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- By Anton Chekhov
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Russian dramatist and author (1860–1904) "Chekhov" redirects here. For other uses, see Chekhov (disambiguation). Anton ChekhovАнтон ЧеховChekhov in 1889Born(1860-01-29)29 January 1860[1]Taganrog, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian EmpireDied15 July 1904(1904-07-15) (aged 44)[2]Badenweiler, Grand Duchy of Baden, German EmpireResting placeNovodevichy Cemetery, MoscowOccupationWriter, physician, philanthropistLanguageRussianNationalityRussian[3]Alma materFirst Moscow State Medical UniversityGenresPlaynovellashort storyfeuilletonopinion journalismtravelogydiarycorrespondenceLiterary movementRealismYears activefrom 1870sNotable worksThe SeagullThree SistersNotable awardsPushkin PrizeSpouse Olga Knipper ​(m. 1901)​RelativesAlexander Chekhov (brother) Maria Chekhova (sister) Nikolai Chekhov (brother) Michael Chekhov (nephew)Lev Knipper (nephew)Olga Chekhova (niece)Ada Tschechowa (great-niece)Marina Ried (great-niece)Vera Tschechowa (great-great niece)Signature Portrait of Anton Chekhov by Isaac Levitan (1886) Anton Pavlovich Chekhov[a] (Russian: Антон Павлович Чехов[b], IPA: [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860[c] – 15 July 1904[d]) was a Russian playwright and physician who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.[e][5][6] Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre.[7] Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."[8][9] Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble[f] as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".[g][12] The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience.[3] Chekhov at first wrote stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations that influenced the evolution of the modern short story.[13][h][15] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.[16] Biography[edit] Childhood[edit] Birth house of Anton Chekhov in Taganrog, Chekhova street, Russia Young Chekhov in 1882 The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present. Portrait of young Chekhov in country clothes Young Chekhov (left) with brother Nikolai in 1882 Anton Chekhov was born into a Russian family on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great (17 January Old Style) 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov – on Politseyskaya (Police) street, later renamed Chekhova street – in southern Russia. He was the third of six surviving children. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf and his wife,[17] was from the village Olkhovatka (Voronezh Governorate) and ran a grocery store. He was a director of the parish choir, a devout Orthodox Christian, and a physically abusive father. Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.[18] Chekhov's paternal grandmother was Ukrainian, and according to Chekhov, the Ukrainian language was spoken in his household.[19][20] Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya (Morozova), was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels all over Russia with her cloth-merchant father.[21][22][23] "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother."[24] In adulthood, Chekhov criticised his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel's tyranny: "Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool."[25][i] Chekhov attended the Greek School in Taganrog and the Taganrog Gymnasium (since renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium), where he was held back for a year at fifteen for failing an examination in Ancient Greek.[27] He sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs. In a letter of 1892, he used the word "suffering" to describe his childhood and recalled: When my brothers and I used to stand in the middle of the church and sing the trio "May my prayer be exalted", or "The Archangel's Voice", everyone looked at us with emotion and envied our parents, but we at that moment felt like little convicts.[28] In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, having been cheated by a contractor named Mironov.[29] To avoid debtor's prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow. Chekhov's mother was physically and emotionally broken by the experience.[30] Chekhov was left behind to sell the family's possessions and finish his education. He remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man by the name of Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.[31] Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers, among other jobs. He sent every ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.[32] During this time, he read widely and analytically, including the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer,[33][34] and wrote a full-length comic drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication".[35] Chekhov also experienced a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.[32] In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University.[36] Early writings[edit] Chekhov then assumed responsibility for the whole family.[37] To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man Without Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by Nikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time.[38] Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.[39][40] In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge.[41] In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit his tuberculosis to his family or his friends.[24] He confessed to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."[42] He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodations. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three times the space.[43] Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.[44][45] Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story "The Huntsman" that[46] "You have real talent, a talent that places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality. Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and confessed, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself."[47] The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising.[48] Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1888, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth".[49] Turning points[edit] Chekhov's family and friends in 1890: (top row, left to right) Ivan, Alexander, father; (second row) Mariya Korniyeeva, Lika Mizinova, Masha, Mother, Seryozha Kiselev; (bottom row) Misha, Anton In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine, which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.[50] On his return, he began the novella-length short story "The Steppe", which he called "something rather odd and much too original", and which was eventually published in Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald).[51] In a narrative that drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, and his companions, a priest and a merchant. "The Steppe" has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", and it represented a significant advance for Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper.[52] In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November.[53] Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening" and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality.[54] Although Chekhov did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such as The Seagull (written in 1895), Uncle Vanya (written in 1897), The Three Sisters (written in 1900), and The Cherry Orchard (written in 1903) served as a revolutionary backbone to what is common sense to the medium of acting to this day: an effort to recreate and express the realism of how people truly act and speak with each other. This realistic manifestation of the human condition may engender in audiences reflection upon what it means to be human. This philosophy of approaching the art of acting has stood not only steadfast, but as the cornerstone of acting for much of the 20th century to this day. Mikhail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career.[24] From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's that has become known as Chekhov's gun, a dramatic principle that requires that every element in a narrative be necessary and irreplaceable, and that everything else be removed.[55][56][57] Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.— Anton Chekhov[57][58] The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life that he realises has been without purpose.[59][60] Mikhail Chekhov recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death. Mikhail was researching prisons at that time as part of his law studies. Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.[24] Sakhalin[edit] Anton Chekhov in 1893 In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the Russian Far East and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He spent three months there interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half-month journey to Sakhalin are considered to be among his best.[61] His remarks to his sister about Tomsk were to become notorious.[62][63] Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too.[64] Chekhov witnessed much on Sakhalin that shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and forced prostitution of women. He wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."[65][66] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example: On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict who had murdered his wife and wore fetters on his legs. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.[67] Chekhov later concluded that charity was not the answer, but that the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science, not literature.[68][69] Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of Sakhalin" in his long short story "The Murder",[70] the last section of which is set on Sakhalin, where the murderer Yakov loads coal in the night while longing for home. Chekhov's writing on Sakhalin, especially the traditions and habits of the Gilyak people, is the subject of a sustained meditation and analysis in Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84.[71] It is also the subject of a poem by the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, "Chekhov on Sakhalin" (collected in the volume Station Island).[72] Rebecca Gould has compared Chekhov's book on Sakhalin to Katherine Mansfield's Urewera Notebook (1907).[73] In 2013, the Wellcome Trust-funded play 'A Russian Doctor', performed by Andrew Dawson and researched by Professor Jonathan Cole, explored Chekhov's experiences on Sakhalin Island. Melikhovo[edit] Melikhovo, now a museum Mikhail Chekhov, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments: From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melikhovo, the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting.[74] Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, but the greatest cost was making journeys of several hours to visit the sick, which reduced his time for writing.[75] However, Chekhov's work as a doctor enriched his writing by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society: for example, he witnessed at first hand the peasants' unhealthy and cramped living conditions, which he recalled in his short story "Peasants". Chekhov visited the upper classes as well, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."[76] In 1893/1894 he worked as a Zemstvo doctor in Zvenigorod, which has numerous sanatoriums and rest homes. A local hospital is named after him. In 1894, Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since he had moved to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended the orchard and the pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, he "looked after ... as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his Three Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."[24] The first night of The Seagull, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on 17 October 1896, was a fiasco, as the play was booed by the audience, stinging Chekhov into renouncing the theatre.[77] But the play so impressed the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced his colleague Konstantin Stanislavski to direct a new production for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.[78] Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting.[79] The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year staged Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.[80] In the last decades of his life he became an atheist.[81][82][83] Yalta[edit] In March 1897, Chekhov suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow. With great difficulty he was persuaded to enter a clinic, where doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner of life.[84] Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900 After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Yalta and built a villa (The White Dacha), into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot Siberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was installed there.[85][86] In Yalta he completed two more plays for the Art Theatre, composing with greater difficulty than in the days when he "wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now". He took a year each over Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.[87] On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper quietly, owing to his horror of weddings. She was a former protégée and sometime lover of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull.[88][89][90] Up to that point, Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor",[91] had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment.[92] He had once written to Suvorin: By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her.... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.[93] Chekhov and Olga, 1901, on their honeymoon The letter proved prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart, although other Russian scholars have rejected that claim.