Anton Chekhov
Based on Wikipedia: Anton Chekhov
The Doctor Who Kept a Mistress
"Medicine is my lawful wife," Anton Chekhov once said, "and literature is my mistress."
It's a revealing confession from a man who would become one of the most influential writers in history. Chekhov didn't abandon his wife for his mistress—he kept both, practicing medicine among Russian peasants while revolutionizing how stories are told and plays are performed. The tension between these two callings shaped everything he wrote.
Born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia, Chekhov came from circumstances that would have crushed most literary ambitions. His grandfather had been a serf—essentially an enslaved agricultural worker bound to the land and its owner. His father Pavel ran a grocery store, directed the parish choir, and beat his children with a regularity that Chekhov would later describe with barely contained fury.
A Childhood of Suffering
Chekhov didn't mince words about his early years. He used the word "suffering" to describe his childhood, and his letters reveal why.
Pavel Chekhov forced his sons to sing in the church choir, standing them in the middle of the congregation where everyone could admire the family's piety. The congregation would look on with emotion, envying the parents of such talented children. Meanwhile, the boys felt like convicts.
Years later, when Chekhov's older brother Alexander began mistreating his own wife and children, Anton reminded him sharply of what they had endured: "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."
This wasn't the casual cruelty that many children experienced in nineteenth-century Russia. It was systematic and terrifying. And it left its mark on Chekhov's writing—his fiction would become famous for its portraits of hypocrisy, of the gap between how people present themselves and who they actually are.
His mother, Yevgeniya, offered a different model. She had traveled across Russia with her cloth-merchant father and became an excellent storyteller, entertaining her children with tales from her journeys. Chekhov credited his parents with different gifts: "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother."
Abandoned at Sixteen
In 1876, everything fell apart.
Pavel Chekhov went bankrupt. He had overextended himself building a new house and been cheated by a contractor. Facing debtor's prison—a real and terrifying prospect in Tsarist Russia—he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons were attending university. The family lived in grinding poverty there, and Chekhov's mother was "physically and emotionally broken by the experience."
Anton, just sixteen years old, was left behind. Someone had to sell the family's possessions and finish school.
He ended up boarding with a man named Selivanov, who had essentially bought the family home in exchange for bailing them out of debt. This arrangement would later resurface in one of Chekhov's greatest plays: in The Cherry Orchard, the character Lopakhin acquires an estate from a family that cannot pay its debts. Chekhov knew that situation from the inside.
For three years, the teenager supported himself through private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and writing short humorous sketches for newspapers. He sent every ruble he could spare to his struggling family in Moscow, along with letters designed to make them laugh.
The Making of a Writer
During those lonely years in Taganrog, Chekhov discovered the theater. He attended performances constantly—vaudevilles, Italian operas, popular comedies—and became enchanted. He read voraciously and analytically: Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, the pessimistic German philosopher Schopenhauer. He even wrote a full-length comic drama called Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication."
In 1879, Chekhov finally completed his schooling and moved to Moscow to join his family. He had gained admission to medical school, and now, at nineteen, he assumed responsibility for the entire household.
To support them and pay his tuition, he wrote daily. Short humorous sketches. Vignettes of contemporary Russian life. Many appeared under pseudonyms like "Antosha Chekhonte" and the wonderfully bizarre "Man Without Spleen." His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life.
By 1882, he was writing for one of the leading publishers of the time. The work was hack writing, in a sense—fast, commercial, designed to fill newspaper pages. But Chekhov was learning his craft at an extraordinary pace, producing hundreds of stories in a few years.
The Doctor in the House
In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician. He would always consider medicine his principal profession, even though he never made much money from it.
He treated poor patients free of charge. Later, when he moved to a country estate called Melikhovo, sick people began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or in carts. Sometimes from early morning, peasant women and children stood outside his door waiting. He made house calls that took hours, journeys across the countryside to reach patients in distant villages.
The time this consumed cut into his writing. But it also enriched it immeasurably. As a doctor, Chekhov entered the homes of every class of Russian society. He saw how peasants actually lived—the cramped, unhealthy conditions that would appear in his short story "Peasants." He visited aristocrats too, and noted in his journal: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."
This democratic vision—the recognition that human frailty and mortality cut across all social distinctions—would become central to his work.
A Secret He Kept
In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov began coughing blood.
