Anton Chekhov

Who Was Anton Chekhov?

Anton Chekhov was the greatest short story writer of the nineteenth century and the founder of the modern drama — a Russian physician whose fiction and plays transformed the literary culture of the Western world with a precision and a humanity that have never been surpassed. Born in Taganrog in 1860, the son of a grocer who had once been a serf, he grew up in poverty and put himself through medical school by writing comic sketches for popular magazines. The income from his writing allowed him to complete his medical degree and support his family, and the discipline of producing large quantities of publishable prose quickly gave him a technical mastery that no amount of formal literary training could have provided.

His mature work — the stories and plays of the 1890s and early 1900s — is characterized by a formal innovation that continues to define short fiction and drama to the present day. He abandoned the conventional plot mechanics of action, climax, and resolution in favor of a more subtle rendering of the way human beings actually live: not in dramatic crises but in the accumulated weight of ordinary days, failed communication, missed opportunities, and the slow erosion of hope.

His four major plays — The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) — are the foundation of the modern theatrical repertoire. His short stories, including “The Bishop,” “Ward No. 6,” “The Student,” and “The Lady with the Dog,” are among the finest in any language.

Chekhov is significant for TLA because his work raises, with unusual precision, the question of what sustains human beings in the face of the ordinary. His characters are not defeated by dramatic catastrophe but by the slow accumulation of ordinary disappointment — and yet in his best work, something persists: a residue of hope, of beauty, of human connection that his secular framework cannot fully account for.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Seagull — 1896
• Uncle Vanya — 1897
• Three Sisters — 1901
• The Cherry Orchard — 1904
• Ward No. 6 — 1892 — short story
• The Lady with the Dog — 1899 — short story
• The Bishop — 1902 — short story
• The Student — 1894 — short story