[94][95] The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints about Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.[96][page needed] In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories,[97] "The Lady with the Dog"[98] (also translated from the Russian as "Lady with Lapdog"),[99] which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting from the encounter. Unexpectedly though, they gradually fall deeply in love and end up risking scandal and the security of their family lives. The story masterfully captures their feelings for each other, the inner transformation undergone by the disillusioned male protagonist as a result of falling deeply in love, and their inability to resolve the matter by either letting go of their families or of each other.[100] Death[edit] In May 1903, Chekhov visited Moscow; the prominent lawyer Vasily Maklakov visited him almost every day. Maklakov signed Chekhov's will. By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Mikhail Chekhov recalled that "everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off, but the nearer [he] was to the end, the less he seemed to realise it".[24] On 3 June, he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest in Germany, from where he wrote outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha, describing the food and surroundings, and assuring her and his mother that he was getting better. In his last letter, he complained about the way German women dressed.[101] Chekhov died on 15 July 1904 at the age of 44 after a long fight with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his brother.[102] Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history"[103]—retold, embroidered, and fictionalized many times since, notably in the 1987 short story "Errand" by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband's last moments: Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ('I'm dying'). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: 'It's a long time since I drank champagne.' He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child ...[104] Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway-car meant for oysters, a detail that offended Gorky.[105] Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military band.[106] Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.[107][108] Legacy[edit] Anton Chekhov museum in Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, Russia. It is the house where he stayed in Sakhalin during 1890. A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin that he thought people might go on reading his writings for seven years. "Why seven?", asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half", Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live."[109] Chekhov's posthumous reputation greatly exceeded his expectations. The ovations for the play The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death served to demonstrate the Russian public's acclaim for the writer, which placed him second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years. Tolstoy was an early admirer of Chekhov's short stories and had a series that he deemed "first quality" and "second quality" bound into a book. In the first category were: Children, The Chorus Girl, A Play, Home, Misery, The Runaway, In Court, Vanka, Ladies, A Malefactor, The Boys, Darkness, Sleepy, The Helpmate, and The Darling; in the second: A Transgression, Sorrow, The Witch, Verochka, In a Strange Land, The Cook's Wedding, A Tedious Business, An Upheaval, Oh! The Public!, The Mask, A Woman's Luck, Nerves, The Wedding, A Defenceless Creature, and Peasant Wives.[110] Chekhov's work also found praise from several of Russia's most influential radical political thinkers. If anyone doubted the gloom and miserable poverty of Russia in the 1880s, the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin responded, "read only Chekhov's novels!"[111] Raymond Tallis further recounts that Vladimir Lenin believed his reading of the short story Ward No. 6 "made him a revolutionary".[112] Upon finishing the story, Lenin is said to have remarked: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!"[113] In Chekhov's lifetime, British and Irish critics generally did not find his work pleasing; E. J. Dillon thought "the effect on the reader of Chekhov's tales was repulsion at the gallery of human waste represented by his fickle, spineless, drifting people" and R. E. C. Long said "Chekhov's characters were repugnant, and that Chekhov revelled in stripping the last rags of dignity from the human soul".[114] After his death, Chekhov was reappraised. Constance Garnett's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield, whose story "The Child Who Was Tired" is similar to Chekhov's "Sleepy".[115] The Russian critic D. S. Mirsky, who lived in England, explained Chekhov's popularity in that country by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values".[116] In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the revolution, but it was later incorporated into the Soviet canon. The character of Lopakhin, for example, was reinvented as a hero of the new order, rising from a modest background so as eventually to possess the gentry's estates.[117][118] Osip Braz. Portrait of Anton Chekhov. Despite Chekhov's reputation as a playwright, William Boyd asserts that his short stories represent the greater achievement.[119] Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story "Errand" about Chekhov's death, believed that Chekhov was the greatest of all short story writers: Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.[120] Style[edit] One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes", and pointed out similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: "the same nice people, the same utter futility".[121] Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer."[122] And Vladimir Nabokov criticised Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions".[123][124] But he also declared "yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet"[125] and called "The Lady with the Dog" "one of the greatest stories ever written" in its depiction of a problematic relationship, and described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice".[126] For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's historical accomplishment was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".[127] Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader (1925): But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.[128] Michael Goldman has said of the elusive quality of Chekhov's comedies: "Having learned that Chekhov is comic ... Chekhov is comic in a very special, paradoxical way. His plays depend, as comedy does, on the vitality of the actors to make pleasurable what would otherwise be painfully awkward—inappropriate speeches, missed connections, faux pas, stumbles, childishness—but as part of a deeper pathos; the stumbles are not pratfalls but an energized, graceful dissolution of purpose."[129] Influence on dramatic arts[edit] In the United States, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of subtext: "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches", wrote Stanislavski, "but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word ... the characters often feel and think things not expressed in the lines they speak."[130][131] The Group Theatre, in particular, developed the subtextual approach to drama, influencing generations of American playwrights, screenwriters, and actors, including Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan and, in particular, Lee Strasberg. In turn, Strasberg's Actors Studio and the "Method" acting approach influenced many actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism.[132] In 1981, the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin. One of Anton's nephews, Michael Chekhov, would also contribute heavily to modern theatre, particularly through his unique acting methods which developed Stanislavski's ideas further. Alan Twigg, the chief editor and publisher of the Canadian book review magazine B.C. BookWorld wrote: One can argue Anton Chekhov is the second-most popular writer on the planet. Only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov in terms of movie adaptations of their work, according to the movie database IMDb. ... We generally know less about Chekhov than we know about mysterious Shakespeare.[133] Chekhov has also influenced the work of Japanese playwrights including Shimizu Kunio, Yōji Sakate, and Ai Nagai. Critics have noted similarities in how Chekhov and Shimizu use a mixture of light humour as well as an intense depictions of longing.[134] Sakate adapted several of Chekhov's plays and transformed them in the general style of nō.[135] Nagai also adapted Chekhov's plays, including Three Sisters, and transformed his dramatic style into Nagai's style of satirical realism while emphasising the social issues depicted in the play.[135] Chekhov's works have been adapted for the screen, including Sidney Lumet's Sea Gull and Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. Laurence Olivier's final effort as a film director was a 1970 adaptation of Three Sisters in which he also played a supporting role. His work has also served as inspiration or been referenced in numerous films. In Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror, characters discuss his short story "Ward No. 6". Woody Allen has been influenced by Chekhov and references to his works are present in many of his films including Love and Death (1975), Interiors (1978) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Plays by Chekhov are also referenced in François Truffaut's 1980 drama film The Last Metro, which is set in a theatre. The Cherry Orchard has a role in the comedy film Henry's Crime (2011). A portion of a stage production of Three Sisters appears in the 2014 drama film Still Alice. The 2022 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Drive My Car, is centered on a production of Uncle Vanya. Several of Chekhov's short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1986 Indian anthology television series Katha Sagar. Another Indian television series titled Chekhov Ki Duniya aired on DD National in the 1990s, adapting different works of Chekhov.[136] Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep was adapted from the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov.[137] Publications[edit] Main article: Anton Chekhov bibliography See also[edit] Literature portalBiography portal Chekhov Library Chekhov Monument in Rostov-on-Don Ann Dunnigan, English-language translator Jean-Claude van Itallie, English-language translator Explanatory notes[edit] ^ In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Pavlovich and the family name is Chekhov. ^ In Chekhov's day, his name was written Антонъ Павловичъ Чеховъ. See, for instance, Антонъ Павловичъ Чеховъ. 1898. Мужики и Моя жизнь. ^ Old Style date 17 January. ^ Old Style date 2 July. ^ "Greatest short story writer who ever lived." – Raymond Carver[4] ^ "Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if they ever make it to the summit." – Ian McKellen[10] ^ "Chekhov's art demands a theatre of mood." – Vsevolod Meyerhold[11] ^ "He brought something new into literature." – James Joyce[14] ^ Another insight into Chekhov's childhood came in a letter to his publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin: "From my childhood I have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave up thrashing me was tremendous."[26] Citations[edit] ^ Chekhov & Garnett 2004, TO G. I. ROSSOLIMO.YALTA, October 11, 1899. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 595. ^ a b Hingley, Ronald Francis (25 January 2022). "Anton Chekhov – Biography, Plays, Short Stories, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 26 April 2022. ^ Chekhov & Bartlett 2004, p. xx. ^ Boyd, William (3 July 2004). "A Chekhov lexicon". the Guardian. Retrieved 31 October 2023. Quite probably. the best short-story writer ever. ^ Steiner, George (13 May 2001). "Observer review: The Undiscovered Chekov by Anton Chekov". the Guardian. Retrieved 31 October 2023. Stories ... which are among the supreme achievements in prose narrative. ^ Bloom 2002, p. [page needed]. ^ Chekhov & Garnett 2004, Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 11 September 1888. ^ Also on Wikiquote. ^ Miles 1993, p. 9. ^ Allen 2002, p. 13. ^ Styan 1981, p. 84; "A richer submerged life in the text is characteristic of a more profound drama of realism, one which depends less on the externals of presentation." ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 87; "Chekhov is said to be the father of the modern short story". ^ Power & Joyce 1974, p. 57. ^ "Tchehov's breach with the classical tradition is the most significant event in modern literature", John Middleton Murry, in Athenaeum, 8 April 1922, cited in Bartlett's introduction to About Love. ^ "You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." Letter to Suvorin, 27 October 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Rayfield 1997, pp. 3–4: Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov and Efrosinia Emelianovna ^ Wood 2000, p. 78 ^ "The Anton Chekhov Foundation". ^ Abdulaziz, Sanaa (19 May 2022). "The Chekhov museum in Ukraine under fire from Russian missiles". The Independent. ^ Payne 1991, p. XVII. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 18. ^ Chekhov and Taganrog, Taganrog city website. ^ a b c d e f From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 102; Letter to brother Alexander, 2 January 1889 ^ Chekhov & Garnett 2004, YALTA, March 27, 1894. ^ Bartlett, pp. 4–5.[incomplete short citation] ^ Letter to I.L. Shcheglov, 9 March 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 31. ^ Letter to cousin Mihail, 10 May 1877. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 25. ^ a b Payne 1991, p. XX. ^ Letter to brother Mihail, 1 July 1876. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 26. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 33. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 69. ^ Wood 2000, p. 79. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 91. ^ "There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty ... The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature." "Vodka Miniatures, Belching and Angry Cats", George Steiner's review of The Undiscovered Chekhov in The Observer, 13 May 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Willis, Louis (27 January 2013). "Chekhov's Crime Stories". Literary and Genre. Knoxville: SleuthSayers. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 26. ^ Letter to N.A.Leykin, 6 April 1886. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 128. ^ Rayfield 1997, pp. 448–450: They only ever fell out once, when Chekhov objected to the anti-Semitic attacks in New Times against Dreyfus and Zola in 1898. ^ In many ways, the right-wing Suvorin, whom Lenin later called "The running dog of the Tzar" (Payne, XXXV), was Chekhov's opposite; "Chekhov had to function like Suvorin's kidney, extracting the businessman's poisons."Wood 2000, p. 79 ^ The Huntsman.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Malcolm 2004, pp. 32–33. ^ Payne 1991, p. XXIV. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 160. ^ "There is a scent of the steppe and one hears the birds sing. I see my old friends the ravens flying over the steppe." Letter to sister Masha, 2 April 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Letter to Grigorovich, 12 January 1888. Quoted by Malcolm 2004, p. 137. ^ "'The Steppe,' as Michael Finke suggests, is 'a sort of dictionary of Chekhov's poetics,' a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come." Malcolm 2004, p. 147. ^ From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. ^ Letter to brother Alexander, 20 November 1887. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Petr Mikhaĭlovich Bit︠s︡illi (1983), Chekhov's Art: A Stylistic Analysis, Ardis, p. x ^ Daniel S. Burt (2008), The Literature 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time, Infobase Publishing ^ a b Valentine T. Bill (1987), Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom, Philosophical Library ^ S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911) ^ "A Dreary Story.". Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Simmons 1970, pp. 186–191. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 129. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 223. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 224. ^ Chekhov & Garnett 2004, (TO HIS SISTER.) TOMSK, May 20 (1890). ^ Wood 2000, p. 85. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 230. ^ Chekhov & Garnett 2004, TO A. F. KONI. PETERSBURG, January 16, 1891.. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 125. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 229: Such is the general critical view of the work, but Simmons calls it a "valuable and intensely human document." ^ "The Murder". Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2011. ^ Heaney, Seamus. Station Island Farrar Straus Giroux: New York, 1985. ^ Gould, Rebecca Ruth (2018). "The aesthetic terrain of settler colonialism: Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov's natives". Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 55: 48–65. doi:10.1080/17449855.2018.1511242. S2CID 165401623. ^ From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. ^ From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. ^ Note-Book.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Rayfield 1997, pp. 394–398. ^ Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, 25. ^ Chekhov and the Art Theatre, in Stanislavski's words, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage."Allen 2002, p. 11 ^ Rayfield 1997, pp. 390–391: Rayfield draws from his critical study Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the "Wood Demon" (1995), which anatomised the evolution of the Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya—"one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements." ^ Tabachnikova, Olga (2010). Anton Chekhov Through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers: Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. Anthem Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-84331-841-5. For Rozanov, Chekhov represents a concluding stage of classical Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, caused by the fading of the thousand-year-old Christian tradition that had sustained much of this literature. On the one hand, Rozanov regards Chekhov's positivism and atheism as his shortcomings, naming them among the reasons for Chekhov's popularity in society. ^ Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1997). Karlinsky, Simon; Heim, Michael Henry (eds.). Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Northwestern University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-8101-1460-9. While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a non-believer in the last decades of his life. ^ Richard Pevear (2009). Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Random House Digital, Inc. pp. xxii. ISBN 978-0-307-56828-1. According to Leonid Grossman, 'In his revelation of those evangelical elements, the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.' ^ Letter to Suvorin, 1 April 1897. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Olga Knipper, "Memoir", in Benedetti 1997, pp. 37, 270 ^ Bartlett, 2.[incomplete short citation] ^ Malcolm 2004, pp. 170–171. ^ "I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around, glass in hand with an endless grin on your face." Letter to Olga Knipper, 19 April 1901. ^ Benedetti 1997, p. 125. ^ Rayfield 1997, p. 500"Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional." ^ Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov's Leading Lady, quoted in Malcolm 2004, p. 59. ^ "Chekhov had the temperament of a philanderer. Sexually, he preferred brothels or swift liaisons."Wood 2000, p. 78 ^ Letter to Suvorin, 23 March 1895. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ Rayfield 1997, pp. 556–557Rayfield also tentatively suggests, drawing on obstetric clues, that Olga suffered an ectopic pregnancy rather than a miscarriage. ^ There was certainly tension between the couple after the miscarriage, though Simmons 1970, p. 569, and Benedetti 1997, p. 241, put this down to Chekhov's mother and sister blaming the miscarriage on Olga's late-night socialising with her actor friends. ^ Benedetti 1997. ^ Chekhov, Anton. "Lady with lapdog". Short Stories. ^ Rosamund, Bartlett (2 February 2010). "The House That Chekhov Built". London Evening Standard. p. 31. ^ Greenberg, Yael. "The Presentation of the Unconscious in Chekhov's Lady With Lapdog." Modern Language Review 86.1 (1991): 126–130. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 November 2011. ^ "Overview: 'The Lady with the Dog'." Characters in 20th-Century Literature. Laurie Lanzen Harris. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 November 2011. ^ Letter to sister Masha, 28 June 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov. ^ "Anton Chekhov | Biography, Plays, Short Stories, & Facts | Britannica". 27 October 2023. ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 62. ^ Olga Knipper, Memoir, in Benedetti 1997, p. 284 ^ "Banality revenged itself upon him by a nasty prank, for it saw that his corpse, the corpse of a poet, was put into a railway truck 'For the Conveyance of Oysters'." Maxim Gorky in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Chekhov's Funeral. M. Marcus.The Antioch Review, 1995 ^ Malcolm 2004, p. 91; Alexander Kuprin in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ "Novodevichy Cemetery". Passport Magazine. April 2008. Retrieved 12 September 2013. ^ Payne 1991, p. XXXVI. ^ Simmons 1970, p. 595. ^ Peter Kropotkin (1 January 1905). "The Constitutional Movement in Russia". revoltlib.com. The Nineteenth Century. Archived from the original on 3 November 2019. Retrieved 5 November 2019. ^ Raymond Tallis (3 September 2014). In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections. Routledge. ISBN 9781317547402. ^ Edmund Wilson (1940). "To The Finland Station". archive.org. Doubleday. When Vladimir finished reading this story, he was seized with such a horror that he could not bear to stay in his room. He went out to find someone to talk to, but it was late: they had all gone to bed. 'I absolutely had the feeling,' he told his sister next day,'that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!' ^ Meister, Charles W. (1953). "Chekhov's Reception in England and America". American Slavic and East European Review. 12 (1): 109–121. doi:10.2307/3004259. JSTOR 3004259. ^ William H. New (1999). Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 15–17. ISBN 978-0-7735-1791-2. ^ Wood 2000, p. 77. ^ Allen 2002, p. 88. ^ "They won't allow a play which is seen to lament the lost estates of the gentry." Letter of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, quoted by Anatoly Smeliansky in "Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre", from The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, 31–32. ^ "The plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity, but the parts appear greater than the whole." A Chekhov Lexicon, by William Boyd, The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Bartlett, "From Russia, with Love", The Guardian, 15 July 2004. Retrieved 17 February 2007. ^ Anna Obraztsova in "Bernard Shaw's Dialogue with Chekhov", from Miles, 43–44. ^ Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, 1925 (from Selected Letters, p. 179), in Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Ed Larry W. Phillips, Touchstone, (1984) 1999, ISBN 978-0-684-18119-6, 101. ^ Wood 2000, p. 82. ^ Wikiquote quotes about Chekhov ^ Karlinsky, Simon (13 June 2008). "Nabokov and Chekhov: Affinities, parallels, structures". Cycno. 10 (1 NABOKOV : Autobiography, Biography and Fiction). Retrieved 10 September 2018. ^ From Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, quoted by Francine Prose in Learning from Chekhov, 231. ^ "For the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life was made the form of the fiction. Before Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions." William Boyd, referring to the novelist William Gerhardie's analysis in Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study, 1923. "A Chekhov Lexicon" by William Boyd, The Guardian, 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007. ^ Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, ISBN 0-15-602778-X, 172. ^ Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama, p72. ^ Reynolds, Elizabeth (ed), Stanislavski's Legacy, Theatre Arts Books, 1987, ISBN 978-0-87830-127-0, 81, 83. ^ "It was Chekhov who first deliberately wrote dialogue in which the mainstream of emotional action ran underneath the surface. It was he who articulated the notion that human beings hardly ever speak in explicit terms among each other about their deepest emotions, that the great, tragic, climactic moments are often happening beneath outwardly trivial conversation." Martin Esslin, from Text and Subtext in Shavian Drama, in 1922: Shaw and the last Hundred Years, ed. Bernard. F. Dukore, Penn State Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-271-01324-4, 200. ^ Tovstonogov, Georgii (1968). "Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Gorky Theatre". The Drama Review. 13 (2). JSTOR: 146–155. doi:10.2307/1144419. ISSN 0012-5962. JSTOR 1144419. Lee Strasberg became in my opinion a victim of the traditional idea of Chekhovian theatre ... [he left] no room for Chekhov's imagery. ^ Sekirin, Peter (2011). Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. Foreword by Alan Twigg. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishers. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-7864-5871-4. ^ Rimer, J. (2001). Japanese Theatre and the International Stage. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. pp. 299–311. ISBN 978-90-04-12011-2. ^ a b Clayton, J. Douglas (2013). Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations. Routledge. pp. 269–270. ISBN 978-0-415-50969-5. ^ "Chekhov Ki Duniya". nettv4u. ^ Diken, Bülent (1 September 2017). "Money, Religion, and Symbolic Exchange in Winter Sleep". Religion and Society. 8 (1): 94–108. doi:10.3167/arrs.2017.080106. ISSN 2150-9301. General and cited sources[edit] Allen, David (2002). Performing Chekhov. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203019504. ISBN 978-0-203-01950-4. OCLC 559297281 – via Internet Archive. Bartlett, Rosamund, ed. (2004). Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. Translated by Bartlett, Rosamund; Phillips, Anthony. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-044922-8. OCLC 1131582937. Bartlett, Rosamund (2004). Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. London: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-3074-2. OCLC 632112773 – via Internet ARchive. Benedetti, Jean, ed. (1997). Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov. Translated by Benedetti, Jean. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press. ISBN 978-0-88001-550-9. OCLC 891822370 – via Internet Archive. Benedetti, Jean, Stanislavski: An Introduction, Methuen Drama, 1989 edition, ISBN 978-0-413-50030-4 Bloom, Harold (2002). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 978-0-446-69129-1. OCLC 1285554573. Borny, Geoffrey, Interpreting Chekhov, ANU Press, 2006, ISBN 1-920942-68-8, free download Chekhov, Anton (2004). About Love and Other Stories. Translated by Bartlett, Rosamund. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280260-6. OCLC 252643218 – via Internet Archive. Chekhov, Anton, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Fifty New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine, Duck Editions, 2001, ISBN 978-0-7156-3106-5 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (2004) [1920]. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Garnett, Constance. Project Gutenberg. OCLC 746986995. ebooks also available at OCLC 647111461, 647103583 Chekhov, Anton, Easter Week, translated by Michael Henry Heim, engravings by Barry Moser, Shackman Press, 2010 Chekhov, Anton (1991). Forty Stories. Translated by Payne, Robert. New York City: Vintage Classics. ISBN 978-0-679-73375-1. Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch, translated by Constance Garnett, Macmillan, 1920. Full text at Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. Chekhov, Anton, Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, B.W. Huebsch, 1921. Full text at Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. Chekhov, Anton, The Other Chekhov, edited by Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor, with story introductions by Pinckney Benedict, Fred Chappell, Christopher Coake, Paul Crenshaw, Dorothy Gambrell, Steven Gillis, Michelle Herman, Jeff Parker, Benjamin Percy, and David R. Slavitt. New American Press, 2008 edition, ISBN 978-0-9729679-8-3 Chekhov, Anton, Seven Short Novels, translated by Barbara Makanowitzky, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003 edition, ISBN 978-0-393-00552-3 Clyman, T. W. (Ed.). A Chekhov companion. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, (1985). ISBN 9780313234231 Finke, Michael C., Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapoetic Journey, an essay in Anton Chekhov Rediscovered, ed Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, Michigan Russian Language Journal, 1988, OCLC 17003357 Finke, Michael C., Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Cornell UP, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8014-4315-2 Gerhardie, William, Anton Chekhov, Macdonald, (1923) 1974 edition, ISBN 978-0-356-04609-9 Gorky, Maksim, Alexander Kuprin, and I.A. Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, B.W.Huebsch, 1921. Read at eldritchpress.. Retrieved 16 February 2007. Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-521-58917-8 Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden – 'Because of Little Apples', in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-8047-2120-2 Klawans, Harold L., Chekhov's Lie, 1997, ISBN 1-888799-12-9. About the challenges of combining writing with the medical life. Malcolm, Janet (2004) [2001]. Reading Chekhov, a Critical Journey. London: Granta Publications. ISBN 9781862076358. OCLC 224119811. Miles, Patrick, ed. (1993). Chekhov on the British Stage. New York, NY: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38467-4. OCLC 26363574 – via Internet Archive. Nabokov, Vladimir, Anton Chekhov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/HBJ Books, [1981] 2002 edition, ISBN 978-0-15-602776-2. Pitcher, Harvey, Chekhov's Leading Lady: Portrait of the Actress Olga Knipper, J Murray, 1979, ISBN 978-0-7195-3681-6 Power, Arthur; Joyce, James (1974). Conversations with James Joyce. London: Millington. ISBN 978-0-86000-006-8. Republished in 2012 as an ebook: OCLC 817895885 Prose, Francine, Learning from Chekhov, in Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini, UPNE, 1991, ISBN 978-0-87451-560-2 Rayfield, Donald (1997). Anton Chekhov: A Life. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780805057478. OCLC 654644946, 229213309. Sekirin, Peter. "Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries," MacFarland Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7864-5871-4 Simmons, Ernest Joseph (1970) [1962]. Chekhov: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226758053. OCLC 682992. Speirs, L. Tolstoy and Chekhov. Cambridge, England: University Press, (1971), ISBN 0521079500 Stanislavski, Constantin, My Life in Art, Methuen Drama, 1980 edition, ISBN 978-0-413-46200-8 Styan, John Louis (1981). Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23068-1. OCLC 752009093 – via Internet Archive. Troyat, Henri, Chekhov, London: Macmillan, 1987, ISBN 978-0-33344-141-1 Wood, James (2000) [1999]. "What Chekhov Meant by Life". The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief. New York, NY: Modern Library. ISBN 9780804151900. OCLC 863217943. Zeiger, Arthur, The Plays of Anton Chekhov, Claxton House, Inc., New York, NY, 1945. Tufarulo, G, M., La Luna è morta e lo specchio infranto. Miti letterari del Novecento, vol.1 – G. Laterza, Bari, 2009– ISBN 978-88-8231-491-0. External links[edit] Anton Chekhov at Wikipedia's sister projects Media from CommonsQuotations from WikiquoteTexts from Wikisource Listen to this article (3 minutes) This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 26 July 2012 (2012-07-26), and does not reflect subsequent edits.(Audio help · More spoken articles) Biographical Petri Liukkonen. "Anton Chekhov". Books and Writers. Biography at The Literature Network "Chekhov's Legacy" by Cornel West at NPR, 2004 The International competition of philological, culture and film studies works dedicated to Anton Chekhov's life and creative work (in Russian) Documentary 2010: Tschechow lieben (Tschechow and Women) – Director: Marina Rumjanzewa – Language: German Works Works by Anton Chekhov in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov at Project Gutenberg. All Constance Garnett's translations of the short stories and letters are available, plus the edition of the Note-book translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf – see the "References" section for print publication details of all of these. Site also has translations of all the plays. Works by or about Anton Chekhov at Internet Archive Works by Anton Chekhov at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett presented in chronological order of Russian publication with annotations. Антон Павлович Чехов. Указатель Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian, listed in chronological order, and also alphabetically by title. Retrieved June 2013. (in Russian) Антон Павлович Чехов Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian. Retrieved 16 February 2007. (in Russian) Works by Anton Chekhov at Open Library vteAnton Chekhov Bibliography Plays Platonov (1881) On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco (1886, 1902) Swansong (1887) Ivanov (1887) The Bear (1888) A Tragedian in Spite of Himself (1889) The Wedding (1889) Tatiana Repina (1889) The Wood Demon (1889) A Marriage Proposal (1890) The Festivities (1891) The Seagull (1896) Uncle Vanya (1897) Three Sisters (1901) The Cherry Orchard (1904) Novel The Shooting Party (1884) Novellas The Steppe (1888) The Duel (1891) The Story of an Unknown Man (1893) Three Years (1895) My Life (1896) Short storiesMotley Stories (1886) "An Enigmatic Nature" (1883) "The Death of a Government Clerk" (1883) "Fat and Thin" (1883) "Surgery" (1884) "The Chameleon (1884) "Oysters" (1884) "A Living Chronology" (1885) "Small Fry" (1885) "The Fish" (1885) "The Huntsman" (1885) "A Malefactor" (1885) "Children" (1886) "Misery" (1886) "Anyuta" (1886) "Ivan