He was a doctor. He knew what this meant. Tuberculosis—the disease that would eventually kill him—was making itself known. But he refused to acknowledge it, even to himself. "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues," he confessed to his publisher. He would not admit his illness to his family or friends for years.
This denial is striking in a writer so devoted to clear-eyed observation of human nature. But perhaps it was necessary. Chekhov had a family to support, a career to build, and an extraordinary amount of work still to do. Facing his mortality too directly might have paralyzed him.
The Thunderbolt
In early 1886, Chekhov received a letter that changed his life.
He had been invited to write for one of the most popular papers in Saint Petersburg, which paid double his previous rate and gave him three times the space. The paper's owner, the millionaire Alexey Suvorin, would become perhaps Chekhov's closest friend.
But the transformative letter came from someone else: Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated sixty-four-year-old Russian writer who had read Chekhov's short story "The Huntsman" and recognized something remarkable. "You have real talent," Grigorovich wrote, "a talent that places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He advised the young author to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality.
Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt." He confessed that he had been writing "the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself."
This was probably too harsh a self-assessment. Surviving manuscripts show that Chekhov often wrote with extreme care, revising constantly even during his hack-work years. But Grigorovich's letter awakened a new artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. Two years later, his short story collection At Dusk won the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."
The Steppe
In 1887, exhausted from overwork and illness, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine. The vast grasslands—the steppe—reawakened something in him.
On his return, he wrote "The Steppe," a novella-length story he described as "something rather odd and much too original." It follows a young boy being sent away from home on a journey across the steppe, accompanied by a priest and a merchant. The narrative drifts with the thought processes of its characters in a way that was genuinely new.
Critics have called "The Steppe" a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics." It represented a major advance, showing the qualities of his mature fiction for the first time. More importantly, it won him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper. Chekhov was no longer a popular entertainer; he was becoming an artist.
Chekhov's Gun
That same year, a theater manager commissioned Chekhov to write a play. He produced Ivanov in two weeks.
He found the production chaotic and described the experience as "sickening." But the play was a hit, praised as a work of originality. Chekhov was bemused by the response, but his brother Mikhail recognized it as a turning point in Anton's intellectual development.
From this period comes one of the most famous principles in storytelling, known as Chekhov's gun. In a letter, Chekhov explained it this way:
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.
This principle—that every element in a narrative must be necessary, that nothing should be included merely for decoration—revolutionized how writers think about economy and purpose in storytelling. It applies far beyond theater: novelists, screenwriters, and short story writers still invoke Chekhov's gun when discussing craft.
The Theater of Mood
Chekhov would go on to write four plays that became classics: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Together with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, Chekhov is considered one of the three seminal figures in the birth of modern theater.
What made his plays revolutionary was their rejection of conventional dramatic action. Instead of obvious conflicts and clear resolutions, Chekhov created what critics call a "theater of mood" with a "submerged life in the text." His characters don't deliver monologues explaining their feelings. Their real emotions lie beneath the surface of what they say, in pauses and silences and apparently trivial conversation.
This made enormous demands on actors. They couldn't rely on the text to do their work for them. They had to inhabit their characters fully, finding the truth beneath the words.
The Seagull premiered in 1896 and was so poorly received that Chekhov swore off theater entirely. But two years later, the Moscow Art Theatre, led by the legendary director Konstantin Stanislavski, revived the play to acclaim. Stanislavski's approach to acting—which emphasized psychological realism, emotional truth, and the actor's inner life—was perfectly suited to Chekhov's work. The partnership produced some of the most influential productions in theater history.
Stanislavski's techniques, developed partly through his work on Chekhov's plays, became the foundation of modern acting training. When people talk about "method acting" or actors who seem to genuinely become their characters, they're describing an approach that traces back to Stanislavski working with Chekhov's texts.
Into the Darkness
In 1889, Chekhov's brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis—the same disease slowly killing Anton himself.
The death plunged Chekhov into depression. That September, he finished a story called "A Dreary Story," about a man confronting the end of a life he realizes has been without purpose. Mikhail Chekhov recorded his brother's restlessness and despair in the months after Nikolai's death.
Mikhail was studying law at the time and researching prisons. Anton became obsessed with the issue of prison reform. He needed, it seems, to find meaning—to do something that mattered beyond the daily routines of doctoring and writing.
