This is a featured article. Click here for more information.

Listen to this article

Anton Chekhov
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
"Chekhov" redirects here. For other uses, see Chekhov (disambiguation).
This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Pavlovich and the
family name is Chekhov.
Anton Chekhov
Chekhov seated at a desk
Born Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
29 January 1860[1]
Taganrog, Ekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire
Died 15 July 1904 (aged 44)[2]
Badenweiler, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire
Resting place Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow
Occupation Physician, short story writer, playwright
Nationality Russian
Alma mater First Moscow State Medical University
Notable awards Pushkin Prize
Spouse Olga Knipper (m.1901)
Relatives Alexander Chekhov (brother)
Michael Chekhov (nephew)
Lev Knipper (nephew)
Olga Chekhova (niece)
Ada Tschechowa (great-niece)
Marina Ried (great-niece)
Vera Tschechowa (great-great niece)
Signature
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: ????? ???????? ?????[note 1], tr. Ant�n P�vlovic
C�hov, IPA: [?n'ton 'pav??v??t? 't??x?f]; 29 January 1860[note 2] � 15 July
1904[note 3]) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to
be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a
playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high
esteem by writers and critics.[3][4] Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg,
Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of
early modernism in the theatre.[5] Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout
most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and
literature is my mistress."[6]

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the
play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art
Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his
last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a
challenge to the acting ensemble[7] as well as to audiences, because in place of
conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the
text".[8]

Chekhov had at first written stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition
grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern
short story.[9] 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.[10]

Contents
1 Biography
1.1 Childhood
1.2 Early writings
1.3 Turning points
1.4 Sakhalin
1.5 Melikhovo
1.6 Yalta
1.7 Death
2 Legacy
3 Publications
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
7 Sources
8 External links
8.1 Documentary
Biography
Childhood

Birth house of Anton Chekhov in Taganrog, Russia

Young Chekhov in 1882

The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer
present

Portrait of young Chekhov in country clothes

Young Chekhov (left) with brother Nikolai in 1882

Chekhov's family and friends in 1890 (Top row, left to right) Ivan, Alexander,
Father; (second row) unknown friend, Lika Mizinova, Masha, Mother, Seryozha
Kiselev; (bottom row) Misha, Anton

Chekhov's classic look: pince-nez, hat and bow-tie

Melikhovo, now a museum

Anton Chekhov in 1893

Osip Braz: Portrait of Anton Chekhov

Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900

Chekhov and Olga, 1901, on their honeymoon

Anton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great (17 January Old
Style) 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia.
He was the third of six surviving children. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov,
the son of a former serf and his Ukrainian wife,[11] was from the village Olhovatka
(Voronezh Governorate) and ran a grocery store. A director of the parish choir,
devout Orthodox Christian, and physically abusive father, Pavel Chekhov has been
seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.[12]
Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya (Morozova), was an excellent storyteller who
entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father
all over Russia.[13][14][15] "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov
remembered, "but our soul from our mother."[16] In adulthood, Chekhov criticised
his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of
Pavel's tyranny: "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."[17][18]
Chekhov attended the Greek School in Taganrog and the Taganrog Gymnasium (since
renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium), where he was held back for a year at fifteen for
failing an examination in Ancient Greek.[19] He sang at the Greek 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.
[20]

In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances
building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov.[21] To
avoid debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and
Nikolay, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow;
Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience.[22]
Chekhov was left behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education.

Chekhov remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man by the name
of Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family
for the price of their house.[23] Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which
he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short
sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs.[24] He sent every ruble he could
spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.[24]
During this time, he read widely and analytically, including the works of
Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer,[25][26] and wrote a full-length
comic drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable
though innocent fabrication."[27] Chekhov also experienced a series of love
affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.[24]

In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having
gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical
University.[28]

Early writings
Chekhov now assumed responsibility for the whole family.[29] 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"
(?????? ???????) and "Man without a Spleen" (??????? ??? ?????????). His prodigious
output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian
street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by Nikolai
Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time.[30] Chekhov's tone at this stage
was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.[31][32]

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.
[33]

In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks
worsened, but he would not admit his tuberculosis to his family or his friends.[16]
He confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my
colleagues."[34] 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 in St.
Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate
Alexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three
times the space.[35] Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's
closest.[36][37]
Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The
sixty-four-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day,
wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story "The Huntsman" that[38] "You have
real 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."[39]" The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early
manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising.[40]
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 collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize
"for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."[41]

