Anton ChekhovDoctorWriterInnovatorThe Man, His World

and His Work

The ManAnton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Russia in 1860. His father was a liberated serf, a former member of the servant class who benefited from the changing social order in 19th century Russia.

The ManIn 1879 Chekhov moved to Moscow to study Medicine, graduating as a doctor in 1884.The inter-relationship between Chekhov’s medical career and his writing has often been noted, particularly by Chekhov himself. His work often features quite complex and ambivalent doctor-figures, including Chebutykin in Three Sisters (1901), a loose prototype of whom appears in Platonov (1882).

The ManWhich of his writing or his medical practice mattered more to him remains unclear. On one occasion, Chekhov wrote that “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress”. Given how dissatisfying marriage often is in Chekhov’s work, it is difficult to say which of a wife or a mistress was the more positive figure for him!

The ManNevertheless, Chekhov has often been said to bring a doctor-like, clinical perspective to his work, in the way that he views his characters without overt judgment, yet unflincingly deconstructs their pathologies and conditions.

The ManChekhov helped to support his family financially by writing stories for magazines, which were a common form of popular entertainment in the nineteenth century. Although he has come to be well-known for his short stories, it is his contributions to Russian, and world, drama that he is best remembered for. His greatest plays came at the end of his life: The Seagull (1898), Uncle Vanya (1900), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). He died of consumption in 1904, not long after marrying actress Olga Knipper, for whom Three Sisters was written.

His WorldThe Russia that Chekhov was born into was characterised by a bizarre mixture of both change and stasis. Europe as a whole was starting to emerge from centuries of feudalism, prompted by a number of peasant rebellions in the 1830s and 40s. 1848 had seen the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and Marx’s seminal Das Kapital was published in 1868. 1861 also saw the liberation of the serfs in Russia, a change that brought about some freedom, but little overall change in the Russian social order.

His WorldMuch of the changes that occurred in late-nineteenth century Russia were brought about by Tsar Alexander II. His assassination in 1881 led to a much more conservative and reactionary era of Russian government, under his son Alexander III.

His WorldLiterature in Russia at this time was, like the nation, a mixture of the conservative and the innovative. Fiction was particularly a site of political dissent and social critique, seen especially in the work of dissidents Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Alexander III frequently condemned such works – an interesting historical paradox, given that the regime that replaced Tsarist Russia also condemned dissenting authors.

His WorldTheatre, on the other hand, was a much more conservative domain. Russian theatre-going audiences liked moral clarity, with obvious goodies and baddies and straightforward moral resolution. Russian theatre was frequently melodramatic and simplistic. The great Russian writer Gogol condemned nineteenth-century Russian theatre with the question: “Where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?...The melodrama is lying most impudently”.

His WorkOne figure who existed in clear opposition to such a theatre was the Russian director Stanislavsky, whom Chekhov met in 1888. Contemporary Drama students still learn Stanislavsky’s theory of “method acting”, whereby actors seek to “become” the character they are playing. Such an approach is taken for granted today, especially after actors like Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando brought it into cinemas. However, in nineteenth-century Russia, it was nothing short of revolutionary.

His WorkChekhov and Stanislavsky did not always stand for the same things. Stanislavsky’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, for example, has been said to miss the essence of Chekhov’s work. Chekhov was not a realist playwright. Nevertheless, he sought to show life truthfully and to oppose the ways that the theatre of the time simplified and over-dramatised life as he and so many Russians knew it.

His WorkThree Sisters, like much of Chekhov’s work, addresses a complacent, bored Russian leisure class. Unlike much of Europe at the time, Russia lacked the kind of educated middle-class that so often led revolutions. The middle-classes in such countries were capable of revolution because they did not have the vested interest in retaining the old order, but had enough education and freedom to see that life could be different. Such a class did not exist in Russia.

His WorkWhat Russia did very much have, however, was a group of people, much like the Prozorovs, whose old-money lives were beginning to shift but who were unable to adapt to these changes. Some were being forced to work for the first time in their lives. Others, like the many military figures in Three Sisters, were still able to live leisurely lives, thanks to the position and rank that their money and status accorded them. Figures like Baron Tuzenbakh exemplify this well: moneyed and educated, they could be given comfortable postings in quiet, provincial towns where no military conflict was ever likely to occur.

His WorkThe large amounts of dramatic “space” that characterise Chekhov’s work – long sections of relative inaction, set off against brief, often peripheral, spurts of action; lengthy and generally banal “philosophical” conversations; many awkward pauses – is in many ways a symptom of his age. For the Russians that he portrays, such was their life: boring, unchanging, overly introspective.

His WorkBoredom amongst the “leisure classes” (Thorstein Veblen, US social theorist) in the Western world was so prevalent around the turn of the twentieth century that psychologists and doctors – obsessed at the time with discovering diseases and “pathologies” wherever they could find them – even coined the term “neurasthenia” to describe the effects of extreme boredom. The term meant “lack of nerve force”.

His WorkOf course, one had to be a member of the leisure classes to feel such boredom. The working classes were too busy…working. Hence, psychologists William James and William Beard suggested that the disease was a particularly glamorous one to have – a sign of social distinction!

His WorkIt was against such an ennui-ridden social backdrop that Chekhov emerged, bringing with him such impressive characters as Baron Tuzenbakh, who addressed such a world in his famous speech about the “mighty, healthy storm” that was “rising” and about to “blow sloth, indifference, contempt for work, this festering boredom right out of our society”.

His WorkHow much of the social change Chekhov foresaw, and how much he advocated in his work, remains unclear. Some suggest that some characters in his work, such as Tuzenbakh, predict the Revolution. It is difficult to know if this is true or not, and probably best to leave such ideas untouched in the exam.

His WorkCertainly, Chekhov would have been aware of what was happening to his country. Socialism was growing in support, culminating with the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, the year Three Sisters was published. A number of smaller revolutions took place in the following years; however, the Russian Revolution as we know it did not take place until 1917.

His WorkWhatever place the coming revolution took in Chekhov’s consciousness, he knew that the old Russia was changing. Yet for many Russians, like the Prozorovs, little seemed to change on a day-to-day basis. Thus, for Chekhov, stasis and impotence are more significant markers of early twentieth-century Russia than revolution and change are. The only way to understand Chekhov’s Russia, and the way it is portrayed in his work, is to see the tension that existed all through his life between those whose lives never changed, those who sought and accepted change, and those who had change forced upon them.

His WorkFor more information on the world that Chekhov wrote about and the role that his work had in shaping twentieth-century literature, read Richard Gilman’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Anton Chekhov, Plays.Gilman is a very well-respected literary critic whose approach to Chekhov will help you avoid a number of common errors in your work, and will help guide you through a very complex, but deeply rewarding, author.