to the editorial office of The Fragments.
The main topic of conversation was the appearance of Chekhov’s book, Motley Tales. The sale of the book claimed his serious attention. He asked for more advertising. As the reviews of the Motley
Tales came in over the summer, Chekhov’s hopes rose.
Chekhov’s growing reputation had begun to weave its magic on the family members. They now realized that his incessant writing, which they had formerly regarded as an unimportant factor in the family budget, propped out as a precious talent. Chekhov and his family shifted to a new house on a fashionable street, near the center of the city. The rent was 650 Roubles annually and the owner demanded an advance payment of two months. This was more than Chekhov had ever paid for living quarters.
The two-storey house with bay windows looking out on the greenery of the street, had a combination of Chekov’s study and medical office on the ground floor. In Chekov’s study, there were open bookcases from floor to ceiling. Chekhov had started to build a substantial library. He frequented the secondhand bookshops and his purchases were varied.
By the end of September 1886, it had become clear that to maintain the new house Chekhov had to write more. He worked from morning to night for five different publications. Rarely would his study be free of manuscripts. At times it seemed as though he was running a professional literary agency.
On February 2, 1887, Chekhov was elected member of the Literary Fund, an old organization working to aid needy authors and scholars. The same year several factors influenced Chekhov to attempt a large work. He realized that the short story did not provide scope for either the correct formulation of serious moral and social problems or the ‘new word’ which some of the critics were demanding. The novel in Russia had been the traditional medium for ambitious authors who believed they had something important to say. Chekhov thought he was ready to make an attempt. However, he attempted only once and then destroyed the manuscripts. Chekhov found it extremely difficult to master the long and complicated narrative form of the novel. Yet it remained the dream of his life to write one. On the other hand, the dramatic emphasis in Chekhov’s short stories, his quality of dialogues made him a master at short-story writing. His adolescent attempts at playwriting no doubt grew out of an instinctive recognition of this special talent.
On January 1, 1888, Chekhov seriously tackled his lengthy story, The Steppe, which he had started somewhat earlier. Chekhov worked at this novel over parts in 1888 but the ultimate synthesis still evaded him. By February 3, 1888, Chekhov sent the manuscript of The Steppe to the magazine Northern Herald. Early in March, The Steppe was printed in the Northern Herald. Reactions quickly followed. Various reviews appeared in periodicals and all acclaimed Chekhov’s latest efforts.
Chekhov himself sensed that in The Steppe, he had contributed something fresh and new to the Russian literature. Over 1888 one can observe an intellectual as well as an artistic flowering in Chekhov. Perhaps the success of The Steppe played the lead role.
Literary Maturity
Chekhov’s literary progress during his early 20s may be charted by the first appearance of his work in asequence of publications in the capital, St Petersburg. In 1888, Chekhov concentrated exclusively on short stories that were serious in conception. There was also a concentration on quality at the expense of quantity. The number of publications dropping suddenly from over a 100 stories a year in the peak years of 1886, to only 10 stories in 1888.
Besides The Steppe, Chekhov also wrote several profoundly tragic real life stories of his time. The most notable being A Dreary Story (1889), a penetrating study into the mind of an elderly and dying professor of medicine. The ingenuity and insight displayed, was remarkable from an author so young. The play Ivanov (1887-89) culminates in the suicide of a young man nearer to Chekhov’s own age. Together with A Dreary Story, this belongs to a group among Chekhov’s works that have been called clinical studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill in spirit.
By the late 1880s many critics had begun to criticize Chekhov, now that he was well-known, for holding no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was completely apolitical.
In the early 1890s, he suddenly sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin, 6,000 miles east of Moscow, on the other side of Siberia. Chekhov’s journey was a long and hazardous ordeal by carriage and riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local conditions and conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to publish his findings as a research thesis, which retains an honored place in the annals of Russian penology : The Island of Sakhalin (1893-94).Chekhov paid his first visit to Western Europe in the company of AS Suvorin, a wealthy newspaper proprietor and the publisher of most of Chekhov’s work. Their long and close friendship caused Chekhov some anxious moments, owing to the commercial newspaper New Times of Suvorin. Eventually Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the attitude taken by the paper toward the notorious Alfred Dreyfus Affair in France, with Chekhov championing Dreyfus.
The Alfred Dreyfus Affair is one that is still remembered for the unchallenged emotional power it ellicited. One cannot read French history without coming across the name of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain for the French military who was falsely convicted of trying to sell military secrets to the Germans. No other country has ever been so transfixed by the fate of a single individual as France was in the Dreyfus era. It happened at a time when Dreyfus was serving his life sentence on Devil's Island, a prison off South America. Emile Zola, a writer for the paper L'Aurore, wrote an article accusing military authorities of faking evidence and hiding the truth. The government had Zola prosecuted for libel and was found guilty by the court. To avoid jail, he escaped to England and stayed there until he was pardoned. But Zola succeeded in creating the tumultuous atmosphere which eventually helped free Dreyfus. In Russia, Anton Chekhov, nearly destroyed his relationship with Alexei Suvorin by insisting on Dreyfus's innocence.
During these years, just before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov continued his experiments as a dramatist. His Wood Demon (1888-89) is a long-winding and ineptly facetious four-act play, which somehow, by a miracle of art, became converted into Uncle Vanya, one of his greatest stage masterpieces. The conversion to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural manor house took place sometime between 1890 and 1896. Other dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act farces.
The Melikhovo Period
After helping both, as doctor and as a medical administrator, to relieve the disastrous famine of 1891-92, Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles south of Moscow. This was his main residence for about six years, providing a home for his aging parents, and also for his sister Mariya, who acted as his housekeeper and remained unmarried to look after her brother.
The Melikhovo period was the most creatively profligate period in Chekhov’s life so far as short stories were concerned. For it was during these six years that he wrote The Butterfly, Neighbors, An Anonymous Story, The Black Monk, Murder and Ariadne, among other masterpieces. Village life now became a leading theme in his work, most notably in Peasants. Undistinguished by plot, this short sequence created more stir in Russia than any other single work of Chekhov. The success is partly owned to Chekhov’s rejection of the convention whereby writers commonly presented the Russian peasantry in a sentimentalized form.
Chekhov also described commercialism in stories like, A Woman’s Kingdom and Three Years. As has often been recognized, Chekhov’s work provides a panoramic study of the Russia of his day and one so accurate that it could even be used as a sociological source.
In some of his stories of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, the well-known novelist and thinker. Once he himself was a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life and also of non-resistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy. Chekhov had now rejected these doctrines. He illustrated his new view in one particular outstanding story Ward Number Six. Here an elderly doctor shows himself non-resistant to evil by refraining from remedying the appalling conditions in the mental ward of which he is in charge, only to be incarcerated as a patient himself through the intrigues of a subordinate. In My Life (1896), the young hero, son of a provincial architect, insists on defying middle-class convention by becoming a house painter, a cultivation of the Tolstoyan simple life that Chekhov portrays as misconceived. In a later trio of linked stories, The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love, Chekhov further develops the same theme, showing various figures who similarly fail to realize their full potential. As these pleas in favor of personal freedom illustrate, Chekhov’s stories frequently contain some kind of submerged moral, though he never worked out a comprehensive ethical or philosophical doctrine.
The Seagull is Chekhov’s only dramatic work dating with certainty from the Melikhovo period. First performed in St Petersburg on October 17, 1896, this four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and the younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov’s friends.
The Yalta Period
In March 1897, Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-valid, Chekhov sold his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta, the Crimean coastal resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French Riveria cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St Petersburg. This was all the more worrying, since his plays were beginning to attract serious attention.
Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyrights of all his existing works, excluding plays, to a publisher A F Marx for 75,000 Roubles, an unduly low sum. Between 1899 and 1901, Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of Chekhov’s works in 10 volumes.
During the Yalta period we could see the decline of the production of short stories and a greater emphasison drama. His last two plays, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre.
But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre’s two founders, he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays he witnessed. Repeatedly insisting that his mature drama was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew distressed when producers insisted on a heavy treatment. The Moscow Art Theatre’s productions were never natural and were nondeclamatory enough for Chekhov who wished his work to be acted with the lightest possible touch. And though Chekhov’s mature plays have since become established in repertoires all over the world, it remains doubtful whether his craving for the light touch has been satisfied except on rarest of occasions.
Chekhov offered in The Cherry Orchard, a poignant picture of the Russian land-owning class in decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. This play was first performed in Moscow on January 17, 1904.
Chekhov had been attracted to a young actress Olga Knipper, who acted in his plays, and whom he eventually married in 1901. The marriage probably marked the only profound love affair of his life. Olga took her place in the Chekhov houshold as his wife. Though
Olga tried to avoid interfering in the household chain of command, she naturally insisted upon assuming sole care of her husband. She was somewhat characteristic of her German background and insisted that he bring a sense of order in his life. She insisted that he change his tie frequently, have his clothes, and shoes brushed regularly, wash his head, and have his hair cut and his beard trimmed more often. But her demands, trivial as they seem, became the cause of friction between her and Anton's mother and his sister, Masha. She kept on urging Chekhov for a place where they would be alone, but he tried to convince her that things would get better with time. But since Olga continued to pursue her acting career, the couple lived apart for most of the winter months and they had no children of the marriage. It was their mutual decision to get divorced because they knew the marriage had its difficulties. Even after separation, their relationship flourished and survived almost insurmountable obstacles through a constant stream of letters.
The Last Days
On June 29, 1904, correspondents of Russian News and the Daily News, who had been closely following the course of Chekhov’s illness, telegraphed the newspapers,
"…After a severe attack on Tuesday, the condition of the heart did not appear to be very dangerous".
The following day another sinking spell took place, and when Chekhov recovered he took the precaution to send a request to a Berlin bank that funds should be forwarded in his wife’s name.
On Friday, July 1, Chekhov seemed to feel better. The correspondents sent encouraging wires to the effect that he had spent the day relatively well and that his heart action had become stronger. To pass the time Chekhov began to improvise a story. He described a fashionable health resort which catered to well-fed bankers and red-cheeked English and American tourists who doted on rich and abundant food. Chekhov then went on to describe, with humorous touches. Olga, curled up on the sofa laughed heartily over his narration which served to release the tension she had been under.
Soon Chekhov slipped into sleep. But after several hours woke up with severe pain. At two o’clock in the morning, the doctor arrived and gave him some injections. Chekhov refused to be put on oxygen saying,
"Now nothing more is needed. Before they bring it, I’ll be a corpse."
Chekhov then asked for champagne. He took the proffered glass and turned to Olga with a radiant smile and said,
"It is some time since I have drunk champagne".
He slowly drained the glass, and quietly lay down on his left side and in few moments he was silent forever.
No sound of human voice was heard,
there was none of the bustle of daily life,
nothing but peace, beauty,
and the grandeur of death.
ANTON CHEKHOV
He believed that ingenuity is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more efficacious than history,
That illusions are more powerful than facts,
That affiance always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And that love is stronger than death.
Well-known playwright and short story writer of Russia, Anton Chekhov was the master of irony, spinning complex webs of verbal imagery, tantalizing phrases and virtual props, he gave an enigmatic touch to histrionics.
The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are proofs of his variegated talent. Failure and success, ebb and tide, recognition and criticism, simplicity and complexity colored the canvas of his 44-year life.
• January 17, 1860
Anton Pavalovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia.
• August 1868
He entered the preparatory class and was promoted to the first regular class the following year.
•1875
Chekhov’s father fled from Taganrog abandoning his family, due to bankruptcy.
•1879
Chekhov rejoined his family in Moscow. Chekhov enrolled at the University to study medicine.
•1882
Became a regular contributor to the St Petersburg humorous journal, with short stories and sketches.
•1884
Began to practise medicine.
•1887
Attained a literary success in St Petersburg, with his first play, Ivanov.
•1890
Traveled across Siberia to interview prisoners and exiles.
• 1895
Chekhov wrote the Seagull.
•1896
The Seagull opened to survive only five performances after a disastrous first night.
•1898
The Seagull produced successfully by the Moscow Art Theatre.
•1899
Uncle Vanya produced successfully by the Moscow Art Theatre.
•1901
Three Sisters draws poor reviews.Chekhov married Olga Knipper.
•1904
His last play, The Cherry Orchard is produced.
•1904
Chekhov leaves this world for the heavenly abode.
• You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
• To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.
• A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
• The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
• When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured.
• The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
• Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.
• If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.
• Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
• Only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
• If you cry ‘forward’, you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.
• Man is what he believes.
• No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand… Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Jonnesse William, when asked to name his favorite authors :
"Chekhov ! Chekhov ! Chekhov !
"Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing in life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world."
–Francine Prose
"His genius lies above all in his creative gifts as a writer of short stories… In fact, his plays derive directly from his stories, in which, it seems to me, the texture is far richer."
– V S Pritchett
"When I had read the story Ward Number 6, I was filled with awe. I could not remain in my room and went out of doors. I felt as if I were locked up in a ward too."
– Nikolai Lenin
"The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov’s soul, so often beyond the reach of mere consciousness."
– Constantin Stanislavski
"His meticulous anatomies of complicated human impulse and response, his view of what’s funny and poignant, his clear-eyed observance of life as lived – all somehow matches our experience."
