13 Ways of Looking at Anton Chekhov

One: The Doctor

Chekhov graduated from medical college in 1884. He was 24 years old and he already was gaining a name as a writer of smart, barbed stories and anecdotes. His success as a writer wasn’t merely literary: He was making decent money from his stories, enough to support his large and chaotic family–parents, brothers, sister and others.

His writing career was going well enough that he would soon not need money from doctoring at all. But his medical practice provided something more valuable than money for a writer: experience. 

Medicine exposed him to an enormous cross-section of Russia: pimps, prostitutes, aristocrats, convicts, and most of all, peasants, the rural poor of Russia who were just years removed from the abolition of slavery (serfdom) and whose lives were being upended by rapid industrialization in latter half of the 19th century. He wrote about them all with an incredible level of detail, balancing the cold eye of a writer with the compassion of a caregiver.

There were other, residual benefits of a medical certificate: Being a doctor allowed Chekhov to avoid military service and gave him social stature that writing for the popular press could not. And status was not nothing in Russia in the late 19th century. For instance, without certain honorary titles, you might not be able to secure an apartment in Petersburg.

For all these reasons, becoming a doctor served Chekhov the man and the writer very well. But beyond the material and artistic benefits, medicine also fed his soul. Chekhov felt a deep respect bordering on reverence for doctors. He loved the idea of doctors. They were wise, rational and altruistic. He was so respectful of the profession that, especially as a young writer, his portrayal of doctor characters verged on the laughable, so upright were they. Even in later stories, his doctors tended to be grave, rational  and benevolent, and most of all, wise. 

Chekhov famously said that medicine was his lawful wife while writing was his mistress. But that was just wordplay. He clearly did not think of himself as a doctor first and a writer second. Rather, he was restless and possessed of an incredible amount of energy. He needed medicine and writing to keep himself busy. The doctor provided grist for the writer. 

One of the many roles he played as a doctor was to perform autopsies. Here he is, describing what I think may have been his first post-mortem, in a remote village. “I carried out the autopsy with the local district physician in a field beneath the leaves of a young oak tree on the village road… The deceased ‘wasn’t from round here’, and peasants on whose land the body was found begged us with tears in their eyes for Christ’s dear sake not to carry out the procedure in their village… The actual postmortem revealed twenty broken ribs, a swelling lung and a strong smell of alcohol from the stomach… The drunk man’s chest had been crushed by something heavy, probably a well-built peasant’s knee.”

No surprise that with experience like this, he turned out quite a few stories involving dead bodies, whether mysteries (“The Examining Magistrate,”), semi-humorous sketches (“A Dead Body”) or literary works like “On Official Business.”

Suggested stories by Chekhov the doctor: “Enemies,” “Ionitch,” “The Grasshopper”

Two: The Genius

One of the most interesting things about Anton Chekhov was that he existed at all. Unlike pretty much every single major writer of the 19th century in Russia, he was not born into an aristocratic family. The fact of his success was remarkable.

But even setting aside his modest beginnings, it’s hard to see exactly how he turned into the writer he was. As a high school student, he worked on publications (and his brother Kolya contributed excellent drawings) but his letters from those days don’t show any particularly deep passion for literature. The amazing fact of the matter is that he started out writing simply to make cash–because his older brother, Aleksandr, was making a bit of money contributing comic sketches to magazines. Anton just hopped on board for the money.

Even then, when he was pumping out multiple pieces weekly (while attending medical school simultaneously!) and reckoning his earnings on a per line basis, it would have been fairly ridiculous to imagine him becoming A Great Writer. His early pieces were mostly meant to amuse or to poke fun. Up until 1885–a good five years into his writing life–his stories were mostly fluff.

“Joy,” for instance, is about a young man who is deliriously excited that his name has appeared in the newspaper… in an article, it turns out, describing an accident he had while drunk. “The Death of a Government Clerk” describes just that, the death of a government clerk. Reason for death: extreme embarrassment after sneezing on his boss.

