The Darling | Author Biography

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, a Russian town on the Sea of Azov. His father owned a small grocery store, where Chekhov worked as a child, and imposed a strict religious discipline on the family. When Chekhov was sixteen, his father’s business failed, and the family moved to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison while Chekhov stayed on to finish his secondary school studies. After joining them in Moscow in 1880, Chekhov began to support his family by writing short, humorous sketches for popular journals. Measures of his prolific literary output during this time are the some three hundred short, humorous pieces written in the subsequent four years. Meanwhile, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Moscow, earning his degree as Doctor of Medicine in 1884. Chekhov later made the now famous comment that, while medicine was his wife, literature was his mistress.

Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov

That same year, 1884, his first two collections of stories were published: the first was entitled Tales of Melpomene, and for the second, In the Twilight, he was awarded the Russian Academy’s Pushkin Prize for distinguished literary achievement. His only novel, The Shooting Party, was also published in serial form between 1884 and 1885. A turning point in his literary career was in 1888 when he published his first piece in a serious journal, a long short story entitled ‘‘The Steppe.’’ He subsequently turned exclusively to writing longer, more serious stories. In 1889, Chekhov took a trip across Siberia to study life in a penal colony in Sakhalin where he stayed for two years, eventually publishing the monograph, The Island of Sakhalin (1893–1894). Chekhov continued to publish short stories, purchasing a six hundred acre country estate in 1892.

In 1898, he met and befriended Stanislavsky, whose newly formed experimental Moscow Art Theater eventually produced many of Chekov’s plays. His major dramatic works include The Sea Gull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1896), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). In 1901, he married the actress Olga Knipper, who starred in many of these productions.

In the late 1880s, Chekhov showed signs of the onset of tuberculosis, and he spent the last years of his life, from the late 1890s, in health spas in Crimea France and Germany, where he died in 1904. Over the course of his life, the inexhaustibly prolific Chekhov published approximately fourhundred-and-fifty narratives. Throughout the twentieth century, Chekhov, a cultural icon in Russia, has been considered internationally to be one of the greatest and most influential of short story writers and playwrights.of short story writers and playwrights.