Anton Pavlovich Chekhov[a] (/ˈtʃɛkɒf/;[3] Russian:Антон Павлович Чехов[b],IPA:[ɐnˈtonˈpavləvʲɪtɕˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860[c] – 15 July 1904[d]) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of all times. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.[e][5][6] Along withHenrik Ibsen andAugust Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of earlymodernism in the theatre.[7] Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress."[8][9]
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception ofThe Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 byKonstantin Stanislavski'sMoscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov'sUncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays,Three Sisters andThe Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble[f] as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."[g][12] The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience.[13]
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.[14][h][16] 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.[17]
Birth house of Anton Chekhov inTaganrog, Chekhova street, RussiaYoung Chekhov in 1882The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.Portrait of young Chekhov in country clothesYoung Chekhov (left) with brother Nikolai in 1882
Anton Chekhov was born into a Russian family on the feast day of St.Anthony the Great (17 JanuaryOld Style) 29 January 1860 inTaganrog, a port on theSea of Azov – on Politseyskaya (Police) street, later renamed Chekhova street – in southernRussia. He was the third of six surviving children; he had two older brothers,Alexander andNikolai, and three younger siblings, Ivan,Maria, andMikhail. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a formerserf and his wife,[18] was from the villageOlkhovatka (Voronezh Governorate) and ran a grocery store. He was a director of the parish choir, a devoutOrthodox 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.[19] As Chekhov's paternal grandmother was Ukrainian, the Ukrainian language was likely present in his household.[20][21] 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.[22][23][24] "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov recalled, "but our soul from our mother."[25]
In adulthood, Chekhov criticised his brotherAlexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel's tyranny: "Let me ask you to recall that it wasdespotism 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."[26][i]
Chekhov attended theGreek School in Taganrog and the TaganrogGymnasium (since renamed theChekhov Gymnasium), where he was held back for a year at fifteen for failing an examination in Ancient Greek.[28] He sang at theGreek 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:
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.[29]
In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov.[30] To avoiddebtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons,Alexander andNikolai, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience.[31]
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 inThe Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.[32] Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and sellinggoldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs. He sent everyruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.[33]
During this time, he read widely and analytically, including the works ofCervantes,Turgenev,Goncharov, andSchopenhauer,[34][35] and wrote a full-length comic drama,Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication."[36] Chekhov also experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.[33] In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school atI.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University.[37]
Chekhov then assumed responsibility for the whole family.[38] 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 asatirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing forOskolki (Fragments), owned byNikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time.[39] Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.[40][41]
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.[42]
In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit histuberculosis to his family or his friends.[25] He confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."[43] 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 inSt. Petersburg,Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnateAlexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three times the space.[44] Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.[45][46]
Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-oldDmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story "The Huntsman" that[47] "You havereal 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."[48] The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising.[49] 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 collectionAt Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the covetedPushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."[50]
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 thesteppe.[51] 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 inSeverny Vestnik (The Northern Herald).[52] In a narrative that drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes achaise 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.[53]
In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result beingIvanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November.[54] 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.[55]
Although Chekhov did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such asThe Seagull (written in 1895),Uncle Vanya (written in 1897),The Three Sisters (written in 1900), andThe 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 consideredIvanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career.[25] From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's that has become known asChekhov's gun, a dramatic principle that requires that every element in a narrative be necessary and irreplaceable, and that everything else be removed.[56][57][58]
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.
The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 influencedA Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life that he realises has been without purpose.[60][61] 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.[25]
In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the Russian Far East and thekatorga, or penal colony, onSakhalin 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.[62] His remarks to his sister aboutTomsk were to become notorious.[63][64]
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.[65]
Chekhov witnessed much on Sakhalin that shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, andforced prostitution of women. He wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."[66][67] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:
On theAmur 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.[68]
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 asOstrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science, not literature.[69][70] Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of Sakhalin" in his long short story "The Murder",[71] 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 theGilyak people, is the subject of a sustained meditation and analysis inHaruki Murakami's novel1Q84.[72] It is also the subject of a poem by the Nobel Prize winnerSeamus Heaney, "Chekhov on Sakhalin" (collected in the volumeStation Island).[73]Rebecca Gould has compared Chekhov's book on Sakhalin toKatherine Mansfield'sUrewera Notebook (1907).[74] 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.
