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Contents 1 Heading 2 Social conscience 3 Melikhovo 4 Late plays 5 Longer stories 6 Yalta 7 Death 8 Legacy 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links

[edit] Heading

Among those less impressed was Leo Tolstoy, who reportedly The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting an ironic statue of Chekhov in huge galoshes, mocking his peevish complaints about the weather.

What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and appalled him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and enforced prostitution of women: "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."^[1] 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 Sahalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. 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.^[2]

In 1892, Chekhov depicted the horrors of internment in one of his grimmest stories, Ward no. 6, in which Ragin, a doctor who quotes Marcus Aurelius to his patients, ends up confined with his former charges in a psychiatric ward, tyrannised by a brutal gaoler.^[3] Where The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes, Janet Malcom has written, Ward No. 6 stabs.^[4]

[edit] Social conscience

Chekhov always claimed he was apolitical and once said, "I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist."^[5] But the catharsis of his journey across Russia and his experiences on Sakhalin left a mark on his social outlook.^[6] The philosopher Lev Shestov suggested that Chekhov's work murmers a quiet "I don't know" to every problem.^[7]In the same vein, Vladimir Nabokov observed the typical Chekhov anti-hero to be:

…a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets…[who] combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action…Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.^[8]

After 1890, the middle-class characters in Chekhov's stories increasingly wring their hands about what is to be done with Russia, whether they are revolutionaries like Sasha in Betrothed,^[9] or liberal activists from the landowning classes like Natalya Gavrilovna in The Wife. In A Doctor's Visit, a factory owner's daughter suffers a psychosomatic illness as a symptom of the injustice of her position;^[10] in A Woman's Kingdom,^[11] a wealthy factory owner performs a random and counter-productive act of charity towards a poor family. In An Anonymous Story,^[12] a nobleman-turned-revolutionary gradually loses his sense of purpose.

Chekhov believed there would never be a revolution in Russia.^[13] But the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had left Russian society in a state of social and political vulnerability which he constantly lay bare in his work.^[14] Without a cheap labour-force of serfs, most landlords struggled to survive economically, while the peasants, cut adrift from their traditional role, often found themselves abandoned to market forces. At the end of The Cherry Orchard, when the family leaves the house after selling up, their old retainer, Firs, an ex-serf who calls the emancipation "the disaster", is left behind, locked in the nursery, the family assuming he had been taken to hospital.^[15]

[edit] Melikhovo

In Rothschild’s Fiddle, a peasant who lives with his wife in a one-room hut makes a coffin for her while she lies dying beside him. ^[16] Chekhov visited the upper classes too, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."^[17]

Some of his stories grew directly from his experiences as a doctor; for example, the idea for A Dead Body^[18]came from an autopsy he had conducted in a field near Voskresensk.^[19] And his story The Party^[20] describes a problematic pregnancy from a female character's point of view. "It really isn't bad to be a doctor and to understand what one is writing about," he told Suvorin. "The ladies say the description of the confinement is true.”^[21]

Chekhov often chose doctors as protagonists, usually, like Ragin from Ward no. Six, depicted in a state of impotent despair. In Ionitch, an idealistic young doctor misses his opportunities in life, and in middle-age turns disillusioned and greedy.^[22] In The Grasshopper, a specialist in diphtheria deliberately infects himself with the disease in response to his wife’s long-term infidelity.^[23]

Doctors appear in both the plays Chekhov finished at Melikhovo. In Uncle Vanya, Dr Astrov casually seduces the woman the title character has set his heart on; while in The Seagull, Eugene Dorn, another doctor, observes the tragi-comic events in the role of a detached outsider. Chekhov had written to Suvorin that he did not fear death. ^[24] In The Seagull, Dorn says, "The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death."^[25]

Chekhov began writing The Seagull in 1894, in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees from seed, which, according to Mihail, he "looked after…as though they were his children, and, like Colonel Vershinin in his Three Sisters, dreamed as he looked at them of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."^[26]

[edit] Late plays

The Seagull impressed the playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, who said Chekhov should have won the Griboyedev prize that year instead of himself.^[27] And it was Nemirovich-Danchenko who convinced Konstantin Stanislavski to direct the play for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.^[28]Chekhov's collaboration with Stanislavski proved crucial to the creative development of both men: Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the play and revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage; while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the script forced Stanislavski to dig beneath the surface of the text in ways that were new in theatre.^[29] In My Life in Art, Stanislavski recorded that after his own performance as Trigorin, Chekhov had said, "It was wonderful. Only you need torn shoes and check trousers." Stanislavski grasped that Trigorin was glamorous solely in Nina's imagination; in reality, he was seedy and second rate.^[28]

