Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Childhood and youth of Anton Chekhov

The future writer was born on January 17 (29), 1860 in the south of Russia, in Taganrog, into a large merchant family. The head of the family, Pavel Yegorovich, sold groceries. He was a pious man, but of a harsh nature, and his five sons and daughter began working early. From five in the morning they sang in the church choir, and in the evenings they guarded their father's shop. At the age of eight, Chekhov entered the Taganrog gymnasium, which today bears the writer's name. It was here, within the walls of one of the oldest educational institutions in the south of Russia, that the young Anton Chekhov began writing stories and even acquired the first of his many pseudonyms - Antosha Chekhonte. The young schoolboy passionately loved literature and the stage: he published a humorous magazine, participated in his friends' home performances, and never missed a production at the Taganrog theater. In 1876, when Chekhov was only 16 years old, his father went bankrupt, sold his property and moved with his family to Moscow. Anton stayed in Taganrog to finish high school. He lived with his parents' former lodger and earned a living by giving private lessons. In 1879, Chekhov entered Moscow University. He chose the profession of a doctor and by 1882 he had already immersed himself in medical practice - he began to help doctors at the Chikinskaya Hospital in Voskresensk (now Istra) near Moscow. Chekhov continued to work at the same hospital after graduating from the university in 1884. Then the young doctor moved to Zvenigorod and headed the local hospital for a while.

The development of Anton Chekhov as a writer

In 1880, the satirical magazine "Strekoza" published A.P. Chekhov's first printed story, "A Letter to a Learned Neighbor." Chekhov wrote a lot and quickly, and this debut was followed by the publication of short humorous stories and feuilletons in various Moscow and St. Petersburg publications. In the early 1880s, Chekhov's short stories were published under various pseudonyms (Antosha Chekhonte, A Man Without a Spleen, etc.), which was a characteristic feature of the genre. Soon Chekhov "outgrew" feuilletons, vaudevilles, and humoresques. From the second half of the 1880s, the themes of his works became more serious, and the author was increasingly occupied with the tragedy of everyday life. During these years, Chekhov's interest in everyday life was born, and that special "uneventfulness" of Chekhov's prose began to appear, which many critics would later note. By the end of the 1880s, humorous short stories had given way to stories. "The Steppe" and "A Boring Story", published in thick magazines, brought Chekhov literary fame. The collection of stories "In the Twilight", published in 1887, was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The first serious dramatic work of A.P. Chekhov, the play "Ivanov", also dates back to this time. The stories of the late 1880s combined an emphatically dispassionate description of insignificant everyday events and a deep tragedy shining through them ("I Want to Sleep").

Writing activity.

In 1890, Chekhov set off on a journey to Sakhalin that lasted almost a year. The writer traveled across Siberia, lived on the island for several months, interacted extensively with its exiled inhabitants, conducted a census, and then returned home by sea. According to Chekhov himself, the trip to Sakhalin had a huge impact on both his worldview and his work. Upon his return, Chekhov spent five years working on the book Sakhalin Island – travel notes in which detached descriptions and statistical data gave rise to the author’s inexpressible horror at the lack of rights, humiliation and poverty of convicts and their families. Stories about the lives of prisoners and scenes of cruel corporal punishment are interspersed in the book with detailed statistics of diseases that the island’s population suffered from and ethnographic notes about the indigenous Ainu inhabitants of Sakhalin. The writer spent the 1890s in Moscow and the Melikhovo estate near Moscow. The two Moscow years were marked by communication with many literary and artistic figures. In Melikhovo, where Chekhov moved in 1892, he wrote the famous stories "The House with a Mezzanine", "The Man in a Case", the novella "Ward No. 6", the play "The Seagull" and more than 30 other works.

Chekhov's works

In these years, Chekhov's work increasingly showed interest in a special type of dramatic action, or rather, a kind of inaction. Contrary to the traditions of the dramatic genre, Chekhov's plays were centered not on events that critically change the lives of the heroes, but on everyday trifles. Chekhov's theater is the everyday life of the heroes, insignificant dialogues, slowly developing action, behind which lies the deep lyricism and complex experiences of Chekhov's characters, their disunity and unresolvable internal conflicts. Chekhov's characters often "don't hear" each other, their dialogues fall apart into separate lines, the combination of which creates a bizarre semantic play - sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. The dispassionate playwright leaves the interpretation of these lines, the penetration into the psychology of the characters and the comprehension of the internal conflict to the reader and viewer. This construction of works became an innovation not only for Russian dramaturgy, but also for Russian theatre: the new conflict and the ways of expressing it required changes in the very type of stage action and approaches to staging. It is no coincidence that Chekhov's first critics reproached his plays for lack of plot, excessive protractedness, weakness. Only with the arrival of K.S. Stanislavsky and V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko to the theatre, Chekhov's new artistic language, his lyricism and the special inner movement of his plays were interpreted on stage. He continued his private medical practice, fought cholera as a sanitary inspector, took part in zemstvo affairs, built schools, and was involved in charity. A writer and a doctor, a public figure and a private person coexisted in his nature. Chekhov also managed to travel around Europe: he visited Austria, Italy, France, and other countries.

