Anton Chekhov
1860–1904
Biography
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, and died in 1904 at Badenweiler, a German spa town where he had gone for his health. He trained as a doctor and practised medicine for most of his life, writing alongside it. He began by writing comic sketches and short pieces to earn money, and over roughly twenty-five years he produced more than five hundred works, among them stories, sketches and plays that are now part of world literature.
His reputation as a playwright rests on four plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. After The Seagull's disappointing first production in 1896, Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre staged it to acclaim in 1898, and that company went on to premiere his last two plays. His drama does without conventional plot built on big events. Instead it builds a mood, with the real feeling running beneath what the characters say. In his stories he made formal changes that shaped the modern short story, and he believed a writer's task was to state a problem accurately rather than to solve it.
Three of his stories are on this site. Ward No. 6 (Палата № 6, 1892) follows a provincial doctor who has stopped caring for his hospital and ends up locked in a ward for the mentally ill. The Man in a Case (Человек в футляре), written in the late 1890s, portrays a schoolmaster who hides from life behind rules and a fear of change. The Lady with the Dog (Дама с собачкой) tells how a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman meet in Yalta and begin an affair that unsettles them both. Together they show the doctor's eye for suffering and the small social failures that run through his fiction.
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Books
Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (translated by Julius West)
Eight of Chekhov's plays, from the one-act farces The Proposal, The Wedding, The Bear and The Anniversary to the full-length The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The sisters long for Moscow while their lives slip by in a provincial town, and a family loses its orchard to a…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (translated by Constance Garnett)
Chekhov's best-known tale of a married man and woman who meet on holiday at Yalta and cannot let each other go, with other stories of provincial life, ambition and loneliness. Constance Garnett's translation keeps his light, painful touch.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Wife, and Other Stories
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (translated by Constance Garnett)
Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov stories, among them 'The Wife', 'A Dreary Story' and 'The Man in a Case'. Provincial doctors, landowners and clerks muddle through marriage and duty. Understated, humane and very funny at turns. This book uses the racial and other slurs…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Дама с собачкой
by Антон Павлович Чехов
At Yalta a bored married banker, Gurov, begins a holiday affair with a young woman walking her small dog, and is surprised to find he cannot forget her. Chekhov's story follows two unhappy people drawn into a love that has no easy ending.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Палата № 6
by Антон Павлович Чехов (1860—1904)
Dr Ragin, who runs a shabby provincial hospital and prefers philosophising to curing, falls into long talks with a patient in the madhouse ward. Chekhov's longest story turns the doctor's detached calm into a grim test of his own beliefs. This book uses the racial and other…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Человек в футляре
by Антон Павлович Чехов (1860—1904)
Belikov, a teacher of Greek, goes about in galoshes and wraps himself in rules and fears, and terrorises a whole town with his timidity. When he is nearly engaged, his colleagues' mockery lets loose a comedy with a sad end.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.