In 1899, Stanislavski directed Uncle Vanya, to such acclaim that Chekhov was bombarded with phone calls in the night, "the first time that my own fame has kept me awake".^[30] When he had rewritten The Wood Demon as Uncle Vanya is not clear, but in December 1898 he had told Gorky: "Uncle Vanya was written long, long ago; I have never seen it on the stage. Of late years it has often been produced at provincial theatres."^[31]

Mihail Chekhov suggested that The Three Sisters was informed by the summers the Chekhov family had spent at Voskresensk, a military town like the one in the play.^[26] Chekhov found himself well enough to assist in the rehearsals of his last play The Cherry Orchard, which was rapturously received at its premiere on 17 January 1904. Two days later he wrote to F.D.Batyushkov, "they gave me an ovation, so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected, that I can't get over it even now."^[32]

[edit] Longer stories

Chekhov wrote most of his best stories in the 1890s. He largely moved away from very short fiction and allowed his stories whatever length they needed, though his attempts to write a full-length novel appear to have come to nothing.^[26] His story The Duel,^[33] for example, was serialised in eleven issues of Suvorin's Novoye Vremya in 1891 and afterwards published by Suvorin as a book in twenty-one chapters.^[34] Several of the longer stories were, in effect, short novels, which attempted a more varied portrait of Russian society at all its social levels. The longest was My Life,^[35] the story of a young man who, in revolt against his harsh father, deserts his middle-class lifestyle and prospects to work as a housepainter. Another long story, Three Years,^[36]follows the industrial heir Laptev, who at first rejects the factory he inherits and marries a woman who does not return his love but later resigns himself to the factory and becomes emotionally numbed. In 1900 Chekhov wrote the long story In the Ravine,^[37] which depicts an entire rural community, with its social, economic, and religious dynamics, centred on the troubled Tsybukin family that runs the village store. "There's everything in it," Chekhov told Olga Knipper.^[38] In the Ravine includes perhaps Chekhov's most evil character, ^[39]the ruthless Aksinya, "who looked at the horses' teeth like a peasant", who in a fit of jealous rage scalds her sister-in-law’s baby to death with a ladle of boiling water. Another of Chekhov's ambitious long stories was An Anonymous Story, in which a revolutionary nobleman spies on a government minister's son by working as his valet.

I helped him to dress, and he let me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence; then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and munching rusks.^[40]

[edit] Yalta

In March 1897 Chekhov suffered a sudden haemorrhage from the lungs while on a visit to Moscow and was, not without some difficulty, persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered him to change his manner of life.^[41]

After the death of his father in 1898, he bought a plot of land at Autka, in Yalta, and began building a white villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. He also bought a small property at Kutchuka, a wild spot twenty-four miles from Yalta, where, according to Mihail, "he wanted to have hens, cows, a horse and donkeys, and, of course, all of this would have been quite possible and might have been realized if he had not been slowly dying".^[26]

Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories at Yalta, The Lady with the Dog,^[42] which describes what at first seems a brief liaison between a married woman on vacation in Yalta and a married man passing through; neither expects anything lasting from the encounter, but later they find themselves drawn back to each other and risk the security of their family lives. At Yalta Chekhov also wrote The Bishop,^[43] "one of the most autobiographical of his stories", ^[44] a long, elegiac portrait a dying bishop, whose family, even his mother, has come to respect rather than love him. Chekhov’s final story, Betrothed,^[45] depicts a decaying household, run by three women from different generations of the landowning class: the grandmother who retreats into religion, the mother who "was interested in spiritualism and homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts to which she was subject", and the daughter, Nadya, who comes under the influence of the revolutionary student Sasha, renounces her betrothal, and leaves the old order behind for a new life in the city.

[edit] Death

By May 1904, Chekhov was seriously ill. "Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off," Mihail Chekhov recalled, "but the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the less he seemed to realize it."^[26] On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, from where he wrote apparently 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 the German women dressed.^[46]He died five days later.

Chekhov’s death is one of "the great set pieces of literary history", ^[47] retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote an acount of her husband’s last moments in her Memoirs:

Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe. 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, 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...^[48]

Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which offended Gorky.^[49] Some of the thousands of mourners followed the wrong funeral procession, that of a General Keller being buried to the accompaniment of a military band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery, alongside the "humble grave of the 'Cossak's widow, Olga Cookaretnikov'".^[50]

[edit] Legacy

A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin he thought people might go on reading him 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."^[51]

Modesty aside, Chekhov could hardly have imagined the extent of his posthumous reputation and influence. The ovations for The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death revealed how far he had ascended in the affections of the Russian public—by then he was second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years—but after Chekhov's death, his fame soon spread further afield. The English translations by Constance Garnett won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, the last to the point of plagiarism.^[52] The Russian critic D.S. Mirsky, who lived in England, explained Chekhov's popularity there by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values".^[53] Chekhov's drama went out of fashion in Revolutionary Russia, but it was later adapted to the Soviet agenda, with Lophakin, for example, reinvented as a hero of the new order, taking an axe to the cherry orchard.^[54]

One of the first non-Russians to grasp the significance of Chekhov's plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" and pointed to 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".^[55]

In America, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of the Stanislavski System, 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".^[56] 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, whose Actors Studio and its "Method" acting approach in turn influenced many actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have become distorted by a preoccupation with realism.^[57] In 1981, the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin.

