Anton Chekhov
1860–1904 3 entries
Biography
Anton Chekhov was a Russian writer and doctor, a master of the short story and one of the greatest playwrights in history. Born in 1860 in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf, he studied medicine in Moscow and paid his way, and helped to support his family, by writing humorous sketches for magazines. He practised medicine all his life, often treating the poor without charge, and in 1890 he travelled across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, about which he wrote a report.
His hundreds of stories, among them The Lady with the Dog and Ward No. 6, show ordinary people with sympathy and without judgment. His plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, staged by the Moscow Art Theatre, changed modern drama with their quiet action and unspoken feelings. Ill with tuberculosis, he married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901. He died in 1904 in the spa town of Badenweiler, in Germany, at forty-four.
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