It is profoundly mysterious that Chekhov emerged as the writer he was–and so quickly! His biography, his teenage letters, and his early stories give little or no sign of the writer he was to become. The fact that he became a writer at all seems serendipitous–what if his brother Aleksandr, instead of writing magazine sketches, had discovered he could make extra money by tending bar at weddings, and Anton followed that path instead???

What it comes down to is that Chekhov just was a genius. The stories rapidly grew more nuanced; the observations more subtle; the sense of place sharper. And the writing turned away from light amusements to deeper, more thoughtful work. 

Somehow, he was a genius. And very specifically a genius at writing short stories.

That’s really all we need to know about that!

Suggested stories by Chekhov the genius: “The Man in the Case,” “Gooseberries,” “About Love”

Three: The Antisemite

Was Anton Chekhov an antisemite? No, absolutely not. 

But let’s not kid ourselves. He wrote a fair amount of antisemitic crap.

It’s one of the weirder dynamics of Chekhov. In real life, he seems to have been a thoughtful, open-minded guy. He feuded with an editor who published antisemitic materials; he corresponded with the pre-eminent Jewish writer of the day, Sholem Aleichem, and contributed a story to an Aleichem project aimed at aiding Jews who had been devastated by pogroms. He argued for Dreyfus, the Jewish Frenchmen falsely accused of passing military secrets to Germany. I could go on, but here’s the capper: In 1886, Chekhov was engaged to a Jewish woman, Dunya Efros. (He didn’t marry her. In fact he didn’t marry at all for another dozen years, but still, he was engaged to Dunya and wrote about it in his letters.)

So, not an antisemite!

And yet, and yet… Again and again, in story after story, we come up against harsh little examples of antisemitism. Sometimes these are simply passing comments that, I suppose, were idioms of the day. For instance, more than once he used the phrase “shaking like a Jew in a frying pan.” (Yes. WTF? Let’s assume that the phrase, whatever it means, was used mindlessly if not entirely harmlessly.) 

But there are other instances that you simply can’t wish away. There are a small but meaningful number of scummy characterizations of Jews: the scheming, money-mad, alluring Susanna of “Mire;” the grotesque innkeeper Moisey Moisevitch in “The Steppe,” (not to mention his wife and children, who are portrayed essentially as animals); the repulsive Jewish dentist of “A Gentleman Friend.” Meanwhile, there is hardly a single positive characterization of a Jew. (Maybe Alexandr Ivanovitch, the sympathetic subject of “Uprooted,” but even he is described as oily and thick-lipped.)

So, I don’t know. An antisemite like T.S. Eliot Chekhov was not. With Eliot, the hatred and disgust with Jews was right there on the page; and it reflected his repulsive, actual feelings. Chekhov was not that bad.

But I’m not sure Chekhov just gets an automatic pass–not in spite of the fact that IRL he spoke out against antisemitism, but because of it. He knew Jews, he came of age in an era of pogroms, he understood the seriousness of Jews’ precarious position in Russia. And he apparently felt sympathy for them. And yet he wrote–occasionally–as if he didn’t know these things. 

It’s vexing to think of him writing such crap.

Suggested stories, if you really insist, by Chekhov the Antisemite: “Mire,” “Uprooted,” “A Gentleman Friend”

Four: The Fisherman

Chekhov had fish on the brain. No other writer, with the possible exception of Hemingway, was so intensely interested in fish–in catching them, in talking about them, in eating them.

He even briefly assumes a fish’s viewpoint at the end of one story, “Gusev.”

Chekhov must have fished a great deal as a boy, for his letters as a young man are studded with the kind of fisherman’s argot that comes from devoting hours and hours to tending lines and reeling them in.

Here he is excitedly cataloging the fishing opportunities near his summer house in Babkino, in 1885: “You can catch some fish with a zherlitsa trap. We got a huge burbot using Vanya’s. But it’s not worth using one at the moment, because there’s no bait. Yesterday it was too windy to fish. Would you please bring some medium size hooks for the traps with you? I haven’t any left.”

