Anton Chekhov

Born in 1860 in Taganrog, a provincial port on the Sea of Azov, Anton Chekhov was the grandson of a serf who had bought his family's freedom and the son of a grocer whose piety expressed itself in flogging his children. When the grocery failed, the family fled to Moscow, leaving the sixteen-year-old behind to finish school and tutor his way through the debt. He followed them to Moscow, enrolled in medical school, and began writing short comic sketches to keep everyone fed, publishing hundreds under pseudonyms in cheap humor magazines. Medicine gave him discipline and a clinical eye; writing gave him a living. By his late twenties the sketches had deepened into the stories, "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), "The Steppe" (1888), "Ward No. 6" (1892), that would remake the form, replacing neat plots with atmosphere, subtext, and the ache of unexpressed feeling. His four great plays, The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904), bewildered audiences expecting conventional drama and became the foundation of modern theater through Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre. Tuberculosis, diagnosed when he was twenty-four, shadowed everything. He married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901. On the night of July 2, 1904, at a spa in Badenweiler, Germany, he drank a glass of champagne, said "It's been so long since I've had champagne," turned on his side, and died. He was forty-four.

In 1890, already ill with the tuberculosis he refused to have diagnosed, thirty-year-old Chekhov spent eleven weeks crossing Siberia by horse-drawn cart to reach the Sakhalin Island penal colony. There he interviewed thousands of convicts and settlers by hand, compiling a census nobody had asked him to take.