“Medicine is my wife and literature my mistress,” Anton Chekhov once quipped. Of course, we know Chekhov for his four major plays—The Sea Gull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Three Sisters—and his short stories—he wrote over 600 of them and became a master of the form. But Chekhov had a medical practice that he continued throughout his life. When he experienced “dry spells” as a writer, he would often focus on doctoring the peasants nearby.
Chekhov attended the Moscow University Medical School from 1879-84, and while a student, he found he could supplement his family’s income by writing humorous pieces and short stories for magazines and journals. He continued to write while practicing medicine, first in Moscow (1884-92), then Melikhovo (1892-99), and finally at Yalta, to which he moved in 1899 for his health. His first stories were written for humor magazines and served as the basis for comic sketches he later wrote for vaudeville theatre. These short plays of Chekhov’s—which include The Bear (1888), The Marriage Proposal (1890), On the Highroad (1884), The Harmfulness of Tobacco Smoking (1886), and The Tragedian in Spite of Himself (1889)—were extremely popular and royalties from their performances helped make Chekhov a wealthy man.
But he continued to work as a doctor and in service to his country, taking on extensive projects like a survey—in summer of 1890—of 10,000 prisoners in the penal colony on the island of Sakihalin in Siberia. “Chekhov saw medicine and physical labor as salvation,” biographer Donald Rayfield has written. He was an obsessive writer, but he never lost contact with his other profession.
This is clearly seen in Chekhov’s response to a cholera epidemic that struck Russia in the summer of 1892. In July Chekhov volunteered to operate a village clinic in his district of Serpukhov (he was living in a country house in Melikhvo, some 45 miles outside Moscow at the time). In his 1998 biography of Chekhov, Donald Rayfield tells the story of the doctor-writer’s work from July to September, the summer of cholera:
[Anton] forwent a salary: the Serpukhov health commission thanked him, but denied him even a nurse. Council funds had to be topped up by the rich: Anton begged the owners of the tannery and cloth mill, the archimandrite of the monastery and the aristocracy for funds to build quarantine barracks. The archimandrite refused, while Princess Orvola-Davydova—Anton never hit it off with the nobility—treated him like a hired hand.
…Few supplies were available, but the Serpukhov authorities ordered the latest anticholera equipment: thermometers, large Cantani syringes for injecting fluids under the skin, tannin enemas to disinfect the gut, carbolic acid, castor oil, calomel, coffee and brandy. All summer Anton rode round twenty-five villages, over dusty or muddy tracks, checking sanitation, treating the dysentery, worms, syphilis and tuberculosis endemic among the peasantry, falling into bed exhausted every night, rising with the sun. Grateful patients gave him a pedigree pig, and three pairs of suede gloves for [his sister] Masha.
Anton’s Sakhalin experience served him well. [He] inspected a tannery that was polluting the rivers and shamed the owners into action, if only cosmetic. In this fallow creative period [as a writer], Chekhov saw environmental degradation, human misery, complacency and failed ideals—material for new fiction.
The cholera never came to Melikhovo. A neighbouring district had sixteen cases, four fatal. Anton’s energy won commendation and he was sucked into the committees for improving the lot of the peasantry. From cholera officer he would become medical officer of health, and builder of schools, libraries, post offices, roads and bridges over 100 square miles.—Tom Shafer