Anton Chekhov
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 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Oil on canvas by Osip Braz, 1898. From the collection of the |
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| Born: | 29 January 1860 [ |
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| Died: | 15 July 1904 [ |
| Occupation(s): | physician, short story writer and playwright |
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (
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[edit] Early life
Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860 in
As an adult, Chekhov was to criticise his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of their own father's behaviour towards their mother:
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.[5]
Chekhov later wrote to his publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin, "From my childhood I have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave up thrashing me was tremendous." [6]
Chekhov sang at the Greek monastery in
Reserved and undemonstrative, he nevertheless gained a reputation for satirical comments, for pranks, and for inventing humorous nicknames for his teachers. He enjoyed amateur theatricals and played the part of Gorodnitchy in a performance of
As an adolescent he tried his hand at writing short "anecdotes", farcical or facetious stories, and he is also known to have written a serious long play at this time, Fatherless, which he later destroyed. Stories written when he was twelve show him already in command of the Russian language, with the same simple, direct style as that of his maturity.[9]
In 1875, facing bankruptcy, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov was forced to escape from creditors to
Chekhov stayed behind in
Many of Chekhov's mature stories are about children separated from their families: for example, The Steppe concerns a boy, Yegorushka, sent away from home to live with strangers;[14] Sleepy tells of the thirteen-year-old nursemaid Varka, left in charge of a baby;[15] while in Vanka a nine-year-old orphan who has been sent far away from his village as an apprentice to a cruel shoemaker writes to his grandfather begging to be taken home, "and when I grow up to be a man I will look after you and I will not let anyone hurt you…" [16]
In 1879, Chekhov completed schooling at the
[edit] Early writings
Chekhov calmly, and with a "strange, sourceless maturity",[17] now assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he daily wrote short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as Antosha Chekhonte (Антоша Чехонте) and Man without a Spleen (Человек без селезенки). His output was prodigious during this period, and he rapidly earned a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life.
By the age of twenty-six, Chekhov had published more than four hundred short stories, sketches and vignettes, as well as two books of collected narratives; but much of his early work remains untranslated and, owing to his many pseudonymous or anonymous contributions to obscure newspapers, uncollected. Nicolas Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time and the owner of Oskolki (Fragments), to which Chekhov began submitting some of his choicer works, recognized the writer's talent but limited him to sketches of a page and a half in length. Some believe this discipline stimulated the development of Chekhov's trademark concise style.
Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher and more mocking than in his mature fiction. In 2001
There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty. This can take the form of physical assault, of lacerating accidents. More subtly, there is the unctuous sadism of money and of social rank. Young women are simply sold off to rheumy, ageing bidders. Alcoholics are mocked and tormented when they cannot scrounge the kopek needed for their next drink. The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature. [18]
Chekhov wrote his first full-length play, variously called the "untitled play", That Worthless Fellow Platonov or simply Platonov in 1880 and tried without success to have it staged. That year he also wrote The Little Apples, which may be considered his first fully realised story, in which cruel beatings intrude on an earthly paradise, destroying a state of innocence.[19]The influence of
In 1884 Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession, though he made little money from it and treated the poor for free.[22] He continued writing for weekly periodicals, however, and earned enough money to move the family to progressively better accommodation. In 1885 he began submitting to the Peterburgskaya Gazeta (The Petersburg Gazette) longer works of a more sombre nature, which were rejected by Leykin; but in the same year he was invited to write for one of the most respected papers in Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexei Suvorin.
By 1886, Chekhov was not only a well-known writer but was attracting critical attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitri Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman,[23] "You have real talent—a talent which 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 admitted, "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".[24] Chekhov may have done himself a disservice with these words, since surviving early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending.[21] But Grigorevich's advice undoubtedly inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old writer.
In a prolific year Chekhov wrote over a hundred stories and published his first collection "Motley Tales" (Pestrye rasskazy) with support from Suvorin; and in the following year the short story collection "At Dusk" (V sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted
In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov had found himself coughing blood, and this worsened in 1886, though he would not admit tuberculosis at first.[4]In April, however, he confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."[25]
[edit] Early maturity
In 1887, under strain from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to the Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.[26] On his return, he started writing the novella-length short story The Steppe, eventually published in Severny Vestnik (Northern Herald) in 1888. This masterpiece represented another turning point for Chekhov: it not only won him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper but achieved much of the mature form of his later fiction. Chekhov describes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe has been described as a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics".[27] Chekhov's narrative drifts with the arbitrary thought processes of the characters, an innovation later taken up by James Joyce and
In Autumn 1887, Chekhov was commissioned by a theatre manager called Korsh, who knew him as a humorous writer, to write a play; he responded by writing
In 1888 and 1889, he spent the summers with his family at Luka, in the province of Harkov, where he delighted in the garden, the woods, the pond full of carp, and a river full of fish and crayfish.[4] But the second of those summers was darkened by the death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, an event which which influenced Chekhov's writing of A Dreary Story, [31] finished that September, about a professor who confronts the end of his life and realises it has been without purpose. Biographer Ernest Simmons speculated that Nikolai's death forced Chekhov to face up to the real possibility of his own death from the same disease.
