About Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is known first and foremost as a playwright. In terms of frequency of productions worldwide, his plays come second only to those of William Shakespeare, and there are only four of them. His legacy as an author of short fiction, however, can hardly be overlooked; many consider Chekhov to be the father of the modern short story.
He was born on January 17th in 1860, in Tagnrok, Ukraine. His father, a grocer and former serf, had been the first in the family to buy his way to freedom. When Chekhov was 16 years old, his family moved to Moscow for financial reasons. Anton Pavlovich stayed behind, supporting himself by giving private lessons, and continued school. He followed three years later to enroll in Moscow University Medical School.
His work as a doctor factors heavily in his writing, manifesting itself both in characters who practice medicine and, some would argue, in the emotionally vivid depictions of family life that only a doctor on house calls would have been able to witness. He is quoted as having said: “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.”
Metaphors aside, he eventually did marry Olga Knipper, an actress who had played several major parts in productions of his plays (Arkadina in The Seagull, Masha in Three Sisters, and Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard). The marriage took place in 1901 and was cut short three years later by Chekhov’s death. He is known to have taken a number of lovers in the years before his marriage, one of whom, it is rumored, was the wife of a schoolteacher.
Chekhov’s literary career was launched when he began to publish satirical vignettes in a small Moscow newspaper, earning him considerable fame by the year 1866. By 1888 he was awarded the Pushkin prize, having earned the praise of contemporary authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov. On July 15th, 1904, Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis, an event to be memorialized later in Raymond Carver’s short story “Errand.” His legacy as a short story writer is one both of proliferation (Chekhov authored hundreds of stories in his lifetime, many of them considered among the best the literary cannon has to offer) and influence over authors such as Carver, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, J.D. Salinger and many others.
-Russell Jacobs