Mikhail Chekhov, a member 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.[75]
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.[76] 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."[77] In 1893/1894 he worked as aZemstvo doctor inZvenigorod, which has numerous sanatoriums and rest homes. A local hospital is named after him.
In 1894, Chekhov began writing his playThe 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 hisThree Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."[25]
The first night ofThe Seagull, at theAlexandrinsky 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.[78] But the play so impressed the theatre directorVladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced his colleagueKonstantin Stanislavski to direct a new production for the innovativeMoscow Art Theatre in 1898.[79] Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting.[80] The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year stagedUncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.[81] In the last decades of his life he became anatheist.[82][83][84]
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.[85]
After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts ofYalta and built avilla (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 asLeo Tolstoy andMaxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hotSiberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was installed there.[86][87] 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 overThree Sisters andThe Cherry Orchard.[88]
On 25 May 1901, Chekhov marriedOlga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of weddings. She was a former protégée and sometime lover ofVladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals forThe Seagull.[89][90][91] Up to that point, Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor",[92] had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment.[93] He had once written to Suvorin:
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.[94]
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; andDonald 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.[95][96] The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints aboutStanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.[97][page needed]
In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories,[98] "The Lady with the Dog"[99] (also translated from the Russian as "Lady with Lapdog"),[100][101] which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying inYalta. 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.[102]
In May 1903, Chekhov visited Moscow; the prominent lawyerVasily Maklakov visited him almost every day. Maklakov signed Chekhov's will. By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill withtuberculosis. 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".[25] On 3 June, he set off with Olga for the German spa town ofBadenweiler in theBlack 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.[103] Chekhov died on 15 July 1904 at the age of 44 after a long fight with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his brother.[104]
Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history"[105]—retold, embroidered, and fictionalized many times since, notably in the 1987 short story "Errand" byRaymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband's last moments:
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 ofcamphor, 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 ...[106]
Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway-car meant foroysters, a detail that offendedGorky.[107] Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral procession of aGeneral Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military band.[108] Chekhov was buried next to his father at theNovodevichy Cemetery.[109][110]
Anton Chekhov museum inAlexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, Russia. It is the house where he stayed in Sakhalin during 1890.
A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writerIvan 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."[111]Chekhov's posthumous reputation greatly exceeded his expectations. The ovations for the playThe 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 toTolstoy, 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, andThe 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, andPeasant Wives.[112]
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 theoristPeter Kropotkin responded, "read only Chekhov's novels!"[113]Raymond Tallis further recounts thatVladimir Lenin believed his reading of the short storyWard No. 6 "made him a revolutionary".[114] Upon finishing the story, Lenin is said to have remarked: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!"[115]
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" andR. E. C. Long said "Chekhov's characters were repugnant, and that Chekhov revelled in stripping the last rags of dignity from the human soul".[116] After his death, Chekhov was reappraised.Constance Garnett's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such asJames Joyce,Virginia Woolf, andKatherine Mansfield, whose story "The Child Who Was Tired" is similar to Chekhov's "Sleepy".[117] The Russian criticD. 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".[118] In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after therevolution, 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.[119][120]
Despite Chekhov's reputation as a playwright,William Boyd asserts that his short stories represent the greater achievement.[121]Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story "Errand" about Chekhov's death, believed that Chekhov was the greatest of all short story writers:
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.[122]
According to literary criticDaniel S. Burt, Chekhov was one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.[123]
One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays wasGeorge Bernard Shaw, who subtitled hisHeartbreak 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".[124]
Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer."[125] 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 ishis works which I would take on a trip to another planet."[126] 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".[127]
For the writerWilliam Boyd, Chekhov's historical accomplishment was to abandon whatWilliam Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".[128]
Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story inThe Common Reader (1925):
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 mostVictorian 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.[129]
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."[130]
In the United States, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence ofStanislavski's system of acting, with its notion ofsubtext: "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."[131][132] TheGroup Theatre, in particular, developed the subtextual approach to drama, influencing generations ofAmerican playwrights, screenwriters, and actors, includingClifford Odets,Elia Kazan and, in particular,Lee Strasberg. In turn, Strasberg'sActors Studio and the"Method" acting approach influenced many actors, includingMarlon Brando andRobert De Niro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism.[133] In 1981, the playwrightTennessee Williams adaptedThe Seagull asThe 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 magazineB.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.[134]
Chekhov has also influenced the work of Japanese playwrights includingShimizu Kunio,Yōji Sakate, andAi Nagai. Critics have noted similarities in how Chekhov and Shimizu use a mixture of light humour as well as an intense depictions of longing.[135] Sakate adapted several of Chekhov's plays and transformed them in the general style ofnō.[136] Nagai also adapted Chekhov's plays, includingThree Sisters, and transformed his dramatic style into Nagai's style of satirical realism while emphasising the social issues depicted in the play.[136]
Several of Chekhov's short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1986 Indian anthology television seriesKatha Sagar. Another Indian television series titledChekhov Ki Duniya aired onDD National in the 1990s, adapting different works of Chekhov.[137]
^Another insight into Chekhov's childhood came in a letter 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."[27]
^Styan 1981, p. 84; "A richer submerged life in the text is characteristic of a more profound drama of realism, one which depends less on the externals of presentation."
