Robert Chandler

A kind of tenderness

The son of a grocer, Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. While studying medicine at Moscow university, he published hundreds of comic sketches in order to pay his way and support his parents and siblings. After becoming famous in the late 1880s, he practised as a doctor only intermittently; most of his medical work was on behalf of the peasants, and unpaid.

In 1890 he made the difficult journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island, where he investigated the living conditions of the convicts, around 10,000 of whom had been exiled there. During the 1890s Chekhov’s tuberculosis worsened and from 1897 he had to spend most of his time in the Crimean resort of Yalta. There he composed The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, as well as some of his finest stories. In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper, for whom he wrote the part of Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard. He died in 1904.

Chekhov is often seen as a delicate miniaturist who wrote about ineffectual people, but this is to underestimate him. ‘The Steppe’ shows him to be one of Russia’s great nature poets. He wrote powerful evocations of madness (‘The Black Monk’), of moral fanaticism (‘The Duel’), and of oppression (‘Ward Six’). Above all, he wrote with insight about an extraordinary range of people. In the words of Vasily Grossman:

Probably only Balzac has ever brought such a mass of different people into the consciousness of society. No — not even Balzac …. Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness — with people of every estate, every class, every age.

Chekhov was as remarkable in his everyday life as in his work. Few, if any, writers have been so consistently helpful to so many people: to his family; to the young writers he unfailingly encouraged; above all, to the peasants for whom he built schools and hospitals and to whom he gave free medical treatment.

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