"All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!'
The important thing is that people realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves."
Here we find the very essence of Chekhov.
He is at once the pessimist howling at present misery and the optimist looking for a better life. He is the Russian who inspired his nation to find a higher idealism (as they would with the Bolshevik Revolution, 15 years after his death) and the solitary writer battered by humankind’s inability to employ its more noble attributes.
In both his plays and short stories, Chekhov focused on portrayals of the dying gentry and its inability to deal with a world that was moving past.
Like Hamlet, Chekhov's characters have a sense of right but get lost in its implementation. Sometimes, this existential angst is played to comic effect. But even in the face of comedy, Chekhov was intensely psychological.
His narratives are subtle, sympathetic examinations of fear and alienation, rendered with both pathos and criticism.
Born in 1860, Chekhov studied medicine at Moscow University, moonlighting as a writer to supplement his income. Soon, humorous stories and sketches began appearing in local papers under facetious pseudonyms like “The Doctor Without Patients.” Such early literary gambols earned him work at a prestigious St. Petersburg publication, where he expanded his written repertoire to include biting satire. By the late 1880s, his writing had matured into sensitive, sad excavations of human existence, as portrayed in such works as “The Steppe” (1888), “A Dreary Story” (1889), “Ward No. Six” (1892), and “The Lady With the Little Dog” (1899). Meanwhile, Chekhov was besieged by personal dramas.
He moved his family to a small estate outside Moscow in 1892, but his home life was hardly perfect -- instead, it was often a hell characterized by a monstrous father, an overbearing sister, and delinquent brothers. Furthermore, he had contracted tuberculosis, which forced him to retire from his medical practice. During these years, Chekhov commenced his career as a dramatist, producing famous works such as “The Seagull” (1895) and “Uncle Vanya” (1897). In 1898, the beleaguered playwright moved to the resort town of Yalta in the continuing battle against his flagging health. This proved to be a time of great artistic collaboration, as he steeped himself in the creative minds of writers Maksim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy. Other seminal plays, “The Three Sisters” (1901) and “The Cherry Orchard” (1904), saw success at the Moscow Art Theater.
It was through the Moscow Art Theater that Chekhov met his wife, actress Olga Knipper. Though theirs was a short-lived and often troubled relationship, his letters to his wife shine with the brilliance of his fictional works. As a wordsmith, Chekhov saw erratic fame during his lifetime. He almost rejected playwrighting entirely, as the first production of the now-revered “The Seagull” was an all-out flop (Constantin Stravinsky's revival of Chekhov’s plays, especially "The Cherry Orchard," reinstated his name to prominence).
His story-writing career saw even harsher blows -- when translations of his works were published after World War I, Hemingway proclaimed him a hack. But like his plays, his fiction is now deemed to be genius, placed with the likes of Joyce and James.
Today, no short-story writer delves into the genre without first studying the master, who finally succumbed to his illness at age 44.