Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov wrote several hundred short stories and four major plays while working as a doctor. Born in Taganrog in southern Russia in 1860, he was the grandson of a serf who had bought his own freedom, and his father, a violent shopkeeper, went bankrupt and fled to Moscow, leaving the sixteen-year-old Anton behind to finish school and sell the family possessions. He entered medical school in Moscow in 1879 and supported the whole family by writing comic sketches for magazines at a few kopecks a line, under pen names, at enormous speed. He qualified in 1884 and practised for years, often without charge, saying that medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. He coughed blood the same year and denied he had tuberculosis for two decades. In 1890 he travelled by cart and boat across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin, conducted a single-handed census of some ten thousand convicts and settlers, and published a study of conditions there. His stories abandoned plot in the conventional sense. Nothing is resolved, the narrator does not judge, and the significant thing is usually not said. Ward No. 6, The Lady with the Dog and The Bishop are among the finest. The Seagull failed catastrophically at its 1896 premiere and succeeded two years later at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, which had the technique for it. Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard followed; he called them comedies and objected to Stanislavsky's mournful staging. He married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901 and died at a German spa in 1904, aged forty-four.

• Lived: 1860 CE – 1904 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: playwright, writer