In 1890, he decided to travel to the end of the earth.
Journey to Sakhalin
Sakhalin Island lies in the Russian Far East, north of Japan, a place so remote that reaching it from Moscow required months of travel by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer. The Russian government had established a katorga there—a penal colony where convicts were sent to serve out their sentences in brutal conditions.
Chekhov spent three months on Sakhalin, conducting a census. He interviewed thousands of convicts and settlers. What he witnessed shocked and angered him: floggings, embezzlement of supplies, forced prostitution of women. "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation," he wrote.
He was particularly moved by the children living in the colony with their parents. In one letter, he described a scene on the steamer traveling to Sakhalin:
On the Amur 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.
The letters Chekhov wrote during this journey are considered among his finest writing. They include sharp observations about the towns he passed through. Of Tomsk, in Siberia, he remarked to his sister: "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."
Chekhov published his findings as The Island of Sakhalin, a work of social science documenting the conditions in the penal colony. He concluded that charity was not the answer—that the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of prisoners. The book is not literature, but it represented Chekhov's attempt to use his powers of observation for direct social good.
The journey left its mark on his fiction too. His long story "The Murder" ends on Sakhalin, where a killer named Yakov loads coal in the darkness while longing for home. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami devoted extended passages of his novel 1Q84 to analyzing Chekhov's writing about Sakhalin. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a poem called "Chekhov on Sakhalin."
The Artist's Role
As Chekhov's fiction matured, he developed strong views about what writers should and shouldn't do.
He made formal innovations in the short story that influenced every writer who came after him. His plots often lack conventional resolutions. His characters don't always learn lessons or experience dramatic transformations. Life, Chekhov seemed to suggest, rarely offers the tidy conclusions that fiction traditionally provides.
This approach frustrated some readers, who wanted clearer guidance about what to think. Chekhov refused to provide it. The role of an artist, he insisted, was to ask questions, not to answer them.
This wasn't evasion or laziness. It was a principled position about the relationship between art and life. Chekhov believed that presenting human situations honestly, with all their complexity and ambiguity, was more valuable than delivering moral lessons. Readers could draw their own conclusions. The writer's job was to illuminate, not to instruct.
The Orchard
In 1892, Chekhov bought the country estate at Melikhovo where peasants would flock to see the doctor. He refurbished the house, took up agriculture and horticulture, tended the orchard and pond, and planted many trees.
Two years later, he began writing The Seagull in a lodge he had built in the orchard—the play that would fail spectacularly in 1896 and triumph two years later at the Moscow Art Theatre.
His final play, The Cherry Orchard, premiered in 1904, the year of his death. It tells the story of an aristocratic family that loses its estate—including a beautiful cherry orchard—because they cannot adapt to changing times. The orchard is sold to a merchant, the son of a former serf, who plans to cut down the trees and build summer cottages.
There's something autobiographical in this. Chekhov knew what it meant to lose a family home to someone who had bailed out your debts. He knew the changing Russian society, where the old aristocracy was giving way to a new commercial class. And he had spent years tending his own orchard, planting trees that might outlive him.
The Cherry Orchard is often described as tragicomic. Chekhov insisted it was a comedy, but Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy. The disagreement points to something essential about Chekhov's work: it resists easy categorization. His plays are sad and funny simultaneously. They capture life's mixture of the absurd and the devastating.
The End
Anton Chekhov died on July 15, 1904, at the age of forty-four. The tuberculosis he had been concealing for two decades finally claimed him.
He had accomplished an extraordinary amount in his short life. Four plays that transformed theater. Hundreds of short stories that changed how fiction works. A journey to one of the most remote places on earth to document injustice. Thousands of patients treated, many of them for free.
Perhaps most remarkably, he had done all this while supporting his family from his teenage years onward, overcoming a childhood of abuse and poverty, and concealing a fatal illness for most of his adult life.
Today, Chekhov is considered one of the greatest writers who ever lived. His influence extends far beyond Russian literature. Every playwright who creates subtext instead of explicit dialogue is following Chekhov. Every short story writer who trusts readers to find meaning without authorial instruction is working in his tradition. Every actor trained in psychological realism owes something to the demands his plays placed on performers.
Medicine was his lawful wife, and literature was his mistress. But it was the mistress who achieved immortality.