Turning points
In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine,
which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.[42] 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 in Severny Vestnik (The
Northern Herald).[43] In a narrative that drifts with the thought processes of the
characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise 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.[44]

In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play,
the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November.[45]
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.[46] Although Chekhov
did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such as The Seagull (written
in 1895), Uncle Vanya (written in 1897), The Three Sisters (written in 1900), and
The 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 and translating it
to the stage to manifest the human condition as accurately as possible in hopes to
make the audience reflect upon their own definition of 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 considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development
and literary career.[16] From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's that
has become known as Chekhov's gun, a dramatic principle that requires that every
element in a narrative be necessary and irreplaceable, and that everything else be
removed.[47][48][49]

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.

�?Anton Chekhov[49][50]
The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolay from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A
Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life
that he realises has been without purpose.[51][52] Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded
his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolay's death, was researching
prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton Chekhov, in a search for
purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison
reform.[16]

Sakhalin
In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and
river steamer to the Russian Far East and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin
Island, north of Japan, where he spent three months 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.[53] His remarks
to his sister about Tomsk were to become notorious.[54][55]

Anton Chekhov museum in Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, Russia. It is the house where he

stayed in Sakhalin during 1890
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.[56]

Anton Chekhov Monument in Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, Russia

Chekhov witnessed much on Sakhalin that shocked and angered him, including
floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and forced prostitution of women. He wrote,
"There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's
degradation."[57][58] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children
living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:

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.[59]

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 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social
science, not literature.[60][61] Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of
Sakhalin" in his long short story "The Murder,"[62] 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 is the subject of brief comment and analysis in
Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84.[63] It is also the subject of a poem by the Nobel
Prize winner Seamus Heaney, "Chekhov on Sakhalin" (collected in the volume Station
Island).[64] Rebecca Ruth Gould has compared Chekhov's book on Sakhalin to
Katherine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook (1907).[65]

Melikhovo
In 1892, Chekhov bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles
south of Moscow, where he lived with his family until 1899. "It's nice to be a
lord," he joked to his friend Ivan Leontyev (who wrote humorous pieces under the
pseudonym Shcheglov),[20] but he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously
and soon made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief
for victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks of 1892, he went on to build three
schools, a fire station, and a clinic, and to donate his medical services to
peasants for miles around, despite frequent recurrences of his tuberculosis.[12]
[33][66]
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.[67]

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.
[68] 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."[69]

In 1894, Chekhov began writing his play The 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 his Three Sisters,
as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred
years."[16]

The first night of The Seagull, at the Alexandrinsky 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.[70] But the play so impressed the theatre
director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced his colleague Konstantin
Stanislavski to direct a new production for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in
1898.[71] Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing
coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in
playwriting.[72] The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the
following year staged Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.[73] In the
last decades of his life he became an atheist.[74][75][76]

Yalta
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 the
doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change
in his manner of life.[77]

After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of
Yalta and built a villa, 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 as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to
leave his "hot Siberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog
as soon as a water supply was installed there.[78][79] 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 over
Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.[80]

On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of
weddings. She was a former prot�g�e and sometime lover of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom
he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull.[81][82][83] Up to that point,
Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor,"[84] had preferred
passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment.[85] 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.[86]

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; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's
letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart,
although Russian scholars have rejected that claim.[87][88] The literary legacy of
this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves gems of theatre
history, including shared complaints about Stanislavski's directing methods and
Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.[89]

In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories,[90] "The Lady with the
Dog"[91] (also translated from the Russian as "Lady with Lapdog"),[92] which
depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an
unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in Yalta. 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.[93]

Death
By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with tuberculosis. 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."[16] On 3 June, he set off
with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, 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.[94]

Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history,"[95]
retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story
"Errand" by Raymond 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 of camphor, 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 ...[96]

Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for
oysters, a detail that offended Gorky.[97] Some of the thousands of mourners
followed the funeral procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the
accompaniment of a military band.[98] Chekhov was buried next to his father at the
Novodevichy Cemetery.[99][100]

Legacy
A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan 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."[101]
Chekhov biographies
Chekhov's posthumous reputation greatly exceeded his expectations. The ovations for
the play The 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 to Tolstoy, 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, and The 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, and Peasant Wives.[102]

