Anton Chekhov
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов) (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) (Old Style: 17 January 1860 - 2 July 1904) was a major Russian writer known primarily for his short stories and plays. Many of his short stories are considered the apotheosis of the form while his plays, though few (although only four are considered major), have had a great impact on dramatic literature and performance.
Chekhov is better known in modern-day Russia for his several hundred short stories, many of which are considered masterpieces of the form. Yet his plays are also major influences on twentieth-century drama. From Chekhov, many contemporary playwrights have learned how to use mood, apparent trivialities and inaction to highlight the internal psychology of characters. Chekhov's four major plays?-The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard?-are frequently revived in modern productions.
Early life
Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, a small provincial port on the Sea of Azov, in southern Russia on January 29, 1860. A son of a grocer (his father had the official rank of Trader of the Third Guild - купeц 3й гильдии) and grandson to a serf who had bought his own freedom, Anton Chekhov was the third of six children.
Anton attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog (1866-1868), and at the age of eight he was sent to the Taganrog Gymnasium for boys, where he proved an average pupil. Rather reserved and undemonstrative, he nevertheless gained a reputation for satirical comments, for pranks, and for making up humorous nicknames for his teachers. He enjoyed playing in amateur theatricals and often attended performances at the provincial theater. As an adolescent he tried his hand at writing short "anecdotes", farcical or facetious stories, although he is also known to have written a serious long play at this time, "Fatherless", which he later destroyed.
Anton Chekhov was in love with theater and literature from his childhood. The first performance that he attended was Jacques Offenbach's operetta "Elena the Beautiful" onstage Taganrog City Theater on October 4, 1873. Anton was a thirteen years old Gymnasium student, and from that moment on, he became a great theater lover and spent there virtually all his savings. His favorite seat in the theater was at the back gallery for it was cheap (40 silver kopeeks), and because Gymnasium students needed a special authorisation to go to the theater. The permission was given not often and mostly for the weekends. Sometimes, Chekhov and other fellow students disguised themselves and even wore some makeup, spectacles or a fake beard, trying to fool the regular school staff who checked for unauthorized presence of students.
The writer's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, and Chekhov is supposed to have acquired his own gift for narrative and to have learned to read and write from her. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a strict disciplinarian and a religious zealot, demanded from all dedication to the Eastern Orthodox Church and the family business. In 1875, facing bankruptcy, he was forced to escape from creditors to Moscow, where his two eldest sons were attending the university, and for the next several years the family lived in poverty.
Anton stayed behind in Taganrog for three more years to finish school. He made ends meet by giving private tutoring, selling off household goods, and later, working in a clothing warehouse. In 1879, Chekhov completed schooling at the gymnasium and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at Moscow State University.
Early writings
In a bid to support his family, Chekhov started writing short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as Antosha Chekhonte (Антоша Чехонте), Man without the spleen (Человек без селезенки), and others. His first published piece appeared in the St Petersburg weekly Strekoza (Стрекоза, "Dragonfly") in March, 1880. It is not known how many stories Chekhov wrote during this period, but his output was prodigious, and he rapidly earned a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life.
Nicolas Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time and the owner of Oskolki (Осколки, "Fragments"), to which Chekhov began submitting some of his finer works, recognized the writer's talent but restricted the length of Chekhov's prose, limiting him only to sketches of a page and a half in length. Some believe that it was this limitation that developed Chekhov's trademark concise style.
Chekhov qualified as a physician in 1884, but continued writing for weekly periodicals and in 1885 began submitting to the Petersburgskaya Gazeta ("The Petersburg Gazette") longer works of a more somber nature; these were rejected by Leykin. By December 1885 he was invited to write for one of the most respected papers of St Petersburg, Novoye vremya (Новое Время, "New Times"), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin. By 1886 Chekhov was becoming a well-known writer, but he still considered his writing a hobby.
Dmitrii Grigorovich, one of the many writers who were attracted to Chekhov's stories, persuaded him to take his talents seriously. In an immensely fruitful year Chekhov wrote over a hundred stories and published his first collection "Motley Tales" {Pestrye rasskazy) with support from Suvorin, and in the following year the short story collection "At Dusk" (V sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize.
His illness forced Chekhov to spend long periods of time in Nice, France and later in Yalta in the Crimea. Chekhov died of complications of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany where he had been visiting a special clinic for treatment. He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.
