Anton Chekhov's Prose A Middlebury blog. Skip to content. Recent Posts Welcome! Create a Site Search Sites Log in. Not much seems to happen to his lonely, often desperate characters, but their inner conflicts take on great significance. Their stories are very specific, painting a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian society, yet timeless. However, by this point his health was in decline due to the tuberculosis that had affected him since his youth.
While staying at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, he died in the early hours of July 15, , at the age of Chekhov is considered one of the major literary figures of his time. His plays are still staged worldwide, and his overall body of work influenced important writers of an array of genres, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Henry Miller.
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He was known for sci-fi works like 'Foundation' and 'I, Robot. From to Chekhov continued to write for the theater. On January 31, , Ivanov opened its St. Petersburg run at the Alexandrine Theater to extremely favorable reviews.
But Chekhov, bending under the strain of overseeing rehearsals, advising his producers, and dealing with the press, was becoming morose and irritated at his success. He declared himself "bored" with Ivanov and contemptuous of theatrical people.
In general, he was impatient with praise because it seldom matched his own highly critical self-estimation, while fame brought with it heightened public expectations and unsolicited advice.
It also brought visitors, and even toward welcome visitors Chekhov often felt ambivalent. When alone with his family, as at his rented country house in Babkino or in summer residences at Luka in the Ukraine, he longed for company and the excitement of city life. But he quickly grew tired of guests because they kept him away from his work.
After Chekhov's fiction diminished in quantity but increased in quality. He began trying to write longer stories without sacrificing conciseness. These two works, along with "Sleepy" and "The Seizure," are among the finest instances of what Oliver Elton in Chekhov: The Taylorian Lecture called the "clinical study": stories drawing on Chekhov's medical expertise and depicting psychosomatic illness or the psychological effects of physical disease or distress.
It was a form he had used in earlier stories such as "Oysters" and "Tif" "Typhus," but had never before developed at such length or with such skill. In "The Name-Day Party" a pregnant wife, hurt and infuriated by her husband's failure to share his professional concerns with her, must cope with the added pressures of entertaining the guests at his name-day party.
This superb study of the emotional effects of marital and social hypocrisy ends with a harrowing description of the wife's experience of miscarriage, which results from the day-long physical and mental strain. Chekhov claimed that many of his female readers attested to the accuracy of this story's description of labor pains, a description based on his clinical observations. In "A Dreary Story" a dying medical professor, Nicolai Stepanovich, recounts at length his final months, his night fears and insomnia, his impatience with colleagues and weariness with family affairs.
Alarmed by his own indifference to his daughter's elopement with a scoundrel and vulgarian, he registers that indifference as "a paralysis of the soul, a premature death," and discovers within himself only a bundle of peevish desires uninformed by any "general idea, or the god of a living man. Having discovered the meaninglessness of life, the professor is now useless to the living.
Scholars have drawn numerous parallels between Chekhov and his protagonist in "A Dreary Story," particularly in the professor's pessimistic and cynical opinions on life, on the academic professions, and on the theater, despite Chekhov's own vigorous disclaimers to Suvorin, recorded by Simon Karlinsky in Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought : "If I present you with the professor's ideas, have confidence in me and don't look for Chekhovian ideas in them.
It is far from true that, as Lev Shestov maintained in Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays , Chekhov was doing only one thing in his writing, "killing human hopes"; but it is a rare occasion in his fictive universe when expectations of happiness--especially in matters of the heart- -are fulfilled.
At the same time, Chekhov strongly believed in scientific and technological progress--slow though it might be in coming--and was a thoroughgoing pragmatist, like another character of his, Dr. The author believed in doing one's best for today, letting tomorrow take care of itself, and remaining open to the joys of life, however vulnerable to subsequent disappointment such openness might leave one.
Chekhov's least likeable characters are nearly always energetic and efficient but indifferent to deeper human feelings, or else so benumbed by suffering and privation as to have died emotionally, like the narrator of "A Dreary Story" or the Siberian ferryman, Semyon, of "V ssylke" "In Exile," By early , Chekhov's spirits were low. His brother Nicolai had died the previous summer after a protracted bout of tuberculosis.