^"Tchehov's breach with the classical tradition is the most significant event in modern literature,"John Middleton Murry, inAthenaeum, 8 April 1922, cited in Bartlett's introduction toAbout Love.
^abcdefFrom the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefacesConstance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
^Malcolm 2004, p. 102; Letter to brother Alexander, 2 January 1889
^"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 ofThe Undiscovered Chekhov inThe Observer, 13 May 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
^Rayfield 1997, pp. 448–450: They only ever fell out once, when Chekhov objected to theanti-Semitic attacks inNew Times againstDreyfus andZola in 1898.
^In many ways, the right-wing Suvorin, whomLenin later called "The running dog of theTzar" (Payne, XXXV), was Chekhov's opposite; "Chekhov had to function like Suvorin's kidney, extracting the businessman's poisons."Wood 2000, p. 79
^"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.
^Letter to Grigorovich, 12 January 1888. Quoted byMalcolm 2004, p. 137.
^"'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."Malcolm 2004, p. 147.
^From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefacesConstance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
^From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
^From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
^Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1 June 2004).Note-Book of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Koteliansky, S. S. (Samuel Solomonovitch); Woolf, Leonard.
^Chekhov and the Art Theatre, in Stanislavski's words, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage."Allen 2002, p. 11
^Rayfield 1997, pp. 390–391: Rayfield draws from his critical studyChekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the "Wood Demon" (1995), which anatomised the evolution of theWood Demon intoUncle Vanya—"one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements."
^Tabachnikova, Olga (2010).Anton Chekhov Through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers: Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. Anthem Press. p. 26.ISBN978-1-84331-841-5.For Rozanov, Chekhov represents a concluding stage of classical Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, caused by the fading of the thousand-year-old Christian tradition that had sustained much of this literature. On the one hand, Rozanov regards Chekhov's positivism and atheism as his shortcomings, naming them among the reasons for Chekhov's popularity in society.
^Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1997). Karlinsky, Simon; Heim, Michael Henry (eds.).Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Northwestern University Press. p. 13.ISBN978-0-8101-1460-9.While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a non-believer in the last decades of his life.
^Richard Pevear (2009).Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Random House Digital, Inc. pp. xxii.ISBN978-0-307-56828-1.According to Leonid Grossman, 'In his revelation of those evangelical elements, the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.'
^"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.
^Rayfield 1997, pp. 556–557Rayfield also tentatively suggests, drawing on obstetric clues, that Olga suffered anectopic pregnancy rather than a miscarriage.
^There was certainly tension between the couple after the miscarriage, thoughSimmons 1970, p. 569, andBenedetti 1997, p. 241, put this down to Chekhov's mother and sister blaming the miscarriage on Olga's late-night socialising with her actor friends.
^Rosamund, Bartlett (2 February 2010). "The House That Chekhov Built".London Evening Standard. p. 31.
^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.
^"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.
^"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 inReminiscences of Anton Chekhov.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
^Chekhov's Funeral. M. Marcus.The Antioch Review, 1995
^Edmund Wilson (1940)."To The Finland Station".archive.org. Doubleday.When Vladimir finished reading this story, he was seized with such a horror that he could not bear to stay in his room. He went out to find someone to talk to, but it was late: they had all gone to bed. 'I absolutely had the feeling,' he told his sister next day,'that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!'
^Meister, Charles W. (1953). "Chekhov's Reception in England and America".American Slavic and East European Review.12 (1):109–121.doi:10.2307/3004259.JSTOR3004259.