That doesn’t sound like a world-famous writer! It sounds more like an overexcited child, leaping from one thing to the next–”Oh and the trap! The burbot! The bait!” And so on.

Whenever he arrived at a new residence or vacation spot, Chekhov would write to friends and family about the quality of the fishing–often in the very first sentence. “I took the place without seeing it, trusting to luck, and have not regretted it so far,” he wrote in a letter in 1888. “The river is wide and deep, with plenty of islands, fish and crayfish.” 

Fishing, like medicine, gave him access to characters he might not have met otherwise. “Every day I row to the mill,” he wrote in the same letter, “and in the evening I go to the islands to fish with fishing maniacs from the Haritovenko factory.”

Chekhov wrote about fishing with a good deal more humor than Hemingway. His characters thrash about in the water (“The Fish”) for burbot and eelpout (in his stories and his letters he was always specific about the different fish) or strip off their clothes (“A Daughter of Albion”) and wade into the water to salvage a hook. Fishing was fun and funny, in Chekhov’s fiction. Oh, and it was tasty, too: One of his better known stories involves a man making lip-smacking noises over a fish dinner, which turns into a scandal of his own making (“A Slander”).

Mostly, though, fishing was a dreamy, almost Edenic pastime. In “Dreams,” an escaped convict harbors a sad, utterly unrealistic hope of being exiled to Siberia rather than tossed back in jail.

“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the convict avers. “Everything is better there. Take the rivers there, for instance… There’s no end of fish, and all sorts of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers, is fishing. Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook.… And would you believe it, there’s special art for every fish: you catch one with live bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a grasshopper. One has to understand all that, of course! For example, take the eel-pout. It is not a delicate fish–it will take a perch; and pike loves a gudgeon, the shilishper likes a butterfly…”

On and on he goes, dreaming ever more fervently of the fish that he will never have the chance to catch. It’s one of those moments when you know that the writer has let himself inside a character and allows himself to express his own passion.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Fisherman: “Dreams,” “A Daughter of Albion,” “A Slander”

Five: The Son

The Chekhov family business, a grocery in the southern port city of Taganrog, collapsed in 1876, when Anton Chekhov was sixteen. The family basically snuck out of town to escape their creditors–but they left Anton behind to finish school. He followed them to Moscow in 1879, when he began medical college.

Other than that three-year period in Taganrog, Chekhov rarely lived separately from his parents and various other family members. 

It’s hard to understand why, exactly. His father, Pavel, was a petty tyrant at home. His mother, Evgenia, was, in the modern parlance, a bit of an enabler. 

What kept the family so close together? Was it guilt? Was it fun? (They did seem to have a nice time together, despite Pavel’s temper.)

Maybe staying close with his parents was an ego trip for Anton. Constance Garnett, Chekhov’s most famous translator, claims that the family deferred to Anton in all things. “‘What will Anton say?’ was always their uppermost thought on every occasion,” she wrote. That is doubtless an enormous oversimplification, but it would make sense that Chekhov would have enjoyed the parental attention.

And reading Chekhov’s hectoring letters to his older brothers you do get the sense that he was, from very early on, the authority figure of the family. Here’s the (childless, 24-year-old) Anton lecturing his older brother about caring for his baby daughter: “Speaking of aesthetics, forgive me, my dear fellow, but there’s more to being a parent than just what you say to your children. You need to teach by example. When you leave the clean linen all mixed up together with the dirty linen, the table covered in scraps of left-over food, filthy rags everywhere, your spouse going round with her tits hanging out and bit of ribbon round her neck as filthy as Kontorskaya Street – this kind of thing can ruin a little girl from her earliest years.”

Whenever Chekhov traveled, he wrote copious instructions, at one point telling everyone to obey Ivan, as he was a “positive man of character.”

A part of the reason that Chekhov was so readily looked to as a father figure was that the actual father of the family, Pavel, was generally an ineffective man. He was a disaster as a businessman; after his grocery failed, he found it difficult to get a job. It took nearly two years after leaving Taganrog for him to land a position as a clerk in a clothing warehouse. That was the only job he held for the rest of his life. 

Nevertheless, Chekhov used to say that he (and his abundantly talented siblings) got their talent from Pavel… and their soul from their mother. 

As a young man, Chekhov wrote bitterly of Pavel’s volatile temper. “Despotism and lies… destroyed our childhood,” he recalled in a letter to one of his brothers. 

You can get a sense of Pavel’s temper in the story “The Head of the Family.” The father, Stepan Stepanovich, berates his wife and children and servants. He is enraged by just about anything: a newspaper out of place, a door left open, an under-salted soup. Worse, he is unpredictable: the very next day he is jolly and demands affection from his cowed son.

Just recalling scenes like that made Chekhov feel “sick and fearful.”

Later in his life, the anger he felt toward his father seemed to mellow. He snarkily referred to Pavel as “Lord and Master.” 

In September 1898, Chekhov was in Yalta, where he spent a lot of time in his later years, dealing with his tuberculosis. He wrote a letter to his father, who was at their shared home in Melikhovo, Chekhov’s (and the family’s) long-time country estate outside of Moscow. The letter was mainly about maintenance issues, but it ended this way: “Keep well and happy and do not forget your homesick wanderer.” It’s a tender farewell; Pavel died unexpectedly less than a month later.

Chekhov wrote frequently about fathers and sons, but other than in the one painful tale, “The Head of the Family,” these characters bore only a passing resemblance to his own father. He wrote of distant, unyielding men, like the narrator of the novella “A Dreary Story,” and rigid, judgmental men, like the father in “A Requiem.”

But he also created sympathetic fathers, like the grieving cabman of “Misery” or the kindly dad helping his son with math homework in “Shrove Tuesday.”

Suggested stories by Chekhov the son: “Misery,” “A Requiem,” “Difficult People”

Six: The Southerner

Chekhov grew up in Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia. Weatherwise, it’s not as warm as the famous Russian resorts on the Black Sea like Yalta or Sochi, but it is certainly mild for Russia, and Russians have long used it as a summer getaway.

Chekhov was happy enough to grow up there, but once he had experienced the life of the big cities in Russia’s cold north, he came to hate Taganrog. 

Specifically, he hated the indolence of southern Russia. On a trip back to Taganrog in 1887, he described it this way: “60,000 inhabitants do nothing but eat, drink, reproduce and have no other interests. Wherever you go, Easter cakes, eggs, Santurini [sic] wine, suckling babies, but no newspapers or books anywhere…”

All through his writing life, the resort towns of Southern Russia appear as a kind of cursed paradise: warm, inviting, vapid, and ultimately soul- and health-destroying. By contrast, the cold air of northern Russia is a kind of curative–a necessity for healthy, vigorous, intellectually-stimulating life.

Chekhov’s most famous story, “The Lady with the Dog,” begins in Yalta, and from the descriptions of it you might almost think it was some sort of hellhole. “It was sultry indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust round and round.” The first comment we hear from the lady of the title, Anna Sergeyevna, is a complaint: “Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!” 

The story of an extramarital affair that somehow, improbably (or unbelievably, depending on your viewpoint) blossoms into actual love, “The Lady with the Dog” has two distinct halves: In the first, which takes place in Yalta, the affair is tawdry, sweaty, and shameful. Once the lovers return to the north, however, their relationship is ennobled. It’s as if the cold air has refined their passion from lust to love.

Even as a very young writer, Chekhov seemed to find something morally repulsive about life in the south. In “A Living Chattel,” written when Chekhov was only 22, the grotesque Groholsky, who has essentially bought a woman from her husband, brings her south, where they live in a self-satisfied haze. Where else would two such monsters go? Chekhov seems to be asking. 

Even when he was as young as 17, Chekhov was itching to get out of the south and make for the northern climes. “Moscow is a wonderful place,” he wrote to a cousin. “As soon as I graduate from the Gymnasium I shall fly to it on wings.”

