A short life of the author
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog, a port town on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf. He became the greatest short-story writer in any language and the most influential playwright of the modern era — a writer who transformed both forms by eliminating the machinery of conventional storytelling (plot, climax, resolution) and replacing it with something closer to the shape of life itself: inconclusive, contradictory, funny and sad at the same time.
Life and Career
Chekhov’s father, Pavel, was a failed grocer and petty tyrant who bankrupted the family and fled Taganrog for Moscow. Young Anton was left behind to finish school, supporting himself by tutoring while writing humorous sketches for Moscow magazines under pseudonyms. He studied medicine at Moscow University, graduating in 1884, and practiced medicine intermittently throughout his literary career — “Medicine is my lawful wife,” he said, “and literature is my mistress.”
His early stories — hundreds of them, written for kopeks — are comic sketches of Russian provincial life. The mature Chekhov emerged in the mid-1880s with stories like “The Steppe” (1888), “A Dreary Story” (1889), and “Ward No. 6” (1892) — works of psychological depth, formal perfection, and a compassion that refuses to judge.
In 1890, at the height of his literary fame, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific coast of Siberia, to conduct a census of prisoners and investigate conditions. The journey — overland across Siberia by horse and cart — destroyed his already fragile health (he had been coughing blood since 1884, though he refused to acknowledge tuberculosis), but produced The Island of Sakhalin (1895) and deepened the moral seriousness of his work.
The Seagull premiered disastrously at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1896 — Chekhov fled the theatre during the performance — but its revival by Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 was a triumph that defined modern theatrical production. Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) followed, each performed by the Moscow Art Theatre, each a masterpiece.
In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, the Moscow Art Theatre actress who played his heroines. He died of tuberculosis on 2 July 1904 in Badenweiler, Germany, at the age of forty-four. According to legend, his last words were “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.”
Major Works and Themes
Chekhov’s stories are distinguished by their refusal of conventional plot. “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) — generally considered the greatest short story ever written — tells of an adulterous affair that begins as a seaside flirtation and becomes, to the surprise of both characters, the central relationship of their lives. It ends not with resolution but with the recognition that “the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”
The plays revolutionised theatre. Nothing “happens” in a Chekhov play in the conventional sense — no one is murdered, no secret is revealed, no marriage is arranged. Instead, characters talk past each other, fail to connect, regret the past, fear the future, and occasionally fire a gun that was mentioned in the first act. The emotional effect is devastating precisely because it arises from the accumulation of ordinary moments rather than from theatrical contrivance.
Chekhov’s Gun and the Art of Omission
“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story,” Chekhov advised. “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.” This principle — “Chekhov’s gun” — has become the most famous dictum in dramatic writing. But it is often misunderstood as a rule about plot mechanics. What Chekhov actually practised was something subtler: an art of omission in which the unsaid matters more than the said, and the reader or audience must do the essential work of interpretation.
His stories characteristically end at the moment where a conventional story would begin its final act. “The Kiss” (1887) ends with a man realizing the meaninglessness of his one moment of accidental romance. “Gooseberries” (1898) ends with a man’s failed attempt to disturb his brother’s complacency. “In the Ravine” (1900) ends with dispossession absorbed into the rhythms of daily life. The effect is not anti-climax but something closer to the way experience actually registers — not in dramatic turning points but in slow accumulations of understanding that arrive too late to change anything.
The Translation Problem
Chekhov’s reputation in English has been shaped by translation more than almost any other major author. Constance Garnett’s early translations (1916–1922) introduced him to the English-speaking world but smoothed his prose into Victorian gentility. The husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky produced acclaimed translations in the 2000s that aimed to restore the roughness and oddity of Chekhov’s Russian. The plays have been translated, adapted, and reimagined endlessly — notable versions by Michael Frayn, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, and Annie Baker have kept the four major plays in continuous production worldwide.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Chekhov’s influence is immeasurable. He is the father of the modern short story — every plotless story, every story that ends in ambiguity, every story that privileges mood over event descends from Chekhov. Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Tobias Wolff — the entire tradition of realist short fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries traces back to him. His plays created the template for all modern naturalistic drama, from Stanislavsky’s Method to Samuel Beckett’s theatre of inaction.
He was also a practising physician who ran a free clinic, built schools, and established a library in Taganrog — a man of extraordinary moral decency in an indecent age. Tolstoy said of him: “Chekhov is an incomparable artist… He is simply Chekhov.”
Collecting Chekhov
Russian first editions published by A.F. Marks (St. Petersburg) and Suvorin (St. Petersburg) are the primary targets. Chekhov’s early stories appeared in numerous periodicals, and the bibliographic situation is complex.
The Island of Sakhalin (1895, in Russkaya Mysl magazine) and the Marks collected edition of stories (1899–1901, 10 volumes) are the major bibliographic items. The Marks edition was a landmark — Chekhov sold the rights for 75,000 rubles — and complete first-edition sets bring $2,000–$8,000.
First editions of the four major plays — Chayka (The Seagull, 1896), Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya, 1897), Tri Sestry (Three Sisters, 1901), Vishnyovy Sad (The Cherry Orchard, 1904) — are rare and desirable.
English translations by Constance Garnett (Chatto & Windus, 1916–22) are the historic English-language editions and are moderately collected. The thirteen-volume Ecco Press/Penguin translations are the modern standard. Chekhov manuscripts and letters are held primarily by the Russian State Library and the Chekhov Museum in Taganrog.