Early on a July morning in 1904, well before sunrise, Anton Chekhov, the Russian story writer and playwright, placed his glass on the table beside his bed. He and his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, were on vacation at the Hotel Sommer in the German resort town of Badenwiler. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne,” Chekhov said, and he lay down and died. He was forty-four years old.
Chekhov had lived a full and eventful life, training as a doctor and practicing medicine, writing humorous sketches for magazines and the vaudeville stage, supporting his family throughout his life, and becoming one of the leading men of letters in Russia. He also wrote four of the great plays in the modern repertoire, works that continue to be produced throughout the world.
The third of six children, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in the Russian port town of Taganrog, near the Black Sea. Chekhov’s father Pavel was a grocer, and his grandfather was a serf who bought his family’s freedom and was emancipated. His mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, Chekhov recalled, who taught him to read and write.
At the age of eight Chekhov attended the local grammar school, where he was an average pupil. Nevertheless, he gained a reputation for satirical comments, pranks, and for making up humorous nicknames for his teachers. He enjoyed playing in amateur theatricals and often attended performances at the provincial theater.
The life of the Chekhov family changed in 1875, when his father’s business failed. Threatened with imprisonment for debt, Pavel left to find work in Moscow, where his two eldest sons were attending university. The family struggled financially; Chekhov brought in some money by selling off household goods and tutoring the schoolboys in Taganrog. He also began to write for money, inspired not by any need to express himself artistically, but by the need to assist his family financially.
Chekhov’s earliest pieces were submitted to lowbrow comic magazines that flourished during this period of political repression in Russia. Chekhov had read the comic magazines since his childhood and was under no illusions about their literary standards. He simply sought the income they provided. Chekhov’s first published work appeared Strekoza in March 1880. Many more humorous sketches followed, submitted by the young writer to similar magazines under various pseudonyms, his favorite being “Antosha Chekhonte,” a nickname he had had since a youth. In 1882, while a student in medical school, Chekhov became a regular contributor to the humor journal Oskolki, submitting stories, sketches, and a column about life in Moscow.
In 1886, Chekhov began writing more substantial stories. His first book, Motley Stories, was published under his own name and did well—Chekhov was recognized as a new literary talent. Chekhov, who was also working as a doctor, balanced the practice of medicine with the life of an author. In February 1887 he was elected to the Literary Fund, an honor accorded to Russia’s most prominent authors. Afterwards, Chekhov’s first completed play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow in November 1887. At this point, Chekhov had given up writing comic pieces in favor of serious fiction which would, he wrote, “depict life as it actually is. Its aim is truth, unconditional and honest.... A man of letters ... has to ... realize that dung heaps play a very significant role in a landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.”
In Moscow, Chekhov’s reputation continued to grow. He wrote a number of short stories and plays that focused on middle-class Russians and the decay of the old order in Russia. The first writer elected to honorary membership in the Academy of Sciences, Chekhov was among Russia’s leading authors. But as Chekhov grew older, he became increasingly less fascinated by prose writings and more fascinated with the theatre.
In 1896, Chekhov wrote The Sea Gull, a play that drew heavily on the romance between two of his friends, I. N. Potapenko and Lidiya Mizinova. The play failed in its first presentation in St. Petersburg, but in 1898 the Moscow Art Theater gave The Sea Gull a new staging. The Moscow production was so successful, the Art Theatre took on the figure of a gull as its official emblem. The success of the play also established Chekhov’s relationship with Nemiróvich-Dánchenko and Konstantin Stanislavski, the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre, who looked upon Chekhov as the theatre’s house playwright. Chekhov’s plays seemed to succeed under Stanislavski’s approach to realistic acting, an approach that influenced acting styles throughout the world in the early years of the twentieth century. Chekhov’s other great plays followed quickly: Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904).
In 1897, while dining with his friend and publisher Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov suffered a massive hemorrhage of the lung. He was, writes Michael Frayn, “forced to recognize at last what he [had] long closed his eyes to—that he [suffered] from advanced consumption”—pulmonary tuberculosis. Like many of the characters in his stories and plays, Chekhov had long denied an ugly reality, in this case his deteriorating health. He was a doctor who literally could not—or would not—cure himself, and he had long ignored the coughing and the blood on his handkerchiefs.
He submitted himself to the care of several physicians during the remainder of his life, but late-19th-century medicine—especially as practiced in Russia—was often primitive and ignorant by modern standards, and Chekhov endured the ministrations of his physicians. He wintered in Nice in 1897, and the next year he moved to Yalta near the Crimean. He lived and wrote there, traveling back to Moscow for theatre rehearsals and performances, as his health permitted.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chekhov was at the height of his fame. He encouraged the young Russian writers Bunin and Andreyev, recommended writers for the Pushkin Prize, and was sought out for literary advice. Among his visitors at Yalta were Tolstoy, Gorky, and the troupe of actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, who gave him personal performances.
In 1901, he married his mistress Olga Knipper, who played major roles in all four of the Moscow Art Theatre productions of his plays (she played Ranevskaya, for example, in the original production of The Cherry Orchard). A portrait of the couple appears at the start of this essay.
There were times when it was difficult to be around Chekhov, not only because of his illness, but because his doctor had ordered him not to bathe, maintaining that to do so would chill the air in his fragile lungs. Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard in 1903 under incredible physical discomfort. An acquaintence wrote of him at the time, “Chekhov could hardly walk, noises came from his chest. But he seemed not to notice. He was interested in anything but illness: …Why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?”
In his last year, as the disease progressed, Chekhov was under prescription for morphine for pain, opium to control chronic diarrhea, and heroin for anything that became worse.
He and Olga left for Europe in order to find some warmth and comfort. He had no illusions about the journey. “I am going away,” he told a visitor before their departure, “to croak.” Many of his family believed that they would not see him alive again.
In June the Chekhovs visited Berlin and then traveled to Badenweiler. They stayed at the Römerbaden, the city’s best hotel, but were asked to move because Chekhov’s cough bothered other guests. They eventually moved to the Hotel Sommer, and Chekhov sat in the sun and watched people on the street from the hotel balcony. He awoke in the night of his death, crying out about a sailor in danger. Olga sent for Dr Schwörer, a German physician who was married to one of her former classmates. Schwörer injected Chekhov with camphor and then, in the dark of early morning, followed an old medical tradition. “German and Russian medical etiquette,” writes Donald Rayfield in his biography of Chekhov, “dictated that a doctor at a colleague’s deathbed, when all hope was gone, should offer champagne. Schwörer felt Anton’s pulse and ordered a bottle.” It was obvious to both men the meaning of the drink they enjoyed together.
Chekhov’s body was returned to Russia by rail in a refrigerated car, packed with ice and labeled—and we know this would have brought the writer a smile, at the least—“FRESH OYSTERS.”
Four thousand mourners accompanied the body to the Moscow cemetery.
—Tom Shafer with Noe Montez