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" and R. E. C. Long said "Chekhov's characters were repugnant, and
that Chekhov revelled in stripping the last rags of dignity from the human soul".
[103] After his death, Chekhov was reappraised. Constance Garnett's translations
won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, whose story "The Child Who Was
Tired" is similar to Chekhov's "Sleepy".[104] The Russian critic D. 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."[105] In Russia itself,
Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the revolution, 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.[106][107]

One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays was George Bernard Shaw,
who subtitled his Heartbreak 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."[108]

In the United States, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly
through the influence of Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of
subtext: "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."[109][110] The Group Theatre, in particular, developed the subtextual
approach to drama, influencing generations of American playwrights, screenwriters,
and actors, including Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan and, in particular, Lee Strasberg.
In turn, Strasberg's Actors Studio and the "Method" acting approach influenced many
actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, though by then the Chekhov
tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism.[111] In 1981,
the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The 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.

Despite Chekhov's reputation as a playwright, William Boyd asserts that his short
stories represent the greater achievement.[112] 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.[113]

Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov
wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer."[114] And Vladimir
Nabokov criticised Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets,
repetitions."[115][116] But he also declared �yet it is his works which I would
take on a trip to another planet�[117] and 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."[118]

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's historical accomplishment was to abandon
what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred,
interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life."[119]

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The 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 most Victorian 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.[120]

While a Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Michael

Goldman presented his view on defining the elusive quality of Chekhov's comedies
stating: "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."[121]

Alan Twigg, the chief editor and publisher of the Canadian book review magazine BC
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.[122]

Chekhov has also influenced the work of Japanese playwrights including Shimizu
Kunio, Yoji Sakate, and Ai Nagai. Critics have noted similarities in how Chekhov
and Shimizu use a mixture of light humour as well as an intense depictions of
longing.[123] Sakate adapted several of Chekhov's plays and transformed them in the
general style of no.[124] Nagai also adapted Chekhov's plays, including Three
Sisters, and transformed his dramatic style into Nagai's style of satirical realism
while emphasising the social issues depicted on the play.[124]

Chekhov's works have been adapted for the screen, including Sidney Lumet's Sea Gull
and Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. Laurence Olivier's final effort as a film
director was a 1970 adaption of Three Sisters in which he also played a supporting
role. His work has also served as inspiration or been referenced in numerous films.
In Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror, characters discuss his short story
"Ward No. 6". Woody Allen has been influenced by Chekhov and reference to his works
are present in many of his films including Love and Death (1975), Interiors (1978)
and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Plays by Chekhov are also referenced in Fran�ois
Truffaut's 1980 drama film The Last Metro, which is set in a theatre. The Cherry
Orchard has a role in the comedy film Henry's Crime (2011). A portion of a stage
production of Three Sisters appears in the 2014 drama film Still Alice.

Publications
Main article: Anton Chekhov bibliography
See also
Literature portal
Biography portal
Ann Dunnigan, English-language translator
Jean-Claude van Itallie, English-language translator
Maria Chekhova
Chekhov Monument in Rostov-on-Don
Notes
In Chekhov's day, his name was written ?????? ????????? ??????.
Old Style date 17 January.
Old Style date 2 July.
References
Letter to G. I. Rossolimo, 11 October 1899. Letters of Anton Chekhov
Rayfield 1997, p. 595.
"Greatest short story writer who ever lived." Raymond Carver (in Rosamund
Bartlett's introduction to About Love and Other Stories, XX); "Quite probably. the
best short-story writer ever." A Chekhov Lexicon, by William Boyd, The Guardian, 3
July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
"Stories ... which are among the supreme achievements in prose narrative." Vodka
miniatures, belching and angry cats, George Steiner's review of The Undiscovered
Chekhov, in The Observer, 13 May 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Harold Bloom, Genius: A Study of One Hundred Exemplary Authors.
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 11 September 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov. On
Wikiquote.
"Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if
they ever make it to the summit". Actor Ian McKellen, quoted in Miles, 9.
"Chekhov's art demands a theatre of mood." Vsevolod Meyerhold, quoted in Allen,
13; "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." Styan, 84.
"Chekhov is said to be the father of the modern short story". Malcolm 2004, p. 87;
"He brought something new into literature." James Joyce, in Arthur Power,
Conversations with James Joyce, Usborne Publishing Ltd, 1974, ISBN 978-0-86000-006-
8, 57; "Tchehov's breach with the classical tradition is the most significant event
in modern literature", John Middleton Murry, in Athenaeum, 8 April 1922, cited in
Bartlett's introduction to About Love.
"You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to
his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem
correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." Letter to
Suvorin, 27 October 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Rayfield 1997, pp. 3�4: Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov and Efrosinia Emelianovna
Wood 2000, p. 78
Payne, XVII.
Simmons 1970, p. 18.
Chekhov and Taganrog, Taganrog city website.
From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail,
which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
 Letter to brother Alexander, 2 January 1889, in Malcolm 2004, p. 102.
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." Letter to Suvorin, 27
March 1894. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Bartlett, 4�5.
Letter to I.L. Shcheglov, 9 March 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Rayfield 1997, p. 31.
Letter to cousin Mihail, 10 May 1877. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Malcolm 2004, p. 25.
Payne, XX.
Letter to brother Mihail, 1 July 1876. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Simmons 1970, p. 26.
Simmons 1970, p. 33.
Rayfield 1997, p. 69.
Wood 2000, p. 79.
Rayfield 1997, p. 91.
"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 of The Undiscovered Chekhov in The Observer, 13 May
2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Willis, Louis (27 January 2013). "Chekhov's Crime Stories". Literary and Genre.
Knoxville: SleuthSayers.
Malcolm 2004, p. 26.
Letter to N.A.Leykin, 6 April 1886. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Rayfield 1997, p. 128.
Rayfield 1997, pp. 448�450They only ever fell out once, when Chekhov objected to
the anti-Semitic attacks in New Times against Dreyfus and Zola in 1898.
In many ways, the right-wing Suvorin, whom Lenin later called "The running dog of
the Tzar" (Payne, XXXV), was Chekhov's opposite; "Chekhov had to function like
Suvorin's kidney, extracting the businessman's poisons."Wood 2000, p. 79
The Huntsman.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Malcolm 2004, pp. 32�33.
Payne, XXIV.
Simmons 1970, p. 160.
"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 by Malcolm 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 prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.
Letter to brother Alexander, 20 November 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Petr Mikhailovich Bit?s?illi (1983), Chekhov's Art: A Stylistic Analysis, Ardis,
p. x
Daniel S. Burt (2008), The Literature 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential
Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time, Infobase Publishing
Valentine T. Bill (1987), Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom, Philosophical
Library
S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)
"A Dreary Story.". Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Simmons 1970, pp. 186�191.
Malcolm 2004, p. 129.
Simmons 1970, p. 223.
Rayfield 1997, p. 224.
Letter to sister, Masha, 20 May 1890. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
 Wood 2000, p. 85.
Rayfield 1997, p. 230.
Letter to A.F.Koni, 16 January 1891. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Malcolm 2004, p. 125.
Simmons 1970, p. 229: Such is the general critical view of the work, but Simmons
calls it a "valuable and intensely human document."
"The Murder". Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2011.
Heaney, Seamus. Station Island Farrar Straus Giroux: New York, 1985.
Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2018). "The aesthetic terrain of settler colonialism:
Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov's natives". Journal of Postcolonial Writing:
1�18. doi:10.1080/17449855.2018.1511242.
Payne, XXXI.
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.
Note-Book.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Rayfield 1997, pp. 394�398.
Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, 25.
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, 11.
Rayfield 1997, pp. 390�391Rayfield draws from his critical study Chekhov's "Uncle
Vanya" and the "Wood Demon" (1995), which anatomised the evolution of the Wood
Demon into Uncle 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. ISBN
978-1-84331-841-5. 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. ISBN 978-0-8101-1460-9. 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. ISBN 978-0-307-56828-1. 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."
Letter to Suvorin, 1 April 1897. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Olga Knipper, "Memoir", in Benedetti, Dear Writer, Dear Actress, 37, 270.
Bartlett, 2.
Malcolm 2004, pp. 170�171.
"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.
Benedetti, Dear Writer, Dear Actress, 125.
Rayfield 1997, p. 500"Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were
more than professional."
Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov's Leading Lady, quoted in Malcolm 2004, p. 59.
"Chekhov had the temperament of a philanderer. Sexually, he preferred brothels or
swift liaisons."Wood 2000, p. 78
Letter to Suvorin, 23 March 1895. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Rayfield 1997, pp. 556�557Rayfield also tentatively suggests, drawing on obstetric
clues, that Olga suffered an ectopic pregnancy rather than a miscarriage.
There was certainly tension between the couple after the miscarriage, though
Simmons 1970, p. 569, and Benedetti, Dear Writer, Dear Actress, 241, put this down
to Chekhov's mother and sister blaming the miscarriage on Olga's late-night
socialising with her actor friends.
Benedetti, Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Olga Knipper and Anton
Chekhov.
Chekhov, Anton. "Lady with lapdog". Short Stories.
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.
Letter to sister Masha, 28 June 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
Malcolm 2004, p. 62.
Olga Knipper, Memoir, in Benedetti, Dear Writer, Dear Actress, 284.
"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 in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov.. Retrieved 16 February
2007.
Chekhov's Funeral. M. Marcus.The Antioch Review, 1995
Malcolm 2004, p. 91; Alexander Kuprin in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. Retrieved
16 February 2007
"Novodevichy Cemetery". Passport Magazine. April 2008. Retrieved 12 September
2013.
Payne, XXXVI.
Simmons 1970, p. 595.
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. JSTOR
3004259.
William H. New (1999). Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform. McGill-Queen's
Press. pp. 15�17. ISBN 978-0-7735-1791-2.
Wood 2000, p. 77.
Allen, 88.
"They won't allow a play which is seen to lament the lost estates of the gentry."
Letter of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, quoted by Anatoly Smeliansky in "Chekhov
at the Moscow Art Theatre", from The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, 31�2.
Anna Obraztsova in "Bernard Shaw's Dialogue with Chekhov", from Miles, 43�4.
Reynolds, Elizabeth (ed), Stanislavski's Legacy, Theatre Arts Books, 1987, ISBN
978-0-87830-127-0, 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, from Text and Subtext in
Shavian Drama, in 1922: Shaw and the last Hundred Years, ed. Bernard. F. Dukore,
Penn State Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-271-01324-4, 200.
"Lee Strasberg became in my opinion a victim of the traditional idea of Chekhovian
theatre ... [he left] no room for Chekhov's imagery." Georgii Tostonogov on
Strasberg's production of Three Sisters in The Drama Review (winter 1968), quoted
by Styan, 121.
"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, by William Boyd,
The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Bartlett, "From Russia, with Love", The Guardian, 15 July 2004. Retrieved 17
February 2007.
Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, 1925 (from Selected Letters,
p. 179), in Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Ed Larry W. Phillips, Touchstone, (1984)
1999, ISBN 978-0-684-18119-6, 101.
Wood 2000, p. 82.
Wikiquote quotes about Chekhov
Karlinsky, Simon (13 June 2008). "Nabokov and Chekhov: Affinities, parallels,
structures". Cycno. 10 (n�1 NABOKOV : Autobiography, Biography and Fiction).
Retrieved 10 September 2018.
From Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, quoted by Francine Prose
in Learning from Chekhov, 231.
"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 novelist William Gerhardie's analysis in Anton 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, ISBN 0-15-602778-X, 172.
Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama, p72.
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. ISBN 978-0-7864-5871-4.
Rimer, J. (2001). Japanese Theatre and the International Stage. Leiden, The
Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. pp. 299�311. ISBN 978-90-04-12011-2.
Clayton, J. Douglas (2013). Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations.
