👶 Early Life and Education
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. He was the third of six children. His father was a grocer, painter and religious fanatic with a mercurial temperament who "thrashed" his children and was likely emotionally abusive to his wife. Chekhov, like Dickens, was no stranger to financial hardship. In 1875, his father took the family and fled to Moscow to escape creditors, leaving young Anton behind for three more years to finish school. He paid for his tuition by catching and selling goldfinches and dispensing private tutoring lessons, and selling short sketches to the newspaper. He sent any money he could spare to his family in Moscow.
📖 Career and Literary Contributions
In 1879, Chekhov was admitted to medical school and joined his family in Moscow. He assumed financial responsibility for the household, and while attending classes at Moscow State University, he wrote and sold a large number of humorous stories and vignettes of contemporary Russian life. He published more than four hundred short stories, sketches, and vignettes by the age of twenty-six.
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."
Chekhov is considered an exemplar author in the genre of Realism and is widely regarded as the founder of the modern short story. His influence is observed in a diverse group of writers including Flannery O’Connor, , William Somerset Maugham, Raymond Carver, and . Along with Henrik Ibsen and , Chekhov is considered one of the three seminal figures in the birth of modern theater.
In 1890, Chekhov made a grueling journey across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, where he conducted a census of the prisoners and documented the brutal conditions. The experience deepened his humanitarian convictions and influenced later works like In Exile and Ward No. 6.
🌿 Writing Style
Chekhov’s elusive, superficially guileless style of writing—in which what is left unsaid seems far more important than what is said—revolutionized both the short story and drama. He rejected contrived plots and tidy resolutions in favor of capturing the texture of ordinary life: loneliness, missed connections, and small revelations. He insisted that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them, and that a writer should be as objective as a chemist.
His stories avoid the heavy-handed moralizing common in nineteenth-century fiction. Characters are rendered with compassion and irony in equal measure, and endings are often deliberately ambiguous—a technique that challenged readers accustomed to conclusive finales. Leo Tolstoy praised Chekhov’s stories highly, though he famously disliked his plays.
✒️ Notable Works
Most of the English-speaking world knows Chekhov as a playwright, particularly for his four masterpieces: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1903).
His short fiction, however, is equally celebrated. Popular starting points for readers include The Lady with the Little Dog, The Darling, The Huntsman, Gusev, and The Bet. A Dreary Story is also an excellent work; due to its length it is classified here as a book. It is also well known under the alternative title A Boring Story, which is listed in the short story section as a convenience to readers searching under that name. Chekhov himself considered The Student his personal favorite.
In 1898, during his years in Yalta, Chekhov produced some of his most celebrated fiction, including a trilogy sometimes referred to as "The Little Trilogy." The three stories—told by two friends on a trekking and shooting holiday—are: The Man in a Case, Gooseberries, and About Love.
❤️ Personal Life
In 1897, Chekhov was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He purchased land in Yalta in 1898 after his father’s death and had a villa built, moving in with his mother and sister in 1899. In 1901, he married the actress Olga Knipper, who had starred in the original production of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre. Their marriage was largely conducted at a distance—Chekhov in Yalta for his health, Olga in Moscow for her career—sustained by a remarkable correspondence of over 800 letters. They had no children.
✨ Death and Legacy
Chekhov’s tuberculosis worsened steadily, and in June 1904 he traveled with Olga to the German spa town of Badenweiler. He died there on July 15, 1904, at the age of forty-four. Witty to the end, Chekhov’s last words were, "I haven’t had champagne for a long time." His words were a satirical reference to a specific etiquette practiced in German medicine at the time; when it was determined that there was no hope for a patient’s recovery, it was customary for the doctor to offer the patient a glass of champagne.
We feature over 200 of Anton Chekhov’s short stories and all of his major plays. You may also enjoy reminiscences about Chekhov by Maxim Gorky and Aleksandr Kuprin. Chekhov is featured in our collection of favorite Russian Writers.