[edit] Sakhalin
In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the far east of Russia and the
The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to Sakhalin are among his best.[32] But his remarks to his sister about Tomsk became notorious.
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.[33]
The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting an ironic statue of Chekhov, mocking his peevish complaints about the weather.
What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and appalled him: "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."[34] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:
On the Amur steamer going to Sahalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. 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.[35]
Chekhov concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer and that the government should pay for humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (Island of Sakhalin). This work was written as social science rather than literature and is worthy and informative rather than brilliant.[36] Chekhov found literary expression for the hell that was Sakhalin in his long short story The Murder, which tells of a domestic murder in an
Yakov Ivanitch had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then he was punished by flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each occasion they were stolen from him. The longing for home had begun from the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window, had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He had no one with whom to talk of home.[37]
In 1892, Chekhov depicted the horrors of internment in one of his grimmest stories, Ward no. 6, in which the liberal, well-meaning doctor, Ragin, ends up confined with his former patients in a psychiatric ward, tyrannised by a brutal gaoler.[38]
[edit] Social conscience
Chekhov always claimed that he was apolitical and once said, "I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist."[39] The philosopher
…a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets…[who] combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action…Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.[41]
After 1890, the middle-class characters in Chekhov's stories increasingly wring their hands about what is to be done with Russia, whether they are revolutionaries like Sasha in Betrothed,[42] or liberal activists from the landowning classes like Natalya Gavrilovna in The Wife. In A Doctor's Visit, a factory owner's daughter suffers a psychosomatic illness as a symptom of the injustice of her position;[43] in A Woman's Kingdom,[44] a wealthy factory owner performs a random and counter-productive act of charity towards a poor family. In An Anonymous Story,[45] a nobleman-turned-revolutionary gradually loses his sense of purpose.
Chekhov believed there would never be a revolution in Russia.[46] But the
[edit] Melikhovo
In 1892, Chekhov himself became a landowner, having bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles south of Moscow, where he lived until 1900 with his family. "It's nice to be a lord," he joked to Shtcheglov;[48] but from the start he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief for victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks of 1892, he went on to build three schools, a fire station, and a clinic, and to donate his medical services to peasants for miles around, despite frequent recurrences of his tuberculosis.[49]
Mihail Chekhov, part of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:
From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melikhovo the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting.[4]
Chekhov’s expenditure on drugs was considerable; and the hardest sacrifice was to make journeys of several hours to visit the sick, reducing the time for writing.[4] But Chekhov’s work as a doctor, by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society, often informed his writing. For example, he witnessed at first hand the unhealthy and cramped living conditions of many peasants. In the short story Peasants, he describes a family's sleeping arrangements: "They began going to bed. Nikolay, as an invalid, was put on the stove with his old father; Sasha lay down on the floor, while Olga went with the other women into the barn." [50] In Rothschild’s Fiddle, a peasant who lives with his wife in a one-room hut makes a coffin for her while she lies dying beside him. [51] Chekhov visited the upper classes too, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."[52]
Some of his stories grew directly from his experiences as a doctor; for example, the idea for A Dead Body[53]came from an autopsy he had conducted in a field near Voskresensk.[54] And his story The Party[55] describes a problematic pregnancy from a female character's point of view. "It really isn't bad to be a doctor and to understand what one is writing about," he told Suvorin. "The ladies say the description of the confinement is true.” [56]
Chekhov often chose doctors as protagonists, usually, like Ragin from Ward no. Six, depicted in a state of impotent despair. In Ionitch, an idealistic young doctor misses his opportunities in life, and in middle-age turns disillusioned and greedy.[57] In The Grasshopper, a specialist in diphtheria deliberately infects himself with the disease in response to his wife’s long-term infidelity.[58]
Doctors appear in both the plays Chekhov finished at Melikhovo. In
Chekhov began writing The Seagull in 1894, in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees from seed, which, according to Mihail, he "looked after…as though they were his children, and, like Colonel Vershinin in his
[edit] Late plays
The first night of The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a disaster, booed by the audience. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who some considered the best actor in Russia, and who, according to Chekhov, had moved people to tears as Nina in rehearsal, was intimidated by the hostile audience and lost her voice.[61] The next day, Chekhov, who had taken refuge backstage for the last two acts, announced to Suvorin that he was finished with writing plays.[62] When supporters assured him that later performances were more successful, Chekhov assumed they were just being kind.
