Chekhov was a south-Russian, born January 17, 1860, in Taganrog, a seaport on an arm of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don. His father was a serf, whose ambition and ability led him early to buy his freedom and provide for the education of his four children. Anton passed through the local college and was graduated from the school of medicine at Moscow, but more than his year as a hospital interne, and a volunteer service during an epidemic of cholera, he did not practise.
His medical education, however, set the tone for Chekhov’s literary work, for he became a great pathologist of character, dealing chiefly with those sick of mind and heart whom we are wont to think of as unnormal. Early afflicted with the tubercular trouble which he combated in vain, and which carried him off July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany, at forty-four, he disclosed in his work, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, the double character of the observing physician and the sick patient. To the observer and in the observed, in such a dual rôle, trivialities would assume a larger interest than to the typical healthy man writing of complacent themes in a rosy land. And so they did to Chekhov—as will more and more appear.
While yet the youth was in the University (1879) he began to write “fugitive sketches” for the minor metropolitan newspapers, and eventually for the better-known Novoe Vremya and the St. Petersburg Gazette. A humor keen, if somewhat coarse, characterized these productions, which were often only a few hundred words in length. This light satirical tone prevailed until after the appearance in 1887 of his first book. Perhaps the critical disapproval it aroused made him see that one who could write so well might be better employed than in merely making people laugh, as one reviewer expressed it. At all events, his later work was more serious, though always a subtle, intellectual humor might be found—for it often lurked—in his most sober fictional and dramatic writings.
Chekhov was so modest, so retiring, so diffident even, that he came to his own by dint of sheer merit. When in the later years of his short life he married Olga Knipper, the blonde beauty of the Théâtre Libre, they took a villa at Yalta, on the Black Sea, for the husband’s enfeebled health demanded a milder climate than that of the metropolis. At Yalta, for a time, dwelt also Tolstoi and Gorki, and there Chekhov learned to know his brother writers. With that sincere big-heartedness which is happily characteristic of each of the Russian littérateurs chosen for inclusion in this series, both did much to bring his work to the attention of the public to which they were themselves looking.
With Tolstoi’s convictions Chekhov had little in common, so he did not seek him out. But the elder artist went to the younger, and a firm friendship ensued. That the enthusiastic prophesies of both Tolstoi and Gorki were not fully realized was doubtless due to the untimely ending of a career so full of promise and of real literary achievement.
Naturally, Chekhov’s attitude toward life was something more personal than was his conscious philosophy. The lost illusions of the Russian people—I speak now of the Russia of the late eighties and early nineties—were perfectly reflected in our author’s work. Of one of his characters he writes:
The Student remembered that when he left the house his mother sat in the hall, barefooted, and cleaned the samovar; and his father lay upon the stove and coughed; and because it was Good Friday nothing was being cooked at home, though he was tortured with desire to eat. And now, shivering with cold, the Student reflected that just the same icy wind blew in the reign of Rurik, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and in the reign of Peter the Great; and that there was just the same gnawing hunger and poverty, just the same dilapidated thatched roofs, just the same ignorance, the same boredom with life, the same desert around, the same darkness within, the same sense of oppression—that all these terrors were and are and will be, and that, though a thousand years roll by, life can never be any better.
Could anything be more pitiful—and more hopeless! And yet it was not the pity of it that Chekhov was picturing. It was the fatalism, the mockery, the uselessness of struggle, the satire of even complaining, that seemed to him to demand a voice. All contemporary life was gray. To him it was a silly thing to seek to idealize it. The only course was to view things as they are—the venom, the scurrility, the disenchantment, the heart-break, the hunger, the chill of soul and body, were real; then why delude self by renaming them, for alter them one could not! Why struggle when inertia accomplished just as much—that is to say, nothing! Why dream when the visions brought one no nearer light than did waking! Again and again his characters set out cheered by hopes and warmed by illusions, but one by one they return, hardened, dulled, disenchanted. But even this experience is not worth fretting about. The gaunt, wild-eyed men, the flat, empty-breasted women, are products of the Russian system, so why should they aspire to the unattainable? Let them be indifferent, for that is the surest anæsthetic.
But in all this one feels the terrible arraignment of the god-of-things-as-they-are, and no blame for the individual. Chekhov doubtless pitied men, but he excoriated Russian society. If he laughed at misery, it was that misery might not crush out the very life. If he preached indifferentism, it was that the Juggernaut of society should not pulverize those over whom its wheels must surely pass.