In the autumn, The Wood Demon had been rejected by two theaters and had closed for good after three performances at a third. A projected novel had been abandoned after two years of intense work, and the liberal press was attacking him for his "unprincipled writing. In April, after months of preparation, he set off to visit the eastern Siberian penal colony of Sakhalin Island to take a census of its inhabitants, interview its officials, and write a report on conditions there.
Though he cited scientific, humanitarian, and literary reasons for his unusual decision, and a vague desire to "pay off my debt to medicine," according to a letter printed by Yarmolinsky, Chekhov was motivated principally by the need for a radical change of scene. The trip was arduous and hazardous, even for a healthy man: five thousand miles across the Siberian wilderness, three thousand by horse-drawn cart along the infamous trakt , the dirt road that spanned Siberia.
On arrival, Chekhov observed and carefully recorded the misery of life on the five-hundred-mile-long island, conducting some interviews a day. In October he sailed for Odessa by way of Vladivostok, Hong Kong, Singapore which he found depressing , Ceylon which he thought a paradise on earth , and Port Said, arriving December 1.
Once in Moscow, he joined his family in their new lodgings on Malaya Dmitrovka Street. Material based on his eastern journey later appeared in "Gusev" "Gusev," , "In Exile" , and "Ubiystvo" "Murder," From February to March of , Chekhov worked on "Duel" "The Duel," , a long story set in the Caucasus and depicting the antagonism between a young, Bohemian romantic and idealist, Layevsky, and a cold-blooded, hard-working, ambitious zoologist, von Koren, who has fanatical convictions about the need to "exterminate" social "drones" like Layevsky.
Typically, their creator refuses to take sides in the dispute, although Layevsky reforms at the end. That summer, he lived at Bogimovo in a mansion provided for the season by an admirer of his work. In March, , Chekhov and his family moved to his newly purchased country estate at Melikhovo in Moscow District. Here they remained in residence until , their longest--and happiest--stay in any one home. Chekhov the landowner was on good terms with the local peasants, treating their medical problems free of charge, paying for his own dispensary, financing and overseeing the building of schools, and organizing measures against the cholera epidemics of and His experiences greatly influenced his depiction of peasant life in such mature works as "Muzhiki" "Peasants," and "V ovrage" "In the Ravine," , the former of which caused a furor when first published because Chekhov refused to sentimentalize or idealize his peasants in the accepted manner of such promoters of unsophisticated wisdom as Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
At one point, "Peasants" even reads like an indictment of the peasantry for its brutality, greed, and sordidness. While the narodniks , or "peasant fanciers," of the liberal press excoriated Chekhov, the Marxists praised the story for its realistic portrayal of class conditions. Dissatisfied, as ever, with staying in one location for too long, Chekhov made frequent trips to Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and the south of Russia. Everywhere he went he was welcomed, praised, and celebrated with parties, but he felt rather distant from it all and soon wearied of the social round. It was not a passionate affair. Chekhov had always manifested a somewhat fastidious attitude toward sex, commensurate with his generally stolid or passive temperament, and seemed to believe that unrestrained sexual activity contributed to senility.
Other women figured in Chekhov's life during the early s, including Lydia "Lika" Mizinov, another friend of his sister's whose intense love for him he reciprocated only as friendship, and Lydia Avilova, wife, mother, and minor writer, who, at their first meeting, managed to convince herself that Chekhov felt toward her a passionate, undying love that was stifled only by guilt over her marital status. Mizonov finally turned her attentions to Chekhov's friend, the Ukrainian writer Ignatius Potapenko, a married man; Chekhov used the affair as a model for the relationship between Trigorin, the writer, and Nina, the aspiring actress, in The Seagull, much to the chagrin of Mizinov and Potapenko.
As for Avilova's allegations presented in her memoirs Chekhov in My Life , most modern scholars--with the exception of David Magarshack, who added an appendix to the reprint of Chekhov: A Life specifically to refute Ernest Simons's dismissal of Avilova's claims--see them as highly subjective interpretations unsubstantiated by corroborating evidence in Chekhov's notebooks and correspondence.
His trip to Sakhalin and the publication of a chapter on escapees in late were admired by left-wing critics and helped to patch up a quarrel between Chekhov and V. Lavrov, the editor of Russkaya mysl.
