Uncle Vanya | Anton Chekhov Biography

Born on January 29, 1860, in the port village of Taganrog in the Ukraine Anton Chekhov was the third son of Pavel Yegorovitch and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna (Morozov) Chekhov. Though the family was descended from Russian peasants, Chekhov’s grandfather purchased the family’s freedom, allowing Chekhov’s father to run a small grocery store. The family’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse, however, when his father’s store went bankrupt in 1876. Following that disaster, his parents moved to Moscow, leaving Chekhov in Taganrog to complete his education.

In 1879, Chekhov reunited with his family in Moscow, where he began studying for a degree in medicine at Moscow University. In 1884, he completed his studies, began to practice medicine, and started publishing short, humorous sketches in popular magazines. In 1886 these collected sketches were published as a book, entitled Motley Stories. According to his biographers, Chekhov only began to take his writing seriously after he moved to St. Petersburg in 1885 and befriended an influential editor named A. S. Suvorin. During the late-1880s, Chekhov wrote some of his most famous short stories, including ‘‘The Kiss’’ and ‘‘The Steppe.’’

Chekhov had attended plays by Nikolai Gogol and William Shakespeare growing up in Taganrog, as well as appearing as an actor on the amateur and professional stage. In the 1880s, Chekhov began to write one-act and full-length plays. Many of his dramatic efforts were poorly received; the 1896 premier of The Sea Gull at the Imperial Alexander Theater in St. Petersburg was drowned out by whispering and derisive laughter. Chekhov’s fortunes as a playwright improved after he met Konstantin Stanislavsky, who produced The Sea Gull at the Moscow Art Theater in 1898. In fact, the Moscow Art Theater was so indebted to Chekhov that an ideogram of a sea gull—from Chekhov’s play of that title—still adorns the theater’s curtain. In 1899, the Moscow Art Theater presented Uncle Vanya, a revised version of Chekhov’s one-act play The Wood Demon. Chekhov’s reputation as an innovative and influential dramatist rests with Uncle Vanya and his two subsequent plays, The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904).

Even as his literary fortunes grew, Chekhov continued to work as a doctor, often refusing payment for the care he dispensed because he earned a good living from writing. In the summer of 1901 Chekhov married Olga Leonardovna Knipper, an actress from the Moscow Art Theater. Ill with tuberculosis, he spent much of his last years traveling to health spas in Europe. He died on July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler, a German health resort, and was buried in Moscow. Chekhov was a highly regarded short story writer and dramatist in his own lifetime and recognition and appreciation for his unique literary gifts have continued to grow throughout the twentieth century..

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