Again and again, in tales like “The Duel” and “Lights,” Chekhov describes men who feel swamped by the heat and the indolence of the south, and long for the cold, true Russia of the north.

It’s sad and ironic, then, that Chekhov himself ended up in Yalta for much of the last years of his life, a tubercular invalid. “Never has winter dragged on so long for me as this one,” he wrote in a letter in 1900. “The time simply crawls by without apparently moving at all, and now I see how stupid I was to leave Moscow.”

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Southerner: “The Lady with the Dog,” “The Duel,” “A Tripping Tongue”

Seven: The Serf

Chekhov’s grandfather and father were born serfs. His grandfather, Egor, worked and saved for 30 years to buy himself, his wife, and his children out of serfdom. (That seems an amazing fact, doesn’t it? Thirty years?!?) 

Egor became an estate manager. Despite his own modest roots (or maybe because of them), he was cruel to the local peasants, who nicknamed him “viper.” “My grandfather was an unrepentant slave-driver,” Chekhov once wrote.

Chekhov’s father, Pavel, was 16 years old when Egor purchased his freedom in 1841. Chekhov was born 19 years later, in 1860.

Those 19 years were all that separated Chekhov from a life of, essentially, slavery. (The system of serfdom was abolished in 1861.)

The subject of serfdom comes up rarely in Chekhov’s writing, but in one story, “Three Years,” the protagonist, Laptev, reflects on his sense of not belonging: 

“Some people talk nonsense or cheat, and even so enjoy life, while I consciously do good, and feel nothing but uneasiness or complete indifference. I explain all that… by my being a slave, the grandson of a serf. Before we plebeians fight our way into the true path, many of our sort will perish on the way.”

Chekhov seemed to have been preternaturally self-confident, so he didn’t share Laptev’s uneasiness. Still, he observed and wrote about the life of the poor with what I guess I would call an “insider’s” view. He knew poverty; he was his family’s protection against want.

In his early years as a writer, his portraits of poor people sometimes edged toward burlesque and ridicule (“A Malefactor,” “A Dead Body,” “Overdoing It,”) but generally the portrayal of rural peasants and their world is as nuanced and careful as anything else Chekhov wrote. He treated the world of peasants with as much respect as he did cosmopolitan city life–there were both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters to be found in either world.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Serf:  “Dreams,” “Peasant Wives,” and “Agafya.”

Eight: The Lazy Titler

Chekhov was a great writer but man was he lazy when it came to titles. Did he put any thought into it? He certainly didn’t seem to. 

Consider these titles: “A Play,” “A Mystery,” “A Slander,” “A Joke.”

Or these: “The Letter,” “The Post,” “The Pipe,” “The Husband,” and, of course, “The Wife.”

I could go on, but you get the point. Lazy! 

Chekhov knew he wasn’t a wit. In an 1884 letter to one of his editors, he admitted that he couldn’t write captions: “I have to confess right away that I am hopeless at devising witty captions for drawings…. I have come up with a plan of action for the future: I’ll just send you whatever comes into my head, whether it is any use or not.”

As with captions, so with titles: He really did seem to give his stories titles based on whatever came into his head. And apparently editors didn’t bother to suggest better ones to him.

The crappy titles reflect something important about Chekhov. He was not necessarily a terribly good “writer,” at least not on a sentence by sentence basis. His writing was rather plain and unadorned. Sometimes the sentences are just bad. When he occasionally strained for poetic descriptions, the effort was pretty apparent. 

And yet the whole of the writing–as opposed to the individual phrases and sentences–was powerful and wonderful. 

Vladimir Nabakov captured this very well:

“Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve.”

He goes on: “A bit of bad grammar or a slack newspaperish sentence left him unconcerned… Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Yes! It’s really true, and one of the great abiding mysteries of Chekhov–that he could express such incredible beauty using such frequently unbeautiful sentences. 

As for the titles, whew! What a bunch of stinkers! 