After two years of hesitation over possible censorship, Chekhov sent Lavrov Sakhalin Island , minus the last four chapters, for serialized publication from October, to July, The entire work was printed in the journal during Chekhov's longest piece by far, it was hailed by liberals as a signal contribution to the movement for prison reform.
According to W. Bruford in Anton Chekhov , Communist leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin, reading the story as an allegorical representation of a repressive society, later wrote, "When I had read this story to the end, I was filled with awe. I could not remain in my room and went out of doors.
I felt as if I were locked up in a ward too. Ward Number Six and a later story Moya zhizn My Life, , the account of a young man who defies his architect father to work as a common laborer, mark Chekhov's final experiments with the Tolstoyan philosophy of pacifistic resistance to evil.
Tolstoy was still, however, a towering object of Chekhov's admiration because of his two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina , the latter of which had influenced Chekhov's writing of "The Name-Day Party.
Other outstanding works from Chekhov's Melikhovo period include a study of intellectual megalomania, "Chorny monakh" "The Black Monk," , "Babye tsarstvo" "A Woman's Kingdom," , "Volodya bol'shoy i Volodya malen'ki" "The Two Volodyas," , "Tri goda" "Three Years," , "Ariadne" , "Skripka Rotshil'da" "Rothschild's Fiddle," , "Na podvode" "In the Cart," , "Vrodnom uglu" "At Home," , and the so-called "trilogy" of stories--one whose title has been translated as "A Hard Case" , "Kryzhovnik" "Gooseberries," , and "O lyubvi" "Concerning Love," --each of which is told by one narrator to characters who figure as narrators in the other two stories.
All three stories focus on a failure to grasp the essential joys of life by not taking advantage of opportunities that come only once in a lifetime, for fear of making a mistake. From October to November, , Chekhov wrote The Seagull, a play that deliberately flouts the stage conventions of nineteenth-century theater: it has no starring role, its dramatic action declines rather than builds with each act, and it eschews dramatic crises and the direct representation of powerful feelings.
Yarmolinsky's Letters records the playwright's own assessment of his art in The Seagull : "I began it forte and wound it up pianissimo --contrary to all the precepts of dramatic art.
But the play is flawed by heavy-handed symbolism borrowed from the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen--the use of the dead seagull to represent hopes betrayed; and the work contains an ambivalence of tone that does not resolve itself, as it does in the later plays, into a perfect balance of opposites. While Donald Rayfield argued in A Chekhov Companion essay that the play is in many ways meant to be "farcical," critics are generally undecided about how seriously to take its subtitle, "A Comedy in Four Acts," since the work treats the ruin of a young woman's life and the suicide of the young man who once loved her.
Petersburg was a complete disaster, due as much to the circumstances in which the play was produced as to its originality. Besides being under-rehearsed, The Seagull was scheduled for the benefit night of a well-known comic actress, for whom there was no part in the play.
Her assembled fans were displeased with what they felt was highbrow experimentation, and a riot ensued. Though later performances were well received, theater management decided to close the play after only five performances.
Chekhov was devastated and swore never again to write plays. He was nevertheless devoting a great deal of effort to revising The Wood Demon, the stage failure that eventually became the play Uncle Vanya.
On the evening of March 22, , Chekhov suffered a violent hemorrhage of the lungs while at dinner with Suvorin in Moscow. He was hospitalized for two weeks, during which time he suffered a second hemorrhage.
He then had to acknowledge his illness. During the ensuing summer at Melikhovo, he stopped writing completely, cut back on all his activities, and his health began to improve.
For the winter of to , Chekhov sought a climate favorable to his health, resuming his writing in Nice on the French Riviera. In France at this time controversy was stirred by the Dreyfus affair, in which military officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly tried and imprisoned for treason against France; Chekhov took an interest in the case, particularly after the publication of Emile Zola's "J'accuse," a defense of the court-martialed Jewish lieutenant.
Support for Dreyfus also earned Chekhov's partisanship, which led to a break with his friend Suvorin, whose Novoye vremya was publishing vehemently anti-Semitic attacks on the Dreyfusards.