^William H. New (1999).Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 15–17.ISBN978-0-7735-1791-2.
^"They won't allow a play which is seen to lament the lost estates of the gentry." Letter ofVladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, quoted by Anatoly Smeliansky in "Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre", fromThe Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, 31–32.
^"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, byWilliam Boyd,The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
^"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 novelistWilliam Gerhardie's analysis inAnton Chekhov: A Critical Study, 1923."A Chekhov Lexicon" by William Boyd,The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
^Woolf, Virginia,The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002,ISBN0-15-602778-X, 172.
^Michael Goldman,The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama, p72.
^Reynolds, Elizabeth (ed),Stanislavski's Legacy, Theatre Arts Books, 1987,ISBN978-0-87830-127-0, 81, 83.
^"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, fromText and Subtext in Shavian Drama, in1922: Shaw and the last Hundred Years, ed. Bernard. F. Dukore, Penn State Press, 1994,ISBN978-0-271-01324-4, 200.
^Tovstonogov, Georgii (1968). "Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Gorky Theatre".The Drama Review.13 (2). JSTOR:146–155.doi:10.2307/1144419.ISSN0012-5962.JSTOR1144419.Lee Strasberg became in my opinion a victim of the traditional idea of Chekhovian theatre ... [he left] no room for Chekhov's imagery.
^Sekirin, Peter (2011).Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. Foreword by Alan Twigg. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishers. p. 1.ISBN978-0-7864-5871-4.
^Rimer, J. (2001).Japanese Theatre and the International Stage. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. pp. 299–311.ISBN978-90-04-12011-2.
^abClayton, J. Douglas (2013).Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations. Routledge. pp. 269–270.ISBN978-0-415-50969-5.
Chekhov, Anton,Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch, translated byConstance Garnett, Macmillan, 1920.Full text at Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Chekhov, Anton,The Other Chekhov, edited by Okla Elliott andKyle Minor, with story introductions by Pinckney Benedict, Fred Chappell, Christopher Coake, Paul Crenshaw, Dorothy Gambrell, Steven Gillis,Michelle Herman, Jeff Parker, Benjamin Percy, and David R. Slavitt. New American Press, 2008 edition,ISBN978-0-9729679-8-3
Chekhov, Anton,Seven Short Novels, translated by Barbara Makanowitzky, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003 edition,ISBN978-0-393-00552-3
Clyman, T. W. (Ed.). A Chekhov companion. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, (1985).ISBN9780313234231
Finke, Michael C.,Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapoetic Journey, an essay inAnton Chekhov Rediscovered, ed Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, Michigan Russian Language Journal, 1988,OCLC17003357
Finke, Michael C.,Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Cornell UP, 2005,ISBN978-0-8014-4315-2
Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain (eds),The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, 2000,ISBN978-0-521-58917-8
Jackson, Robert Louis,Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden – 'Because of Little Apples', inDialogues with Dostoevsky, Stanford University Press, 1993,ISBN978-0-8047-2120-2
Pitcher, Harvey,Chekhov's Leading Lady: Portrait of the Actress Olga Knipper, J Murray, 1979,ISBN978-0-7195-3681-6
Power, Arthur; Joyce, James (1974).Conversations with James Joyce. London: Millington.ISBN978-0-86000-006-8. Republished in 2012 as an ebook:OCLC817895885
Prose, Francine,Learning from Chekhov, inWriters on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini, UPNE, 1991,ISBN978-0-87451-560-2
Sekirin, Peter. "Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries," MacFarland Publishers, 2011,ISBN978-0-7864-5871-4
Wood, James (2000) [1999]. "What Chekhov Meant by Life".The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief. New York, NY: Modern Library.ISBN9780804151900.OCLC863217943.
Zeiger, Arthur,The Plays of Anton Chekhov, Claxton House, Inc., New York, NY, 1945.
Tufarulo, G, M.,La Luna è morta e lo specchio infranto. Miti letterari del Novecento, vol.1 – G. Laterza, Bari, 2009–ISBN978-88-8231-491-0.
201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett presented in chronological order of Russian publication with annotations.
Антон Павлович Чехов. Указатель Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian, listed in chronological order, and also alphabetically by title. Retrieved June 2013.(in Russian)
Антон Павлович Чехов Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian. Retrieved 16 February 2007.(in Russian)