Chekhov is now the most popular playwright in the English-speaking world after Shakespeare;^[58] but some writers believe that his short stories represent the greater achievement.^[59] Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story Errand about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov 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.^[60]

Ernest Hemingway, another of Carver's influences, was more grudging, saying: "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer".^[61] And Vladimir Nabokov once complained of Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions".^[62]. He was more in line with the critical majority when he declared The Lady with the Dog "one of the greatest stories ever written" 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." ^[63]

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's breakthrough was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".^[64]

Virginia Woolf described the unique quality of a Chekhov story in her The Common Reader:

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.^[65]

[edit] See also

• Bibliography of Anton Chekhov

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Allen, David, Performing Chekhov, Routledge (UK), 2001, ISBN 0415189349
• Bartlett, Rosamund, and Anthony Phillips (translators), Chekhov: A Life in Letters, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN 0140449221
• Bartlett, Rosamund, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, Free Press, 2004, ISBN 0743230744
• Benedetti, Jean (editor and translator), Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1998 edition, ISBN 0413723909
• Benedetti, Jean, Stanislavski: An Introduction, Methuen Drama, 1989 edition, ISBN 0-413-50030-6
• Chekhov, Anton, About Love and Other Stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0192802607
• Chekhov, Anton, A Journey to Sakhalin, translated by Brian Reeve, Sutton Publishing, 1992, ISBN 185763005X
• Chekhov, Anton, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Fifty New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine, Duck Editions, 2001, ISBN 0715631063
• Chekhov, Anton, Forty Stories, translated and with an introduction by Robert Payne, New York, Vintage, 1991 edition, ISBN 0-679-73375-2
• Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch, translated by Constance Garnett, New York, Macmillan, 1920. Full text at Gutenberg.
• Chekhov, Anton, Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, New York, B.W.Heubsch, 1921.Full text at Gutenberg.
• Chekhov, Anton, Seven Short Novels, translated by Barbara Makanowitzky, W.W.Norton & Company, 2003 edition, ISBN 0393005526
• Finke, Michael, Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapoetic Journey, an essay in Anton Chekhov Rediscovered, ed Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, East Lansing, Michigan Russian Language Journal, 1988, ISBN 9999838855
• Gerhardie, William, Anton Chekhov, Macdonald, (1923) 1974 edition, ISBN 0356046095
• Gorky, Maksim, Alexander Kuprin, and I.A.Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.S.Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, New York, B.W.Huebsch, 1921. Read at eldritchpress.
• Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0521589177
• Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden—'Because of Little Apples', in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0804721203
• Nabokov, Vladimir, Anton Chekhov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/HBJ Books, [1981] 2002 edition, ISBN 0156027763.
• Malcom, Janet, Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey, London, Granta Publications, 2004 edition, ISBN 1-86207-635-9
• Miles, Patrick (ed), Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0521384672
• Pitcher, Harvey, Chekhov's Leading Lady: Portrait of the Actress Olga Knipper, J Murray, 1979, ISBN 0719536812
• Prose, Francine, Learning from Chekhov, in Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini, UPNE, 1991, ISBN 0874515602
• Rayfield, Donald, Anton Chekhov: A Life, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1998, ISBN 0805057471
• Shestov, Lev, Anton Chekhov: Creation from the Void, in All Things Are Possible and Penultimate Words and Other Essays, Ohio University Press, 1991 edition, ISBN 0821402374. Read 1977 edition. Retrieved 13 November 2006
• Simmons, Ernest.J., Chekhov: A Biography, University of Chicago Press, (1962) 1970 edition, ISBN 0-226-75805-2
• Stanislavski, Konstantin, My Life in Art, Methuen Drama, 1980 edition, ISBN 0413462005
• Styan, John Louis, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1981, ISBN 052129628
• Troyat, Henri, Chekhov, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Corner House Pub, 1986, ISBN 0525244069
• Wood, James, What Chekhov Meant by Life, in The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief, London, Pimlico, 2000 edition, ISBN 0-7126-6557-9

[edit] External links

• Works by Anton Chekhov at Project Gutenberg
• Chekhov Lexicon. An ABC of Chekhov by the novelist William Boyd. Retrieved 14 November 2006.
• Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian
• Anton Chekhov at the Internet Movie Database
• A collection of 201 stories translated into English
• Chekhov's short stories.

v • d • e Plays by Anton Chekhov That Worthless Fellow Platonov · On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco · Ivanov · The Bear · A Marriage Proposal · The Wedding · The Wood Demon · The Seagull · Uncle Vanya · Three Sisters · The Cherry Orchard