In Nice Chekhov was contacted by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder along with Constantin Stanislavsky of the new Moscow Art Theater, which was intended to stimulate public taste for the "new drama.
From that point on, Chekhov's activities as a dramatist and those of the Moscow Art Theater were intertwined. In September, , on his way to winter in Yalta, Chekhov attended rehearsals of his play and was introduced to the members of the new theater troupe, including Olga Knipper, the actress who later became his wife. At the end of the first act, after a stunned silence, the audience exploded into applause.
At their insistence, a telegram was sent to Chekhov in Yalta to tell him of his success. During Chekhov's stay in Yalta that winter he purchased land on which to build a new villa and bought a seaside cottage not far from the city. His stories from this time, such as "Novaya dacha" "New Villa," , and especially "Po delam sluzhby" "On Official Business," , show a growing awareness of the rift between the upper and lower classes and a new concern for social justice.
It was at this time, perhaps not coincidentally, that he became friends with a young writer of social conscience, Maksim Gorky. Chekhov divided his time between Melikhovo and Moscow during the spring and summer of , helping the Maly Theater in its preparations for the Moscow premiere of Uncle Vanya, which had been making the rounds of provincial theaters since its appearance two years before in Chekhov's collected plays.
Except for its principal characters and central theme, Uncle Vanya is almost unrecognizable as a later version of The Wood Demon. The play focuses on the Voynitsky household, plunged into turmoil by the sudden appearance of the now nearly senile Professor Serebryakov, the intellectual brother-in-law for whose benefit "Uncle" Vanya Voynitsky, to manage the family estate, has sacrificed his adult life. In representing this situation Chekhov fulfilled the promise of The Seagull : he created a perfectly orchestrated tragicomedy of nuanced pauses, significant breakdowns and cross-purposes in conversation, elusively symbolic objects, and farcical violence, all pointing up the unrecoverable loss of a whole and meaningful life.
However, the play was much too ambiguous for the Theatrical and Literary Committee that administered the imperial theaters, of which the Maly was one. They voted to send Uncle Vanya back to its author for cuts and changes. Chekhov took the opportunity to withdraw the play and submit it to his new friends at the Moscow Art Theater, where it became the talk of the autumn season in Moscow after its first performance on October 26, During the summer of the two became lovers, but only after Olga first made a point of securing the friendship of Chekhov's sister, Mariya, and the good will of the Chekhov household.
By August Olga was playfully cajoling the writer in her letters from Moscow to marry her. During October, , Chekhov joined Olga in Moscow with the manuscript of The Three Sisters, to which he had devoted nearly all his energies since the new year. In The Hudson Review Howard Moss described The Three Sisters as "the most musical of all of Chekhov's plays in construction, the one that depends most heavily on the repetition of motifs," and yet a play that is "seemingly artless.
Rzepka declared in his Modern Language Studies essay that The Three Sisters continually invokes "a world of art" larger than life while, like life itself, betraying no "sense of Ominously, the Art Theater actors and producers felt it to be unplayable. Irritated, as much with Moscow in general as with the players, and feeling definitely uncomfortable with Olga's constant presence, Chekhov took a brief trip to St.
In general, Chekhov was unhappy with most of the Art Theater's productions of his plays because of Stanislavsky's tendency to overplay and underscore scenes that Chekhov had conceived as exquisitely understated and indirect. This clash of interpretative styles became very clear during rehearsals for The Three Sisters, where the real tragedy appears not in such events as the killing of Irina's suitor, Tusenbach, by the ironical dandy, Solyoni, nor in the success of Natasha, the grasping and ruthless sister-in-law of the Prozoroffs, but in the agonizing stultification of three lives that are finally smothered under the weight of everyday occurrences.
When The Three Sisters premiered on January 21, , response was lackluster, criticism lukewarm. The public did not know how to receive the play. This news reached Chekhov as he was touring Italy. After he returned to Yalta in early , Olga increasingly pressured Chekhov to marry her.
She did not want to spend time with him and his family in Yalta, living in his house and secretly joining him in his room at night. In May, Chekhov reluctantly agreed to matrimony and joined Olga in Moscow to exchange vows.
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