The Complete Plays

ANTON CHEKHOV’S BRIEF LIFE

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the town of Taganrog on the sea of Azov in southern Russia on January 17, 1860,¹ the third of six children, five boys and a girl. He might have been born a serf, as his father, Pavel Yegorovich, had, for the Emancipation came only in 1861; but his grandfather, a capable and energetic estate manager named Yegor Chekh, had prospered so well that in 1841 he had purchased his freedom along with his family’s. Anton’s mother, Yevgeniya Morozova, was the orphaned daughter of a cloth merchant and a subservient spouse to her despotic husband. To their children, she imparted a sensibility he lacked: Chekhov would later say, somewhat unfairly, that they inherited their talent from their father and their soul from their mother.²

The talent was displayed in church. Beyond running a small grocery store where his sons served long hours — “In my childhood, there was no childhood,” Anton was later to report³ — Pavel Chekhov had a taste for the outward trappings of religion. This was satisfied by unfailing observance of the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, daily family worship, and, especially, liturgical music. He enrolled his sons in a choir that he founded and conducted, and he aspired to be a pillar of the community.

Taganrog, its once-prosperous port now silted up and neglected, had a population that exceeded fifty thousand during Chekhov’s boyhood. Its residents included wealthy Greek families, the ship-building interests, and a large number of Jews, Tatars, and Armenians. The town benefited from such public amenities of the tsarist civil administration as a pretentious-looking gymnasium, which the Chekhov boys attended, for one of Pavel’s aims was to procure his children the level of education needed for entry into the professions. The upward mobility of the Chekhov generations is reflected in the character of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, a self-made millionaire whose ancestors had been serfs on the estate he succeeds in purchasing. Chekhov’s father, born a serf, had risen from meshchanin, or petty bourgeois,⁴ to be the member of a merchant guild; and Chekhov himself, as a physician and writer, became influential on the national scene. He was a model of the raznochinets, or person of no settled rank, who began to dominate Russian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

To impede mass advancement, the tsarist curriculum laid great stress on Greek and Latin. One recalls the schoolmaster Kulygin in Three Sisters chuckling over the fate of a classmate who missed promotion because he could not master the ut consecutivum construction. Schoolmasters are usually portrayed by Chekhov as narrow-minded, obsequious, and unimaginative, no doubt the result of his own observations as he studied the classics, German, Russian, and, for a brief time, French. His best subject was Scripture. School days were lightened by the fairy tales of his nanny, the picaresque reminiscences of his mother, vacations spent on the estate his grandfather managed, fishing, swimming, and, later, visits to the theater.

As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. Although it was against school regulations, he and his classmates, often in false whiskers and dark glasses, frequented the gallery of the active and imposing Taganrog Playhouse. He was also the star performer in domestic theatricals, playing comic roles such as the Mayor in The Inspector and the scrivener Chuprun in the Ukrainian folk opera The Military Magician. While still at school, he wrote a drama called Without Patrimony and a vaudeville (a farce with songs) called The Hen Has Good Reason to Cluck. Later, while a medical student, he tried to revise them, even as he completed another farce, The Cleanshaven Secretary with the Pistol, which his younger brother Mikhail recalls as being very funny. Never submitted to the government censorship office, which passed plays or forbade them from performance, it is now lost.

By 1876 Pavel Chekhov had so mismanaged his business that, fearing imprisonment for debt, he stole off to the next town, where he took the train to Moscow. There his two elder sons, Aleksandr and Nikolay, were pursuing their studies. He had already stopped paying his dues to the merchant guild and had reverted to the status of meshchanin. Whether Anton suffered a psychic trauma at this loss of caste, as had the young Henrik Ibsen when his father went bankrupt, is matter for speculation. Certainly, the repercussions felt at the sale of the home left their trace on many of his plays, including Platonov and The Cherry Orchard. Dispossessed of home and furniture, his mother and the three youngest children also departed for Moscow, abandoning Anton in a house now owned by a friend of his father’s. He had to support himself by tutoring during the three years before he graduated. He did not rejoin his family until Easter 1877, his fare paid by his university-student brother Aleksandr. This first visit to Moscow and its theaters set standards by which he henceforth judged the quality of life in the provinces. Suddenly, Taganrog began to look provincial.

Just before Anton Chekhov left Taganrog for good, a public library opened. This enabled him to read classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, a work he was to cite recurrently, and, like any Victorian schoolboy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the adventure stories of Thomas Mayne Reid. Heavier reading included philosophic works that enjoyed a high reputation at the time, such as Thomas Henry Buckle’s positivist and skeptical survey of European culture, The History of Civilization in England. Later in life, Chekhov took a wry view of this omnivorous autodidacticism, and had the clumsy bookkeeper Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard allude to Buckle’s works as a token of self-improvement.

It was at this time that Chekhov began writing prose, sending comic pieces to Aleksandr in Moscow in the hope that they would be accepted by the numerous comic journals that had sprung up in the capitals. He made friends with actors, hung around backstage, and learned how to make up his face. Two of his school fellows did enter the profession: Aleksandr Vishnevsky, who would become a charter member of the Moscow Art Theatre, and Nikolay Solovtsov, who was to create the title role in The Bear.

In 1879 Chekhov moved to Moscow to enter the medical school at the university, funded by a scholarship from the Taganrog municipal authorities. He arrived to find himself the head of the family, which was still in dire straits and living in a cramped basement flat in a disreputable slum. His father, now a humble clerk in a suburban warehouse, boarded at his office; Aleksandr, a journalist, and Nikolay, a painter, led alcoholic and bohemian lives; his three younger siblings, Ivan, Mariya, and Mikhail, still had to complete their educations. Lodging at home, Chekhov was compelled to carve out a career as a journalist at the same time that he was taking the rigorous five-year course in medicine.

At first, he wrote primarily for humor magazines, contributing anecdotes and extended jokes, sometimes as captions to drawings by Nikolay and others; these brought in a niggardly ten to twelve kopeks a line. Gradually, he diversified into parodies, short stories, and serials, including a murder mystery, The Shooting Party, and a romance that proved so popular it was filmed several times in the days of silent cinema (Futile Victory). He was a reporter at the trial of the CEOs of a failed bank. He became a close friend of Nikolay Leykin, editor of the periodical Splinters of Petersburg Life, to which he was a regular contributor from 1883. He conducted a theatrical gossip column, which won him entry to all the greenrooms and side-scenes in Moscow. And he partook of his brothers’ bohemianism. He wrote to an old school chum in a letter his Soviet editors provided only in expurgated form: “I was on a spree all last night and, ‘cept for a 3-ruble drunk didn’t . . . or catch . . . I’m just about to go on a spree again.”⁵ His writing at this time was published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known being Antosha Chekhonte, from a schoolboy nickname. He also found time to revise Without Patrimony, which he seriously hoped would be staged; turned down by the leading actress to whom he submitted it, it was burnt by its author. Chekhov always took failure in the theater hard. However, two variant copies survived, minus the title page. It was first published in 1923. It has since become known as Platonov, after the central character.

The year 1884 was critical in Chekhov’s life. At the age of twenty-four, he set up as a general practitioner and, influenced by reading the English social critic Herbert Spencer, began research on a history of medicine in Russia. That December he had bouts of spitting blood, which his medical expertise might have led him to diagnose as a symptom of pulmonary tuberculosis. No outside observer would have suspected this active, well-built, handsome young man was suffering from a mortal illness. Only in his last years did he become a semi-invalid, and, until that time, he kept up the pretence that his symptoms were not fatal. This subterfuge was not carried on simply to allay his family’s anxieties. He wilfully strove to ignore the forecast of his own mortality and regularly discounted the gravity of his condition.

Eighteen eighty-four also saw the publication of his first collection of stories, pointedly entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene: the muse of tragedy compressed into pithy anecdotes of the life of actors. Chekhov had found more prestigious and better-paying periodicals to take his stories and was now an expert on Moscow life.

He had an opportunity to amplify his subject matter when he and his family began to spend summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school, and then in a cottage on the estate of the Kiselyov family. It was during those summers that Chekhov gained first-hand knowledge of the manor house setting he employed in many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of the officers of a battery, who turn up as characters in Three Sisters. Chekhov’s artistic horizons also expanded, for the Kiselyovs, intimates of the composer Chaikovsky, were devoted to classical music. Another summer visitor to become a lifelong friend was the painter Isaak Levitan, whose impressionistic landscapes are graphic counterparts of Chekhov’s descriptions.

The following year Chekhov’s literary career took a conspicuous upward turn. On a visit to St. Petersburg, Chekhov had been embarrassed by the acclaim that greeted him, because he recognized that much of his output had been hasty and unrevised. “If I had known that that was how they were reading me,” he wrote his brother Aleksandr, on January 4, 1886, “I would not have written like a hack.” Such stories as “Grief” and “The Huntsman,” both from 1885, had already displayed a new care in technique and seriousness in subject matter. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from Dmitry Grigoro-vich, the doyen of Russian critics, singling him out as the most promising writer of his time and urging him to take his talent more seriously. Although Antosha Chekhonte continued to appear in print for a few more years, Anton Chekhov made his first bow in the powerful Petersburg newspaper New Times. Its editor, Aleksey Suvorin, had risen from peasant origins to become a tycoon and a leading influence-monger in the conservative political camp. He and Chekhov were to be closely allied, although their friendship would later founder when Suvorin promoted the anti-Semitic line during the Dreyfus affair.

During the years when he was winning recognition as a writer of short stories, Chekhov made two further attempts to write for the theater. With the first, Along the Highway (1885), he came up against the obstacle of the censor, who banned it on the grounds that it was a “gloomy, squalid play.” The other piece, the monologue The Evils of Tobacco, was, like many of his early “dramatic études,” written with a specific actor in mind. It first appeared in 1886 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, and Chekhov kept revising it, publishing the final version, virtually a new work, in his collected writings of 1903. Farces he sketched out with collaborators never got beyond the planning stage.

Between 1886 and 1887, Chekhov published one hundred and sixty-six titles while practicing medicine. Such fecundity boosted his fame but wore him out. His health and his temper both began to fray. Profiting from an advance from Suvorin, Chekhov returned to southern Russia in 1887, a trip that produced remarkable work. The stories that ensued signaled his emergence as a leading writer of serious fiction. The novella “The Steppe” (1888) was published in The Northern Herald, one of the so-called fat, or weighty, journals that had introduced the writing of Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy and served as organs of public opinion. That same year, Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for Literature by the Imperial Academy of Science for his collection In the Gloaming. One of the most enthusiastic instigators of this honor had been the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who would later play an important role in establishing Chekhov’s reputation as a dramatist.

The Northern Herald was liberal in its politics, its editor, Aleksey Pleshcheev, a former prisoner in Siberia with Dostoevsky. Typically, Chekhov was able to be friendly with Pleshcheev and Suvorin at the same time, and he continued to contribute to New Times. His reluctance to be identified with any one faction exposed him to much acrimonious criticism from members of both camps, and especially from the progressive left. The writer Katherine Mansfield pointed out that the “problem” in literature is an invention of the nineteenth century. One of the legacies of Russian “civic criticism” of the 1840s was the notion that a writer had an obligation to engage with social problems and offer solutions, making his works an uplifting instrument of enlightenment. This usually meant espousing a doctrinaire political platform. Chekhov, perhaps fortified by his medical training, treasured his objectivity and steadfastly refrained from taking sides, even when his sympathies were easy to ascertain. “God keep us from generalizations,” he wrote. “There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never had any problems.”

Between 1886 and 1890, his letters discuss his objectivity and his “monthly change” of opinions, which readers preferred to see as the views of his leading characters. To his brother Aleksandr he insisted on May 10, 1886, that in writing no undue emphasis be placed on political, social, or economic questions. In another letter to Suvorin, on October 27, 1888, Chekhov wrote that the author must be an observer, posing questions but not supplying the answers. It is the reader who brings subjectivity to bear. Not that an author should be aloof, but his own involvement in a problem should be invisible to the reader, he explained to Suvorin, on April 1, 1890:

You reproach me for my objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, absence of ideals and ideas, etc. You want me to say, when I depict horse thieves: horse-stealing is a bad thing. But that’s been known for a long time now, without my help, hasn’t it? Let juries pass verdicts on horse thieves; as for me, my work is only to show them as they are.

The year before “The Steppe” appeared, Chekhov had at last had a play produced; the manager Fyodor Korsh had commissioned Ivanov and staged it at his Moscow theater on November 19, 1887. It was a decided if controversial success. As Chekhov wrote to Aleksandr, “Theater buffs say they’ve never seen so much ferment, so much unanimous applause cum hissing, and never ever heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play” (November 20, 1887). It was taken up by the Alexandra Theatre, the Imperial dramatic playhouse in St. Petersburg, and produced there on January 31, 1889, after much hectic rewriting in an attempt to make the playwright’s intentions clearer and to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the new cast.

The theme of a protagonist fettered by a sick wife and want of money was a distorted reflection of Chekhov’s own situation. His family obligations kept his nose to the grindstone, and he felt guilty whenever he traveled away. Yet the success of Ivanov and the curtain-raisers The Bear and The Proposal (1888–1889) had put Chekhov at a premium as a dramatist. Urged on by Korsh and others, and unable to make headway on a full-length novel, Chekhov hoped to collaborate with Suvorin on a new comedy; when the publisher begged off, Chekhov completed it himself as The Wood Goblin (1889). It was promptly turned down by the state-subsidized theaters of Petersburg and Moscow, which regarded it as more a dramatized story than an actable play. They recommended that Chekhov give up writing for the stage. A production at a private theater in Moscow was received with apathy bordering on contempt, and may have helped provide the impetus for a decision Chekhov would soon make to go to Sakhalin, ten thousand miles away. Throughout 1888 and 1889, Chekhov also tended to his brother Nikolay, who was dying of tuberculosis; after Nikolay’s death, Chekhov experienced both guilt and a foreboding of his own mortality, which brought on the mood conveyed in “A Dismal Story” (1889), in which a professor of medicine contemplates his frustrated ideals and imminent demise. The author’s mood was at its lowest ebb.

Secure in his reputation and income at the age of thirty, Chekhov sought to cast off this despondency by traveling to Sakhalin, the Russian Devil’s Island, in 1890; the eighty-one-day journey was arduous, for the Trans-Siberian railway had not yet been built. The enterprise may have been inspired by a Tol-stoyan wish to practice altruism or it may have been an ambitious project to write a magnum opus of “medical geography.” In any case, the ensuing documentary study of the penal colony was a model of socially engaged field research, and may have led to prison reforms. On a more personal level, it intensified a new strain of pessimism in Chekhov’s work, for, despite his disclaimers, he began to be bothered by his lack of outlook or mission.

No sooner had Chekhov returned, via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon, than he made his first excursion to Western Europe, accompanying Suvorin. His initial enthusiasm for Vienna, Venice, and Naples began to wane by the time he visited Nice, Monte Carlo, and Paris, and he was eager to get back to work. In Russia, with the writing routines resumed, the sense of enslavement returned. This mood was modulated by a flirtation with a family friend, Lidiya (Lika) Mizinova, who invested more significance in the relationship than he did. Her subsequent affair and illegitimate child with the married writer Ignaty Potapenko would be exploited by Chekhov in The Seagull (although he hoped his own circle would not spot the similarities).

The steady flow of royalties enabled Chekhov in 1891 to buy a farmstead at Melikhovo, some fifty miles south of Moscow, where he settled his parents and siblings. There he set about “to squeeze the last drop of slave out of his system” (as he wrote to Suvorin on January 7, 1889); “a modern Cincinnatus,” he planted a cherry orchard, installed a flush toilet, and became a lavish host. This rustication had a beneficial effect on both his literary work and his humanitarianism. He threw himself into schemes for building roads and schools and opened a clinic to provide free medical treatment, improving peasants’ minds and bodies. During the cholera epidemic of 1892–1893, he served as an overworked member of the sanitary commission and head of the famine relief board. These experiences found their way into the activities of Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya.

During this period, Chekhov composed masterful stories that explored the dead ends of life: “The Duel” (1891), “Ward No. 6” (1892), “The Black Monk,” “A Woman’s Kingdom,” “The Student” (all 1894), “Three Years” (1895), “The House with the Mansard,” “My Life” (both 1896), and “Peasants” (1897), carefully wrought prose pieces of great psychological subtlety. They recurrently dwell on the illusions indispensable to making life bearable, the often frustrated attempts at contact with one’s fellow man, the inexorable pull of inertia preventing people from realizing their potential for honesty and happiness. Chekhov’s attitude is clinically critical, but always with a keen eye for the sympathetic details that lead the reader to a deeper understanding.

For several years, Chekhov abandoned the theater, except for some monologues and one-act farces. Not until January 1894 did he announce that he had again begun a play, only to deny it a year later, in a letter to V. V. Bilibin: “I am not writing a play and, altogether, I have no inclination to write any. I am grown old, and I have lost my burning ardor. I should like to write a novel 100 miles long” (January 18, 1895). Nine months after that he was to break the news to Suvorin, “Can you imagine, I am writing a play which I shall probably not finish before the end of November. I am writing it not without pleasure, though I swear horribly at the conventions of the stage. A comedy, three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, a landscape (view of a lake); a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, five tons of love” (October 21, 1895).

The comedy was The Seagull, which had a rocky opening night at St. Petersburg’s Alexandra Theatre in 1896: the actors misunderstood it, the audience misapprehended it. Despite protestations of unconcern to Suvorin (“I dosed myself with castor oil, took a cold bath — and now I would not even mind writing another play”; October 22, 1896), Chekhov fled to Melikhovo, where he renounced playwriting. Although The Seagull grew in public favor in subsequent performances, Chekhov disliked submitting his work to the judgment of literary cliques and claques. Yet barely one year after the event, a new drama from his hand appeared in the 1897 collection of his plays: Uncle Vanya, a reworking of the earlier The Wood Goblin. It was widely performed in provincial capitals, where the residents found it reflected their dreary lives.

It was during this year that Chekhov’s illness was definitively diagnosed as tuberculosis, and he was compelled to leave Melikhovo for a milder climate. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Yalta on the Black Sea and various French and German spas, with occasional business trips to Moscow. He had a house constructed in the Yalta suburb of Autka. To pay for it, and to cover the new expenses his multiple residences created, Chekhov sold all he had written before 1899, excepting the plays, to the publisher Marks for the flat fee of 75,000 rubles (in current purchasing power, approximately $81,000), along with the reprint rights to any future stories. It was an improvident move. Marks had had no idea of the size of Chekhov’s output and had underpaid. The error in calculation may have induced Chekhov to return to playwriting as a more lucrative activity.

The remainder of his dramatic career was bound up with the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded in 1897 by his friend Nemirovich-Danchenko and the wealthy dilettante K. S. Alekseev, who acted under the name Konstantin Stanislavsky. Chekhov was one of the original shareholders in the enterprise. He admired his friends’ announced program of ensemble playing, their serious attitude to art, and a repertory of high literary quality. At the opening production, Aleksey Tolstoy’s blank-verse historical drama Tsar Feodor Ioannovich, his eye was caught by Olga Knipper, the young actress who played the tsarina. With only slight misgivings Chekhov allowed the Art Theatre to revive The Seagull at the close of its first season. Stanislavsky, as co-director, had greater misgivings; he did not understand the play. But a heavily atmospheric production won over the audience, and the play was a resounding success. The Moscow Art Theatre adopted an art-nouveau seagull as its insignia and henceforth regarded Chekhov as its house dramatist. When the Imperial Maly Theatre insisted on revisions to Uncle Vanya, which had been playing throughout the provinces for years, Chekhov withdrew the play from them and allowed the Art Theatre to stage its Moscow premiere. Three Sisters (1901) was written with Art Theatre actors in mind.

Chekhov’s chronic reaction to the production of his plays was revulsion, and so two months after the opening of Three Sisters, he was declaring, to Olga Knipper, “I will never write for the theater again. One can write for the theater in Germany, in Sweden, even in Spain, but not in Russia, where dramatists get no respect, are kicked by hooves and forgiven neither success nor failure” (March 1, 1901). Nevertheless, he soon was deep into The Cherry Orchard (1904), tailoring the roles to specific Moscow Art players. Each of these productions won Chekhov greater fame as a playwright, even when he himself disagreed with the chosen interpretation of the Art Theatre.

Chekhov languished in Yalta, which he called his “warm Siberia,” feeling that he had been shunted to an outpost for the moribund. At the age of forty, in 1900, to the great surprise of his friends and the temporary dismay of his sister Mariya, who had always been his housekeeper, he married the Art Theatre actress Olga Knipper. Chekhov’s liaisons with women had been numerous, ranging from a brief engagement in 1886 to Dunya Efros, a Jewish woman who refused to convert to Orthodoxy, to a one-night stand with a Japanese prostitute and a fling with the flamboyant actress Lidiya Yavorskaya. He exercised an involuntary fascination over a certain type of ambitious bluestocking and his fan mail from female admirers was considerable. Some women friends, such as Lidiya Avilova, projected their desires onto an ordinary relationship, casting themselves as Chekhov’s Egeria. Whenever the affair became too demanding or the woman too clinging, Chekhov would use irony and playful humor to disengage himself. In his writings, marriage is usually portrayed as a snare and a delusion that mires his characters in spirit-sapping vulgarity. His relationship with Knipper was both high-spirited—she was his “kitten,” his “horsie,” his “lambkin,” his “darling crocodile”—and conveniently remote, for she had to spend much of her time in Moscow, while he convalesced at his villa in Yalta. On those terms, the marriage was a success.

Chekhov’s villa, today a museum, became a Mecca for young writers, importunate fans, touring acting companies, and plain freeloaders. Such pilgrimages, though well meant, were not conducive to Chekhov’s peace of mind or body, and his health continued to deteriorate. Despite this rapid decline, and the disappointment of a miscarriage Olga suffered in 1902,⁶ a deeply lyrical tone suffuses his last writings. His late stories, “The Darling” and “Lady with Lapdog” (both 1899) and “The Bishop” (1902) and “Betrothed” (1903), offer more acceptance of the cyclical nature of life. They also reveal an almost musical attention to the structure and sounds of words, a quality to be remarked as well in the last “comedy,” The Cherry Orchard.

In December 1903, a failing Chekhov came to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard. The opening night, January 17, 1904, concided with his name day and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the commencement of his literary activity. Emaciated, hunched over, gravely ill, he did not show up until the second act and sat through the third, after which, to his great bemusement, a ceremony to honor him took place.

In June 1904 the Berlin doctors Chekhov consulted ordered him to Badenweiler, a health resort in the Black Forest. There the forty-four-year-old writer died on July 2. Shortly before his death, the doctor recommended putting an ice pack on his heart. “You don’t put ice on an empty heart,” Chekhov protested. When they suggested a glass of champagne, his last words came, “It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk champagne.” Unconsciously, he echoed the line of the old nurse Marina in Uncle Vanya: “It’s a long time since I’ve had noodles.”

Chekhov’s obsequies were a comedy of errors he might have appreciated. The railway carriage bearing his body to St. Petersburg was stencilled with the label “Fresh Oysters,” and, at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, the bystanders spent more time ogling the controversial author Maksim Gorky and the bass singer Fyodor Shalyapin than in mourning the deceased.⁷ Finally, and inadvertently, Chekhov’s cortège became entangled with that of General Keller, a military hero who had been shipped home from the Far East. Chekhov’s friends were startled to hear an army band accompanying the remains of a man who had always been chary of the grand gesture.

NOTES

1 The date given by Chekhov himself, although he would appear to have been born on the 16th. The 17th was his “saint’s day” or “name day,” the day of St. Anthony after whom he was christened. Dates given here are “Old Style,” in accord with the Julian calendar, twelve days behind the Gregorian.

2 M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 44.

3 Quoted in Ernest Simmons, Chekhov, A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 6.

4 Peter the Great had established a table of ranks that stratified social status into civil, military, naval, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In the civil hierarchy, meshchanin (literally, townsman) came just above peasant. In The Seagull, Treplyov complains that his father had been classified as a meshchanin of Kiev, even though he was a famous actor, and the same rank appears on his own passport. He finds it particularly galling since the term had come to imply philistinism.

5 Letter to Dmitry Savelyov, January (?) 1884. All translated quotations from Chekhov’s writings and letters are based on Polnoe sobranie sochineny i pisem, the complete collected works and letters in thirty volumes published in Moscow in 1974–1983. On the cuts made by Soviet editors, see A. Chudakov, “ ‘Neprilichnye slova’ i oblik klassika. O kupyurakh v izdaniya pisem Chekhova,” Liter-aturnoe obozrenie (November 1991): 54–56.

6 Olga’s miscarriage is described in a letter of hers to Chekhov (March 31, 1902). However, a controversy has arisen among scholars as to whether it was a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or something else; moreover, the paternity of the child has been questioned. See the articles of Hugh McLean and Donald Rayfield in The Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society XI, 1 (Summer 2003), and letters in subsequent issues.

7 Maksim Gorky, Literary Portraits, trans. Ivy Litvinov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 158–159.