Routledge. pp. 269�270. ISBN 978-0-415-50969-5.
Sources
Allen, David, Performing Chekhov, Routledge (UK), 2001, ISBN 978-0-415-18934-7
Bartlett, Rosamund, and Anthony Phillips (translators), Chekhov: A Life in Letters,
Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN 978-0-14-044922-8
Bartlett, Rosamund, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, Free Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7432-
3074-2
Benedetti, Jean (editor and translator), Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love
Letters of Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1998 edition,
ISBN 978-0-413-72390-1
Benedetti, Jean, Stanislavski: An Introduction, Methuen Drama, 1989 edition, ISBN
978-0-413-50030-4
Borny, Geoffrey, Interpreting Chekhov, ANU Press, 2006, ISBN 1-920942-68-8, free
download
Chekhov, Anton, About Love and Other Stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett,
Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-19-280260-6
Chekhov, Anton, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Fifty New Stories, translated by Peter
Constantine, Duck Editions, 2001, ISBN 978-0-7156-3106-5
Chekhov, Anton, Easter Week, translated by Michael Henry Heim, engravings by Barry
Moser, Shackman Press, 2010
Chekhov, Anton, Forty Stories, translated and with an introduction by Robert Payne,
New York, Vintage, 1991 edition, ISBN 978-0-679-73375-1
Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with
Biographical Sketch, translated by Constance Garnett, Macmillan, 1920. Full text at
Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Chekhov, Anton, Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and
Leonard Woolf, B.W. Huebsch, 1921. Full text at Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February
2007.
Chekhov, Anton, The Other Chekhov, edited by Okla Elliott and Kyle 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, ISBN 978-0-9729679-
8-3
Chekhov, Anton, Seven Short Novels, translated by Barbara Makanowitzky, W.W.Norton
& Company, 2003 edition, ISBN 978-0-393-00552-3
Clyman, T. W. (Ed.). A Chekhov companion. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, (1985).
ISBN 9780313234231
Finke, Michael C., Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapoetic Journey, an essay in Anton
Chekhov Rediscovered, ed Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, Michigan Russian
Language Journal, 1988, OCLC 17003357
Finke, Michael C., Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Cornell UP, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8014-
4315-2
Gerhardie, William, Anton Chekhov, Macdonald, (1923) 1974 edition, ISBN 978-0-356-
04609-9
Gorky, Maksim, Alexander Kuprin, and I.A. Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov,
translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, B.W.Huebsch, 1921. Read at
eldritchpress.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.
Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov,
Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-521-58917-8
Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden�'Because of Little
Apples', in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-
8047-2120-2
Klawans, Harold L., Chekhov's Lie, 1997, ISBN 1-888799-12-9. About the challenges
of combining writing with the medical life.
Malcolm, Janet (2004) [2001]. Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey. London: Granta
Publications. ISBN 9781862076358. OCLC 224119811.
Miles, Patrick (ed), Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press,
1993, ISBN 978-0-521-38467-4
Nabokov, Vladimir, Anton Chekhov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/HBJ
Books, [1981] 2002 edition, ISBN 978-0-15-602776-2.
Pitcher, Harvey, Chekhov's Leading Lady: Portrait of the Actress Olga Knipper, J
Murray, 1979, ISBN 978-0-7195-3681-6
Prose, Francine, Learning from Chekhov, in Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and
Jay Parini, UPNE, 1991, ISBN 978-0-87451-560-2
Rayfield, Donald (1997). Anton Chekhov: A Life. London: HarperCollins. ISBN
9780805057478. OCLC 654644946, 229213309.
Sekirin, Peter. "Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family,
Friends and Contemporaries," MacFarland Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7864-5871-4
Simmons, Ernest Joseph (1970) [1962]. Chekhov: A Biography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226758053. OCLC 682992.
Speirs, L. Tolstoy and Chekhov. Cambridge, England: University Press, (1971), ISBN
0521079500
Stanislavski, Constantin, My Life in Art, Methuen Drama, 1980 edition, ISBN 978-0-
413-46200-8
Styan, John Louis, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press,
1981, ISBN 978-0-521-29628-1
Wood, James (2000) [1999]. "What Chekhov Meant by Life". The Broken Estate: Essays
in Literature and Belief. New York, NY: Modern Library. ISBN 9780804151900. OCLC
863217943.
Zeiger, Arthur, The Plays of Anton Chekhov, Claxton House, Inc., New York, NY,
1945.
Tufarulo, G, M., La Luna � morta e lo specchio infranto. Miti letterari del
Novecento, vol.1- G. Laterza, Bari, 2009� ISBN 978-88-8231-491-0.
External links
Anton Chekhov
at Wikipedia's sister projects
Media from Wikimedia Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Texts from Wikisource
Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision of the article "Anton Chekhov" dated
2012-07-26, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)
More spoken articles
Biographical

Anton Chekhov at the Encyclop�dia Britannica

Petri Liukkonen. "Anton Chekhov". Books and Writers
Biography at The Literature Network
"Chekhov's Legacy" by Cornel West at NPR, 2004
The International competition of philological, culture and film studies works
dedicated to Anton Chekhov's life and creative work (in Russian)
Documentary
2010: Tschechow lieben (Tschechow and Women) - Director: Marina Rumjanzewa -
Language: German
Works

Works by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov at Project Gutenberg. All Constance Garnett's

translations of the short stories and letters are available, plus the edition of
the Note-book translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf � see the
"References" section for print publication details of all of these. Site also has
translations of all the plays.
Works by or about Anton Chekhov at Internet Archive
Works by Anton Chekhov at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett presented in
chronological order of Russian publication with annotations.
????? ???????? ?????. ????????? Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian,
listed in chronological order, and also alphabetically by title. Retrieved June
2013. (in Russian)
????? ???????? ????? Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian. Retrieved 16
February 2007. (in Russian)
Works by Anton Chekhov at Open Library
Plays, Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov.
vte
Anton Chekhov (works)
vte
Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1899)
vte
Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters
vte
Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (1896)
vte
Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Authority control Edit this at Wikidata
BIBSYS: 90733091BNE: XX907635BNF: cb11926133z (data)GND: 118638289ISNI: 0000 0001
2103 1904LCCN: n79130807MusicBrainz: ecf035ed-ecd5-478e-a76e-0b524f0a7dc1NDL:
00435837NKC: jn19990210160NLA: 36321458NLA-person: 1246123NTA: 068570651RSL:
000082167ICCU: IT\ICCU\CFIV\006477SELIBR: 201439SNAC: w6f491dfSUDOC: 027156397VIAF:
95216565WorldCat Identities (via VIAF): 95216565
Categories: Spoken articlesAnton Chekhov1860 births1904 deathsPeople from
TaganrogPeople from Yekaterinoslav GovernoratePushkin Prize
winnersDramaturgesModernismMoscow Art TheaterMoscow State University alumniRussian
atheistsRussian dramatists and playwrightsRussian male dramatists and
playwrightsRussian psychological fiction writersRussian male novelistsRussian
medical writers19th-century Russian physiciansImperial Russian short story
writersRussian humour20th-century dramatists and playwrightsRussian writers of
Ukrainian descent20th-century deaths from tuberculosisInfectious disease deaths in
GermanyBurials at Novodevichy CemeteryRussian-language writersPositivistsRussian
male short story writers19th-century Russian short story writersModernist
theatreAmerican Theater Hall of Fame inductees
Navigation menu
Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView
historySearch
Search Wikipedia
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
In other projects
Wikimedia Commons
Wikiquote
Wikisource
Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version
Languages
????????
Afrikaans
Alemannisch
????
???????
Aragon�s
Asturianu
Aymar aru
Az?rbaycanca
??????
?????
B�n-l�m-g�
?????????
??????????
?????????? (???????????)?
Bislama
?????????
Boarisch
Bosanski
Brezhoneg
??????
Catal�
???????
Cebuano
Ce�tina
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Eesti
????????
??????
Espa�ol
Esperanto
Euskara
?????
Fiji Hindi
F�royskt
Fran�ais
Frysk
Gaeilge
Galego
?????
???????
???/Hak-k�-ng�
???
???????
??????????????
??????
Hrvatski
Bahasa Hulontalo
Ido
Ilokano
Bahasa Indonesia
Interlingua
�slenska
Italiano
?????
Kab?y?
?????
???????
???????
Kernowek
Kiswahili
Kurd�
????????
Latina
Latvie�u
L�tzebuergesch
?????
Lietuviu
Ligure
Limburgs
Livvinkarjala
Magyar
??????????
Malagasy
??????
?????
?????????
????
????????
Bahasa Melayu
Minangkabau
M�ng-de?ng-ng?�
??????
??????????
Nederlands
??????
????? ????
???
???????
Nordfriisk
Norsk
Norsk nynorsk
Occitan
???? ?????
?????
O?zbekcha/???????
??????
??????
????
Picard
Piemont�is
Polski
Portugu�s
Qaraqalpaqsha
Qirimtatarca
Rom�na
Runa Simi
??????????
???????
???? ????
???????
Sardu
Scots
Shqip
?????
Simple English
????
Slovencina
Sloven�cina
?????
?????? / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / ??????????????
Sunda
Suomi
Svenska
Tagalog
?????
???????/tatar�a
??????
???
??????
T�rk�e
T�rkmen�e
??????????
????
Veps�n kel�
Ti?ng Vi?t
Volap�k
Winaray
??
??????
Yor�b�
??
Zazaki
�emaite�ka
??
Edit links
This page was last edited on 14 September 2019, at 13:11 (UTC).
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;
additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. Wikipedia� is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaDevelopersCookie
statementMobile viewWikimedia FoundationPowered by MediaWiki