One of my favorite Chekhov stories is “The Schoolmistress,” which is not a terrible title. But that is not the title he gave it. I don’t read Russian but as far as I can tell, the original title was more like “On the Way.” That is a seriously bad title for a story about a woman returning to her thankless job as a teacher and daydreaming about a slightly dashing and eligible local bachelor. A great story like that should not be called “On the Way.” 

(Meanwhile, a common translation of this story gives the title, for some unknown reason, as “In the Cart.” That’s the one used by George Saunders in his generous and interesting readings of Chekhov and other Russian short story masters. But really, “In the Cart?” In the cart???) 

If I were to rank all of Chekhov’s stories by terrible titles, here would be my top (bottom) five:

No. 5: A Trivial Incident

Oof. This story is a really interesting portrait of an aristocrat who has squandered his riches–and a woman who once was in love with him. The incident–trespassing on her lands–is not trivial. What a stupid title for this story.

No. 4: Sleepy

Whoa, this is a terribly cruel story about an abused servant–and the cruelty she in turn inflicts upon a child. But it’s titled as if it were a kids book. It’s as if “Goodnight Moon” turned out to be about a bunny being murdered.

No. 3: A Trifle From Life

We’re getting into the really most atrocious titles now, and this one is hard to beat. “A Trifle From Life” sounds like a mild entertainment of sorts. In fact it’s about a complete bastard who betrays the son of his mistress.

No. 2. A Story Without a Title

Seriously, could there be a lazier title than this? This story is not some meta-fiction or a playful narrative with a story inside it. No, it’s a tale of monks facing the temptations of the world. “A Story Without a Title?” Surely he didn’t mean for this to be the actual title. It’s a fable; you could almost imagine it being written by Aesop. If Chekhov had written “The Tortoise and the Hare,” he probably would have called it “A Race.”

No. 1: The Man in a Case

It sounds like a bad thriller, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s one of Chekhov’s masterpieces. It’s about a schoolmaster. But Chekhov had already written a story called “The Schoolmaster,” naturally, so what other title was left to him???

Suggested stories (great stories with terrible titles) by Chekhov the Lazy Titler: “In the Coach-House,” “Frost,” “Art”

Nine: The Traveler

During Chekhov’s lifetime, and especially during his writing life, Russia was experiencing the wrenching pains of industrialization, beginning to shift away from an almost purely agrarian society to one that also included manufacturing. 

A major part of that was the development of railroads, which rapidly spread across the country in the second half of the 19th century. Railroads brought enormous change to previously remote locales, and allowed manufacturing towns to spring up where once there was little but farmland and woods.

Chekhov was fascinated with the development of the railroads. It is a key feature in stories like “Lights,” “The New Villa,” and “The Cattle-Dealers.” And you can see the pressure of change brought by railways in stories like “Agafya” and “A Malefactor.” 

Chekhov was not merely interested in the societal impact of the spread of railroads; the trains and stations themselves were great places to set stories–where chance meetings could occur, where stories could be told, and where drama could play out in public. 

But Russia was a vast country and, for all the building that was going on, by 1890 there was still less than 20,000 miles of track for the entire country. Most travel occurred by horse and carriage, or cart, or on foot, and, because it involved discomfort and often danger, this kind of travel too was a constant theme for Chekhov. 

In Chekhov’s fictional world (and I assume it bore a fair resemblance to the actual world of Russia in that time), travel in the vast, undeveloped countryside was dangerous and difficult. Roads were rough; thieves and murderers roamed about. Horses were stolen (“The Horse-Stealers”), travelers were murdered (“An Adventure”), and dead bodies abounded (“On Official Duty,” “A Dead Body.”)

Even when crimes didn’t occur, there was a constant sense of danger. Country folk and city folk distrusted each other, and gave each other frights, mostly out of misunderstanding (“A Troublesome Visitor,” “Overdoing It.”)

It’s a violent, threatening world; it can’t help but remind you of modern day America–widely spread out, tense, suspicious, and quick to pull the trigger, or at least flash a knife blade.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Traveler: “On the Road,” “On Official Duty,” “The Petchenyeg”

Ten: The Reporter

Chekhov didn’t set out to write fiction. If, as a teenager, he ever dreamed of the life of a writer, he probably would have said he wanted to be a playwright.

But when he moved to Moscow to enter medical college, Chekhov learned that his older brother, Aleksandr, a brilliant, drunken mess, was making a bit of money selling sketches to Moscow periodicals, and Anton jumped in enthusiastically, writing under the pen name Antoshe Chekhonte. (He was saving his real name for medical writings)

Chekhov’s writing in the early 1880s wasn’t confined to any one kind of work: He wrote full-fledged stories; he wrote comic bits that were just a few paragraphs long; he even wrote novellas. And he also wrote straight-up news articles, reporting on some of the major stories of the day, such as the Rykov affair, an embezzlement scandal similar to the Madoff saga in the US 125 years later.

In the process, he began to write what can best be described as amalgamations–not stories, not reported pieces, but something in between: reportage enlivened as necessary with invention.

At first, these amalgamations were small and light–for instance, his sketch of street life in “The Bird Market.” But in later, more ambitious works, like “The Cattle-Dealers” or “Ward No. 6,” he combined reportage with large-scale fictional story-telling at some length. To my mind, these stories don’t work very well, but “Ward No. 6” is widely cited as one of his better works, so I’m an outlier on that one.

A key event in Chekhov’s life was his somewhat odd decision to make a trip across Russia to Sakhalin Island, where he would investigate the conditions of a penal colony. This occurred in 1890, and seems to have been a reaction to the death of his brother Kolya, an artist and, like Aleksandr, a drunken mess. Chekhov also might have been seeking a reset in his life, after the failure of his first two plays. Or, just maybe, it was a reaction to his worsening health–proof to himself or the world that he was still capable and strong (which he wasn’t, even though he was just 30 at the time.)

In any case, the Sakhalin trip seemed to complete Chekhov’s journey as a reporter. After that, his attention mainly shifted to the world of theater.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Reporter: “The Bird Market,” “The Runaway,” “In Exile” 

Eleven: The Playwright

Chekhov was involved in the drama club in his high school, and he began writing plays before he was 20, but his first plays, “Ivanov” and “The Wood Demon,” were flops. It wasn’t until 1896, with the production of “The Seagull,” that he began to build a name for himself in the theater (and even “The Seagull” was not universally acclaimed.)

What’s odd about Chekhov’s flirtation with the theater is not that success came slowly, but that he seemed to abhor everything about the world of the theater. In his stories, actors are almost always cads, degenerates, and scoundrels. No good comes to anyone who makes a life as an actor in a Chekhov story.

Actors are portrayed as the epitome of human scum: In “A Tragic Actor,” a young woman runs off with an actor after seeing him perform, and then writes home piteously to her father, saying she is being beaten by him. In “The Jeune Premiere,” we meet an actor who not only is a cad, having slept with a woman and then boasted about it to a stranger, but also a sniveling coward: He immediately takes the story back when it turns out the stranger is related to the woman. There are a lot more like this. Chekhov wrote not one but two stories (“In the Graveyard” and “An Actor’s End”) in which actors nearing their deaths rue their wasted lives in the theater.  

It wasn’t just professional actors that Chekhov disdained. He seems also to have been repulsed by amateurs. “The Grasshopper” and “Not Wanted” feature selfish women more interested in getting up a show than in showing affection to their husbands.

Even the writers of plays were detestable, apparently. Chekhov goes so far as to kill a character who has had the gall to write a bad play. (“A Play,” another of Chekhov’s dreadful titles.)

The theatrical success of Chekhov’s later plays (the only ones commonly read or produced any longer) seems to have mellowed him–a little. In “The Darling” and “A Dreary Story,” theater figures in the storytelling, and not necessarily in a base way. Chekhov didn’t go so far as to present any really admirable actors, but they at least aren’t portrayed as utter wretches.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Playwright: “The Requiem,” “In the Graveyard,” “An Actor’s End”

Twelve: The Atheist

Chekhov was a blasphemer, a ladies man, a consorter with prostitutes. Looking back at his childhood, he told a friend: “In my childhood I had a religious education and a religious upbringing… And the result? When I recall my childhood I now find it rather gloomy. I now have no religion.”

When he was 37, he wrote: “A good man’s indifference is as good as any religion.”

His stories suggest something different. Tales like “Easter Eve” and “The Student” practically glow with religious ecstasy. I don’t know that I have ever read anything, by any other writer, with such beautiful fervor. “Art” and “Choristers” show holiness reflected in imperfect men.

Chekhov frequently wrote of priests, and his priest characters are a complex lot. Some are drinkers, some are rigid, some ineffectual, but never are they scoundrels. Compare the priests of “The Letter” to any of the theater people in Chekhov’s stories–the priests are given a range of qualities; the actors are irredeemable.

In “The Bishop,” one of Chekhov’s last stories–and one of the very best–the writer seems to have made peace with the contradictions of God’s existence and nonexistence. The bishop of the title has risen to great heights in the church hierarchy despite coming from a poor family. He attends to his tasks with great humility and care. He rejoices in a visit from his mother. But, when he dies, he is forgotten; only the dead bishop’s mother remembers him, and it seems so improbable that a poor woman like herself could have had a son who was a bishop; some people doubt he even existed.

Suggested stories by Chekhov the Atheist: “The Bishop,” “Easter Eve,” “Art”

Thirteen: The Patient

Chekhov had his first attack of tuberculosis in his 20s. By his late 30s he was nearly an invalid. He died at the age of 44, at a spa (really a sanatorium, I suppose) in Germany.

He didn’t often write about sickness from the perspective of the patient. Two stories, “Gusev” and “Typhus,” are detailed and harrowing portraits of illness, but they are fairly unusual for Chekhov because there is no medical presence in the tales. The protagonists grow sicker and sicker; one lives, one dies.

When the topic was illness, Chekhov’s tendency was to consider it from the vantage of a doctor: There is no end to the stories of doctors caring for the sick–”A Doctor’s Visit,” “Enemies,” “The Doctor,” to name just a few. 

As in fiction, so in life: Chekhov focused on being a doctor and didn’t pay much attention to himself as a patient. He first coughed up blood in 1884, when he was already working as a doctor, but he shrugged it off, assuming against all evidence that it was nothing serious. “Apart from that, I’m fine,” he wrote. “I imagine the cause is a burst blood vessel.”

Four years later, he was coughing up blood fairly regularly, but he insisted that it was nothing much to worry about. “The point is that consumption and other serious lung diseases only manifest themselves through a particular set of symptoms, and I don’t have that particular combination,” he wrote. “If the bleeding I experienced in that circuit courtroom [an incident that occurred several years earlier] had been a symptom of incipient consumption, I would long ago have departed this life–that is my logic.”

All through the 1880s and 1890s–his 20s and 30s–evidence of tuberculosis piled up. During that time he wrote hundreds of stories, attended to patients in Moscow and his summer house in Melikhovo, traveled, assisted in aid drives during a famine, worked on the national census, chased women, lectured his brothers, fished with gusto, and disregarded the fact that he was seriously ill. 

He complained more about his hemorrhoids than his symptoms of tuberculosis.

And then, in 1896, he was given a diagnosis of “active pulmonary tuberculosis.” He resisted the recommendation that he move to the country, but fairly soon his health declined enough that he was forced to spend most of his time in Yalta, a warm weather resort that he found stultifying and dull.

In 1904, he was too weak to travel, really, but he went to Germany with his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, and there his health really collapsed. When he appeared to be at the point of death, the doctors opened a bottle of champagne – a common courtesy for the dying at the time. 

Chekhov declared that he was dying and then had a drink of champagne.

“I haven’t had champagne for a long time,” he said, and then he died.