Mature years
In the late 1880s, Chekhov contracted tuberculosis from his patient. In 1887, forced by overwork and ill health, Chekhov undertook a trip to eastern Ukraine. Upon his return, he started writing the long short story The Steppe (Step), which was eventually published in a serious literary journal Severny vestnik ("Northern Herald"). This short story marked a new height for the writer, having the prestige to be published in a leading periodical of the time and showing the maturity that distinguished his later fiction.
After a successful production of The Seagull by the Moscow Art Theatre, he wrote three more plays for the same company: Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In 1901 he married Olga Leonardovna Knipper (1870-1959), an actress who performed in his plays.
The movement toward naturalism in theatre that was sweeping Europe reached its highest artistic peak in Russia in 1898 with the formation of the Moscow Art Theatre (later called МХАТ, the Moscow Academy Art Theatre). Its name became synonymous with that of Chekhov, whose plays about the day-to-day life of the landed gentry achieved a delicate poetic realism that was years ahead of its time. Konstantin Stanislavsky, its director, became the 20th century's most influential theorist on acting.
Accompanied by Suvorin, Chekhov visited western Europe. Their long and close friendship negatively reflected on Chekhov's popularity, as Suvorin's Novoye vremya was considered politically reactionary in the increasingly liberal times. Eventually, Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the attitude taken by the paper toward the notorious Dreyfus Affair in France, with Chekhov championing the cause of Alfred Dreyfus.
His illness forced Chekhov to spend long periods of time in Nice, France and later in Yalta in the Crimea. Chekhov died of complications of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany where he had been visiting a special clinic for treatment. He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.
Assessment
It can be safely said that Chekhov revolutionized the genre of short story; his subject matter and technique influenced many future short-story writers. It is often said that little action occurs in Chekhov's stories and plays, but he compensates for lack of outward excitement by his original techniques for developing internal drama. The point of a typical Chekhov story is most often what happens within a given character, and that is conveyed indirectly, by suggestion or by significant detail. Chekhov eschews the traditional build-up of chronological detail, instead emphasizing moments of epiphanies and illumination over a significantly shorter period of time. As such, his best stories have a psychological realism and concision seldom matched by other writers. Tolstoy likened Chekhov's technique to that of the French Impressionists, who daubed canvases with paint apparently without reason, but achieved an overall effect of vivid, unchallengeable artistry.
One critic says of Chekhov that he is no moralist ?- he simply says "you live badly, ladies and gentlemen," but his smile has the indulgence of a very wise man.
As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov's letters have been rated second only to Aleksandr Pushkin's by the literary historian D.S. Mirsky. Although Chekhov is still chiefly known for his plays, critical opinion shows signs of establishing the stories, particularly those that were written after 1888, as an even more significant and creative literary achievement.
Equally innovative in his dramatic works, Chekhov sought to convey the texture of everyday life and move away from traditional ideas of plot and conventions of dramatic speech. Dialogue in his plays is not smooth or continuous: characters interrupt each other, several different conversations take place at the same time, and lengthy pauses occur when no one speaks at all. A recurring theme is the pointlessness of radical, human or mechanical change, versus the powerful inertia of slow organic cycles.
Perhaps one of his best known contributions is Chekhov's dictum (also known as Chekhov's Gun): 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.
Influence
Although contemporary Russian literary critics celebrated Chekhov, international fame came only after World War I with Constance Garnett's English translations.
Chekhov's plays were immensely popular in England in the 1920s and have become classics of the British stage. In the United States his fame came somewhat later, through the influence of Stanislavsky's technique for achieving realistic acting. American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets have used Chekhovian techniques, and few important writers of plays in the 20th century can have escaped Chekhov's influence entirely: for example, the work by British playwright Michael Frayn is often compared to that of Chekhov for its focus on humorous family situations and its insights into society.
Many writers of prose, particularly of short stories, have also been influenced by Chekhov, such as Katherine Mansfield. John Cheever has been called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" for his ability to capture the drama and sadness of the lives of his characters by revealing the undercurrents of apparently insignificant events. American writer Raymond Carver was also frequently compared to Chekhov, because of his minimalistic prose style, and tendency to meditate upon the humor and tragedy in the everyday lives of working class people. Master of the short story, the British author Victor Sawdon Pritchett's short stories are prized for their craftsmanship and comic irony similar to that of Chekhov.
The continuously growing list of films and theater productions based on Chekhov's stories and plays includes Emil Loteanu's My Tender and Affectionate Beast (1978, see Мой ласковый и нежный зверь at the Internet Movie Database), Nikita Mikhalkov and Marcello Mastroianni's Dark Eyes (1987), Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Anthony Hopkins's August (1996), Lanford Wilson's The Three Sisters (1997), among many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov
