Chekhov said writers should state problems, not solve them
The Taganrog-born physician (1860–1904) wrote four stage classics and reinvented the short story. After The Seagull flopped in 1896 he quit theatre—until Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre revived it in 1898 and premiered Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer often ranked among literature's greats. His stage career yielded four classics; his fiction is prized by writers and critics. Alongside Ibsen and Strindberg he is named a founder of early modern theatre. He practiced medicine and joked that medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. He argued a writer's duty is to state problems correctly, not to solve them.
Born 29 January 1860 (17 January Old Style) in the Sea of Azov port of Taganrog, third of six surviving children, he grew up under grocery-store father Pavel's choir piety and physical abuse, while mother Yevgeniya's travel tales fed the children's imagination. Held back a year for failing Ancient Greek, he sang in monastery and parish choirs yet later recalled feeling like a little convict under public praise. In 1876 Pavel's bankruptcy after a botched house project sent the family fleeing debtors' prison to Moscow; Anton stayed three years selling belongings, tutoring, and catching goldfinches to fund school and send rubles home. To support the family in Moscow he churned out daily comic sketches under pen names such as Antosha Chekhonte, qualified as a doctor in 1884 and treated poor patients for nothing, even while he was coughing blood and hiding his tuberculosis. In 1886 the magnate Alexey Suvorin hired him for Novoye Vremya at double his old rate per line, and the veteran novelist Dmitry Grigorovich urged him to take his gift more seriously.
Seagull's 1896 failure made him renounce the stage; Stanislavski's 1898 revival, then Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, proved a theatre of mood and submerged life over plot machinery. The boy who boarded with house-buyer Selivanov—echoed in Lopakhin—grew into the doctor-writer who changed what a play and a story could refuse to explain.
Source: Anton Chekhov