Family

Despite his difficult childhood and youth, Chekhov always felt a sense of unity with his large family. Over time, Anton Pavlovich's brothers and sister became his comrades in the field of literature and art. The elder brother Alexander became known as a prose writer, publicist and memoirist. He moved in Moscow literary circles, published in humorous magazines in his youth and did a lot for Anton's literary career. Alexander's son was the famous actor and director Mikhail Alexandrovich Chekhov. Another brother of the writer, the artist Nikolai Chekhov, illustrated Anton's humorous pieces in satirical magazines. Ivan Pavlovich, the youngest of the brothers, was a famous Russian educator, a people's teacher, and a great authority in the field of education. Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov became famous as a writer, literary critic, editor, publisher of children's magazines, translator, and the first biographer and researcher of his famous brother's work. Chekhov's sister Maria Pavlovna outlived all of her brothers by a long way. She created the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta and devoted many years to collecting, preserving, and studying Anton Pavlovich's legacy.

Personal life

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's personal life was not easy. In his youth, he was often infatuated with women, had affairs, but it never came to marriage. In 1898, the writer met Olga Leonardovna Knipper, an actress at the Moscow Art Theater, where plays by the then famous playwright were staged. In 1901, Chekhov and Knipper got married, but they almost always lived apart: Olga in Moscow, where she played on the theater stage, Anton in Yalta. Only occasionally did Chekhov come to Moscow to see his wife, but during their separation he wrote her many tender and funny letters, full of love.

Chekhov's inner house

Kitchen. Immediately upon entering, to the right, there is a tiny kitchen. The mother of the family, Evgenia Yakovlevna, spent a lot of time here. The kitchen has a clay floor, and the house was cooked and heated on a southern Russian stove. On the shelves are copper and brass dishes of handicraft Turkish manufacture, as well as Russian wooden ones. On the towel shelf is a wooden carved form for paskha curd, and on the stool is a washstand. The living room. It is also the dining room and study of the writer's father, Pavel Yegorovich. This is the largest room, its area is 9 m², it has 4 windows. In the middle of the living room is a round extendable table, the whole family gathered around it, and guests were received here. There are Viennese chairs around the perimeter. The dishes on the table and in the cabinet belonged to the Chekhov family. The parents' bedroom. The smallest room with two windows. It communicates with the living room and the children's room by doors. The bedroom has two windows, a bed and an antique chest of drawers with an oval mirror. On the chest of drawers under glass is grandfather's congratulations on Anton's birth. Above the bed are portraits of the parents. In the same room there is Antosha's small rocking bed. Nursery. Antosha's older brothers, Alexander (5 years old) and Nikolai (2 years old), lived here. They slept on the same bed. There are two windows in the nursery, and a large chest that was left to him by the writer M. E. Chekhov's uncle. There is a candle and candle snuffers on a table in the corner, as well as wooden toys. From the hallway you can immediately enter the writer's office. In it, the writer received patients from 12 to 15 o'clock and worked on his works.

Appearance

His eyes were dark, almost brown, and the corner of his right eye was much more strongly colored, which gave Anton Pavlovich's gaze, when he turned his head in certain directions, an expression of absentmindedness. His upper eyelids hung slightly over his eyes, resembling concentrated vision. Thanks to his pince-nez and his manner of looking through the bottom of his glasses, slightly raising his head upward, Anton Pavlovich's face often seemed stern. But one had to see Chekhov at certain moments when he was overcome with merriment and when, with a quick movement of his hand, he threw off his pince-nez and rocked back and forth in his chair, burst into sweet, sincere and deep laughter. Height: about 185 cm. Build: broad-shouldered, almost heroic. Hair: chestnut. Gaze: slightly squinted, ironic. Voice: low baritone. Nose, mouth, chin: moderate. He is 40 years old.