A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin that he thought people might go on reading his writings for seven years. "Why seven?", asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half", Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live." [109] Characters [ edit ] Chekhov reads The Seagull with the Moscow Art Theatre company. Chekhov reads (centre), on Chekhov's right, Konstantin Stanislavski is seated, and next to him, Olga Knipper. Stanislavski's wife, Maria Lilina, is seated to Chekhov's left. On the far right side of the photograph, Vsevolod Meyerhold is seated. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko stands in the far left side of the photograph. During this time, he read widely and analytically, including the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer, [33] [34] and wrote a full-length comic drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication". [35] Chekhov also experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher. [32] In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. [36] Early writings [ edit ]

I thought that if I had written and put on the stage a play so obviously brimming over with monstrous defects, I had lost all instinct and that, therefore, my machinery must have gone wrong for good. This is the last ever of Chekhov’s “comedies” as he defined the genre. And it’s one of the most frequently staged of all Russian plays. Symbolically it was written just on the eve of the first Russian Revolution of 1905. At that time, the world of the old Imperial nobility got a rude awakening with the new modern world and its upheaval and progress. Willis, Louis (27 January 2013). "Chekhov's Crime Stories". Literary and Genre. Knoxville: SleuthSayers.

Collections of his stories that Chekhov prepared and published, or, in the case of The Prank, attempted to publish. On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of weddings. She was a former protégée and sometime lover of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull. [88] [89] [90] Up to that point, Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor", [91] had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment. [92] He had once written to Suvorin: But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony. [128] I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around, glass in hand with an endless grin on your face." Letter to Olga Knipper, 19 April 1901. Edmund Wilson (1940). "To The Finland Station". archive.org. Doubleday. When Vladimir finished reading this story, he was seized with such a horror that he could not bear to stay in his room. He went out to find someone to talk to, but it was late: they had all gone to bed. 'I absolutely had the feeling,' he told his sister next day,'that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!'

One can argue Anton Chekhov is the second-most popular writer on the planet. Only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov in terms of movie adaptations of their work, according to the movie database IMDb.... We generally know less about Chekhov than we know about mysterious Shakespeare. [133] Rayfield 1997, pp.390–391: Rayfield draws from his critical study Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the "Wood Demon" (1995), which anatomised the evolution of the Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya—"one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements." The Steppe,' as Michael Finke suggests, is 'a sort of dictionary of Chekhov's poetics,' a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come." Malcolm 2004, p.147. Letters of Anton Tchehov to His Family and Friends: With a Biographical Sketch. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York. 1920. Internet Archive on-line edition. The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life that he realises has been without purpose. [59] [60] Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform. [24] Sakhalin [ edit ] Anton Chekhov in 1893Rayfield 1997, p.500"Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional." Christian Camargo directed a 2014 film adaptation of the play, titled Days and Nights, set in rural New England during the 1980s. The film starred Camargo, William Hurt, Allison Janney, Katie Holmes, Mark Rylance, and Juliet Rylance.