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Anton Chekhov Biography |
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, Russian Empire
, Germany
, short story writer and playwright
, major Russian short story writer and playwright. His best short stories are among the supreme achievements in prose narrative and regarded as world classics, while his brief playwriting career produced at least three plays which are incomparable and have altered the history of the theatre. George Steiner, 2001. Retrieved 31 October 2006.
Early life Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a small provincial port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russian Empire, the third of six children. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former Serfdom, was a grocer, amateur painter, and the pious choirmaster of the local church; a keen flogger of his children, Pavel Chekhov may be seen as the original of all Chekhov's great portraits of hypocrites.Wood, p 78. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, from whom Chekhov is supposed to have acquired his gift for narrative. Chekhov himself said: "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother."From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. As an adult, Chekhov was to criticise his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of their own father's behaviour towards their mother: Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool.Letter to brother Alexander, 2 January 1889, quoted in Malcom, p 102.Chekhov later wrote to his publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin, "From my childhood I have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave up thrashing me was tremendous." Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 27 March 1894. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog, and at the age of eight he was sent to the Taganrog Gymnasium (school) for boys, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he proved an average pupil. Reserved and undemonstrative, he nevertheless gained a reputation for satirical comments, for pranks, and for inventing humorous nicknames for his teachers. He enjoyed amateur theatricals and played the part of Gorodnitchy in a performance of Gogol's The Inspector General put on by the Chekhov children, in which he reviewed an imaginary squad of Cossacks.Biographical Sketch.He often attended performances at the provincial theatre. The first performance that he attended was Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène at Taganrog Theatre on 4 October 1873, as a thirteen-year-old Gymnasium student. From that moment on, he became a great theatre lover and spent virtually all his savings there. His favorite seat was in the back gallery because it was cheap (40 silver kopecks). Sometimes Chekhov and fellow students disguised themselves and even wore makeup, spectacles or a fake beard, trying to fool school staff checking for the unauthorized presence of students. In a mock autobiography written in 1892 for V.A.Tikhonov, editor of the journal Sever, Chekhov said, "I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen".Quoted by Malcom, p 16. As an adolescent he tried his hand at writing short "anecdotes", farcical or facetious stories, and he is also known to have written a serious long play at this time, Fatherless, which he later destroyed. Stories written when he was twelve show him already in command of the Russian language, with the same simple, direct style as that of his maturity.Payne, introduction to Forty Stories, p XIX. In 1875, facing bankruptcy, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov was forced to escape from creditors to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending the university. For the next several years the family lived in poverty, Chekhov's mother physically and emotionally broken.Letter to cousin Mihail, 10 May 1877. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov stayed behind in Taganrog for three more years to finish school, boarding with a man called Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.Malcom, p 25. Chekhov paid for his education by private tutoring and by catching and selling goldfinches, as well as by selling short sketches to the newspapers.Payne, p XX. He sent every rouble he could spare to Moscow, along with letters full of jokes to cheer up the family.Payne, pXX. During this time he read widely and analytically, including Cervantes, Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.Letter to brother Mihail, 1 July 1876. Letters of Anton Chekhov. He also enjoyed a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.Payne, p XX. Many of Chekhov's mature stories are about children separated from their families: for example, The Steppe concerns a boy, Yegorushka, sent away from home to live with strangers; The Steppe. Sleepy tells of the thirteen-year-old nursemaid Varka, left in charge of a baby; Sleepy. while in Vanka a nine-year-old orphan who has been sent far away from his village as an apprentice to a cruel shoemaker writes to his grandfather begging to be taken home, "and when I grow up to be a man I will look after you and I will not let anyone hurt you…" Vanka. In 1879, Chekhov completed schooling at the gymnasium (school) and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at Moscow State University. Early writings Chekhov calmly, and with a "strange, sourceless maturity",Wood, p 79. now assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he daily wrote short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as Antosha Chekhonte (Антоша Чехонте) and Man without a Spleen (Человек без селезенки). His output was prodigious during this period, and he rapidly earned a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life. By the age of twenty-six, Chekhov had published more than four hundred short stories, sketches and vignettes, as well as two books of collected narratives; but much of his early work remains untranslated and, owing to his many pseudonymous or anonymous contributions to obscure newspapers, uncollected. Nicolas Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time and the owner of Oskolki ( Fragments), to which Chekhov began submitting some of his choicer works, recognized the writer's talent but limited him to sketches of a page and a half in length. Some believe this discipline stimulated the development of Chekhov's trademark concise style. Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher and more mocking than in his mature fiction. In 2001 George Steiner wrote of the early stories translated in The Undiscovered Chekhov: There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty. This can take the form of physical assault, of lacerating accidents. More subtly, there is the unctuous sadism of money and of social rank. Young women are simply sold off to rheumy, ageing bidders. Alcoholics are mocked and tormented when they cannot scrounge the kopek needed for their next drink. The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature. George Steiner, Vodka miniatures, belching and angry cats, 2001. Retrieved 31 October 2006.Chekhov wrote his first full-length play, variously called the "untitled play", That Worthless Fellow Platonov or simply Platonov in 1880 and tried without success to have it staged. That year he also wrote The Little Apples, which may be considered his first fully realised story, in which cruel beatings intrude on an earthly paradise, destroying a state of innocence.Payne, p XXIII.The influence of Dostoevsky has been detected in Little Apples.In the essay Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden by Robert Louis Jackson, 1993. Chekhov's early stories have been considered juvenilia and until recently were often omitted from collections; but from The Little Apples on, a steady power is evident in Chekhov's best work, and a mind already formed.Payne, p XXIV. In 1884 Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his first profession, though he made little money from it and treated the poor for free.Malcom, p 26. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, however, and earned enough money to move the family to progressively better accommodation. In 1885 he began submitting to the Peterburgskaya Gazeta ( The Petersburg Gazette) longer works of a more sombre nature, which were rejected by Leykin; but in the same year he was invited to write for one of the most respected papers in St Petersburg, Novoye vremya ( New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexei Suvorin. By 1886, Chekhov was not only a well-known writer but was attracting critical attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitri Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman, The Huntsman. "You have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation". He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality. Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and admitted, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself". Malcom, p 32-3. Chekhov may have done himself a disservice with these words, since surviving early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending.Payne, p XXIV. But Grigorevich's advice undoubtedly inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old writer. In a prolific 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. This marked the beginnings of a highly productive career for the writer. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov had found himself coughing blood, and this worsened in 1886, though he would not admit tuberculosis at first.From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.In April, however, he confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."Letter to N.A.Leykin, 6 April 1886. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Mature years In 1887, under strain from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to the Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe."There is a scent of the steppe and one hears the birds sing. I see my old friends the ravens flying over the steppe." Letter to his sister, 2 April 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. On his return, he started writing the novella-length short story The Steppe, eventually published in Severny vestnik (Northern Herald) in 1888. This masterpiece represented another turning point for Chekhov: it not only won him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper but achieved much of the mature form of his later fiction. Chekhov describes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe has been described as a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics".Michael Finke, quoted by Malcom, p 147. The way Chekhov's narrative drifts with the arbitrary thought processes of the characters was an innovation in fiction, later taken up by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf."This use of stream-of-consciousness would, in later years, become the basis of Chekhov's innovation in stagecraft; it is also his innovation in fiction." Wood, p 81. In 1890, Chekhov made a 9650-km (6000-mile) journey across Siberia by train, river steamer, and horse-drawn carriage to conduct a sociological and medical survey in a Russian katorga (penal colony) on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Russia. His findings, published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), had some influence in moderating the harsh prison rule on the island. The first production of The Seagull, which premiered on 17 October 1896 in St. Petersburg, was disastrous for Chekhov. The opening night audience was expecting a comedy and the company had had only nine days to rehearse. Jeers and boos greeted Nina's monologue at the end of Act I. Chekhov was so distraught that he wrote "I shall never forget last evening...I shall not have that play produced in Moscow, ever. Never again shall I write plays or have them staged." Audiences from the second and third nights were more appreciative, but Chekhov ignored them. After the second production of The Seagull (and first successful one) by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, 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 (literature) in theatre that was sweeping Europe reached its highest artistic peak in Russia in 1898 with the formation of the Moscow 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 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 and later in Yalta. He died of complications of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany while visiting a special clinic for treatment. The circumstances surrounding his last days are fictionalised in Raymond Carver's award-winning short story "Errand". He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. Assessment It can be safely said that Chekhov revolutionized the literary genre of the short story; his subject matter and technique influenced many future short-story writers. 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 epiphany and illumination over a significantly shorter period of time. As such, his best stories have a psychological novel and concision seldom matched by other writers. Leo 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 that 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. 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 (recorded by S. Shchukin, Memoirs, 1911). Influence Although contemporary Russian literary critics celebrated Chekhov, international fame came only after World War I with Constance Garnett's English language translations. Chekhov's plays were immensely popular in the United Kingdom in the 1920s and have become classics of the British stage. In the United States his fame came somewhat later, through the influence of Konstantin Stanislavski technique for achieving realistic acting. American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Clifford Odets have used Chekhovian techniques, and few important 20th century playwrights 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 and Eudora Welty. 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. Carver like Chekhov presented his characters with compassion and didn't place judgement on them or their actions. 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 theatre productions based on Chekhov's stories and plays includes Emil Loteanu's My Tender and Affectionate Beast (1978, see ), Nikita Mikhalkov's An Unfinished Piece for a Piano Player (1976) and 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. Trivia Quotations See also 
Courtesy of: http://www.wikipedia.org/ |
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