The Seagull impressed the playwright
In 1899, Stanislavski directed
In 1900, entering the last stages of his tuberculosis, Chekhov moved from Melikhovo to the Crimean resort of
[edit] Longer stories
Chekhov wrote most of his best stories in the 1890s. He largely moved away from very short fiction and allowed his stories whatever length they needed, though his attempts to write a full-length novel appear to have come to nothing.[4] His story The Duel,[69] for example, was serialised in eleven issues of Suvorin's Novoye Vremya in 1891 and afterwards published by Suvorin as a book in twenty-one chapters.[70] Several of the longer stories were, in effect, short novels, which attempted a more varied portrait of Russian society at all its social levels. The longest was My Life,[71] the story of a young man who, in revolt against his harsh father, deserts his middle-class lifestyle and prospects to work as a housepainter. Another long story, Three Years,[72]follows the industrial heir Laptev, who at first rejects the factory he inherits and marries a woman who does not return his love but later resigns himself to the factory and becomes emotionally numbed. In 1900 Chekhov wrote the long story In the Ravine,[73] which depicts an entire rural community, with its social, economic, and religious dynamics, centred on the troubled Tsybukin family that runs the village store. "There's everything in it," Chekhov told Olga Knipper.[74] In the Ravine includes perhaps Chekhov's most evil character, [75]the ruthless Aksinya, "who looked at the horses' teeth like a peasant", who in a fit of jealous rage scalds her sister-in-law’s baby to death with a ladle of boiling water. Another of Chekhov's ambitious long stories was An Anonymous Story, in which a revolutionary nobleman spies on a government minister's son by working as his valet.
I helped him to dress, and he let me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence; then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and munching rusks.[76]
[edit] Yalta
In March 1897 Chekhov suffered a sudden haemorrhage from the lungs while on a visit to Moscow and was, not without some difficulty, persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered him to change his manner of life.[77]
After the death of his father in 1898, he bought a plot of land at Autka, in Yalta, and began building a white villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. He also bought a small property at Kutchuka, a wild spot twenty-four miles from Yalta, where, according to Mihail, "he wanted to have hens, cows, a horse and donkeys, and, of course, all of this would have been quite possible and might have been realized if he had not been slowly dying".[4]
Chekhov disliked Yalta as much as ever and intended to move to his home town of Taganrog, further along the coast, as soon as a mains water supply was installed there.[78] Though he planted trees and gardens at Autka, kept animals, and received guests such as Leo Tolstoy and
On 25 May 1901, after a particularly dangerous bout of ill health, Chekhov married
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.[80]
Such was exactly the pattern of Chekhov's subsequent marriage to Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, while she lived in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. The marriage may have been unconventional in other ways. In 1902, Olga became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that the conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart.[81] The legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence between Chekhov and Olga which contains gems of theatre history, including Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays and complaints about Stanislavski's methods, as well as insights into Chekhov's creative process.[81]
Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories at Yalta, The Lady and the Little Dog,[82] which describes what at first seems a brief liaison between a married woman on vacation in Yalta and a married man passing through; neither expects anything lasting from the encounter, but later they find themselves drawn back to each other, risking the security of their family lives. At Yalta Chekhov also wrote The Bishop,[83] "one of the most autobiographical of his stories", [84] a long, elegiac portrait a dying bishop, whose family, even his mother, have come to respect rather than love him. Chekhov’s final story, Betrothed,[85] depicts a decaying household, run by three women from different generations of the Russian gentry: the grandmother who retreats into religion, the mother who "was interested in spiritualism and homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts to which she was subject", and the daughter, Nadya, who comes under the influence of the revolutionary student Sasha, renounces her betrothal, and leaves her home forever to start a new life in the city.
[edit] Death
By May 1904, Chekhov was seriously ill. "Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off," Mihail Chekhov recalled, "but the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the less he seemed to realize it."[4] On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of
Chekhov’s death is one of "the great set pieces of literary history", [87] retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by
Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): "Ich sterbe". The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. He drained it, 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.[88]
Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which offended Gorky.[89] Some of the mourners followed the wrong funeral procession, that of a General Keller, to the tune of a military band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichie Cemetery.[90]
"You ask me what is life?" Chekhov once said. "That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that's all there is to it."[91]
[edit] Influence
Tolstoy likened Chekhov's technique to that of the French Impressionists, who daubed canvases with paint apparently without reason, but achieved an overall effect of vivid, unchallengeable artistry.
As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov's letters have been rated second only to
Dialogue in his plays is not smooth or continuous: characters interrupt each other, several different conversations take place at the same time, and lengthy pauses occur when no one speaks at all. A recurring theme is the pointlessness of radical, human or mechanical change, versus the powerful inertia of slow organic cycles.
Some writers believe that Chekhov’s short stories represent an even greater achievement than his plays.[92]
Although contemporary Russian literary critics celebrated Chekhov, international fame came only after World War I with
Chekhov's plays were immensely popular in the United Kingdom in the 1920s and have become classics of the British stage. In the United States his fame came somewhat later, through the influence of
The continuously growing list of films and theatre productions based on Chekhov's stories and plays includes Emil Loteanu's My Tender and Affectionate Beast (1978, see Мой ласковый и нежный зверь at the
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Works by Anton Chekhov at
- Chekhov Lexicon. An ABC of Chekhov by the novelist William Boyd. Retrieved 14 November 2006.
- Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian
- Anton Chekhov at the
- A collection of 201 stories translated into English
| Plays by Anton Chekhov | |
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That Worthless Fellow Platonov | On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco | |
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