Matveyich" (1886) In the Twilight (1887) "The Requiem" (1886) "The Witch" (1886) "Agafya" (1886) "Easter Eve" (1886) "A Misfortune" (1886) "Home" (1887) Stories (1888) "The Privy Councillor" (1886) "Mire" (1886) "Vanka" (1886) "Happiness" (1887) Gloomy People (1890) "The Cattle-Dealers" (1887) "Sleepy" (1888) "A Dreary Story" (1889) "A Nervous Breakdown" (1889) Ward No. 6 (1893) "Gusev" (1890) "Peasant Wives" (1891) "Ward No. 6" (1892) Novellas andStories (1894) "The Grasshopper" (1892) "In Exile" (1892) "The Black Monk" (1894) "Rothschild's Violin" (1894) "The Student" (1894) "The Teacher of Literature" (1894) Little Trilogy (1898) "The Man in the Case" (1898) "Gooseberries" (1898) "About Love" (1898) Stories (1901) "Anna on the Neck" (1895) "Ariadne" (1895) "The House with the Mezzanine" (1895) "Peasants" (1897) "The Petcheneg" (1897) "At Home" (1897) "In the Cart" (1897) "Ionych" (1898) "A Doctor's Visit" (1898) "On Official Duty" (1899) "The Darling" (1899) Other stories "The Complaints Book" (1884) "A Horsey Name" (1885) "Sergeant Prishibeyev" (1885) "Grisha" (1886) "A Gentleman Friend" (1886) "The Chorus Girl" (1886) "Shrove Tuesday" (1886) "First Aid" (1887) "The Runaway" (1887) "The Siren" (1887) "Boys" (1887) "Kashtanka" (1887) "A Story Without a Title" (1888) "The Bet" (1889) "Whitebrow" (1895) "The Lady with the Dog" (1899) "In the Ravine" (1900) "The Bishop" (1902) "Betrothed" (1903) Non-fictionSakhalin Island (1893–1895)Related Olga Knipper (wife) Maria Chekhova (sister) Mikhail Chekhov (brother) Osip Dymov (character) Birth house and museum Chekov Shop, home and museum Melikhovo, home and museum White Dacha, home and museum Chekhov Gymnasium and museum Chekhov Library Bust, Taganrog Statue, Taganrog Statue, Rostov-on-Don Chekhov's gun Show, don't tell Fragments Wild Honey Category Links to related articles vteAnton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1899)Films Uncle Vanya (1957) Uncle Vanya (1963) Uncle Vanya (1970 Russian) Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) Country Life (1994) August (1996) Other Sonya's Story September Cold Souls Story within a story Drive My Car vteAnton Chekhov's Three SistersFilms The Three Sisters (1966) The Three Sisters (1970) Three Sisters (1970) Three Sisters (1994) The Sisters (2005) vteAnton Chekhov's The Seagull (1896)Films The Seagull (1959) The Sea Gull (1968) The Seagull (1972) Little Lili (2003) The Seagull (2018) Plays Moscow Art Theatre production (1898) The Notebook of Trigorin (1981) Stupid Fucking Bird (2013) Other The Seagull (1974 opera) The Seagull (1980 ballet) Related Birds of Paradise vteAnton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904)Films The Cherry Orchard (1973) The Cherry Orchard (1999) Pomegranate Orchard (2017) Opera Der Kirschgarten Story within a Story Sakura no Sono Henry's Crime vteModernismMovements Acmeism Art Deco Art Nouveau Ashcan School Constructivism Cubism Dada Expressionism Der Blaue Reiter Die Brücke Music Fauvism Functionalism Bauhaus Futurism Imagism Lettrism Neoplasticism De Stijl Orphism Surrealism Symbolism Synchromism Tonalism Literary artsLiterature Apollinaire Barnes Beckett Bely Breton Broch Bulgakov Chekhov Conrad Döblin Forster Faulkner Flaubert Ford Gide Hamsun Hašek Hemingway Hesse Joyce Kafka Koestler Lawrence Mann Mansfield Marinetti Musil Dos Passos Platonov Porter Proust Stein Svevo Unamuno Woolf Poetry Akhmatova Aldington Auden Cavafy Cendrars Crane H.D. Desnos Eliot Éluard Elytis George Jacob Lorca Lowell (Amy) Lowell (Robert) Mallarmé Moore Owen Pessoa Pound Rilke Seferis Stevens Thomas Tzara Valéry Williams Yeats Works In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) The Metamorphosis (1915) Ulysses (1922) The Waste Land (1922) The Magic Mountain (1924) Mrs Dalloway (1925) The Sun Also Rises (1926) The Master and Margarita (1928–1940) The Sound and the Fury (1929) Visual artsPainting Albers Arp Balthus Bellows Boccioni Bonnard Brâncuși Braque Calder Cassatt Cézanne Chagall Chirico Claudel Dalí Degas Kooning Delaunay Delaunay Demuth Dix Doesburg Duchamp Dufy Ensor Ernst Gauguin Giacometti van Gogh Goncharova Gris Grosz Höch Hopper Kahlo Kandinsky Kirchner Klee Kokoschka Léger Magritte Malevich Manet Marc Matisse Metzinger Miró Modigliani Mondrian Monet Moore Munch Nolde O'Keeffe Picabia Picasso Pissarro Ray Redon Renoir Rodin Rousseau Schiele Seurat Signac Sisley Soutine Steichen Stieglitz Toulouse-Lautrec Vuillard Wood Film Akerman Aldrich Antonioni Avery Bergman Bresson Buñuel Carné Cassavetes Chaplin Clair Cocteau Dassin Deren Dovzhenko Dreyer Edwards Eisenstein Epstein Fassbinder Fellini Flaherty Ford Fuller Gance Godard Hitchcock Hubley Jones Keaton Kubrick Kuleshov Kurosawa Lang Losey Lupino Marker Minnelli Murnau Ozu Pabst Pudovkin Ray (Nicholas) Ray (Satyajit) Resnais Renoir Richardson Rossellini Sirk Sjöström Sternberg Tarkovsky Tati Trnka Truffaut Varda Vertov Vigo Welles Wiene Wood Architecture Breuer Bunshaft Gaudí Gropius Guimard Horta Hundertwasser Johnson Kahn Le Corbusier Loos Melnikov Mendelsohn Nervi Neutra Niemeyer Rietveld Saarinen Steiner Sullivan Tatlin Mies Wright Works A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) Mont Sainte-Victoir (1887) The Starry Night (1889) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) The Dance (1909–1910) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Black Square (1915) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) Ballet Mécanique (1923) Battleship Potemkin (1925) Metropolis (1927) Un Chien Andalou (1929) Villa Savoye (1931) Fallingwater (1936) Citizen Kane (1941) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) PerformingartsMusic Antheil Bartók Berg Berio Boulanger Boulez Copland Debussy Dutilleux Feldman Górecki Hindemith Honegger Ives Janáček Ligeti Lutosławski Milhaud Nono Partch Russolo Satie Schaeffer Schoenberg Scriabin Stockhausen Strauss Stravinsky Szymanowski Varèse Villa-Lobos Webern Weill Theatre Anderson Anouilh Artaud Beckett Brecht Chekhov Ibsen Jarry Kaiser Maeterlinck Mayakovsky O'Casey O'Neill Osborne Pirandello Piscator Strindberg Toller Wedekind Wilder Witkiewicz Dance Balanchine Cunningham Diaghilev Duncan Fokine Fuller Graham Holm Massine Nijinsky Shawn Sokolow St. Denis Tamiris Wiesenthal Wigman Works Don Juan (1888) Ubu Roi (1896) Verklärte Nacht (1899) Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) Salome (1905) The Firebird (1910) Afternoon of a Faun (1912) The Rite of Spring (1913) Fountain (1917) Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) The Threepenny Opera (1928) Waiting for Godot (1953) Related American modernism Armory Show Avant-garde Ballets Russes Bloomsbury Group Buddhist modernism Classical Hollywood cinema Degenerate art Ecomodernism Experimental film Film noir Fourth dimension in art Fourth dimension in literature Grosvenor School of Modern Art Hanshinkan Modernism High modernism Hippie modernism Impressionism Music Literature Post- Incoherents International Style Late modernism Late modernity List of art movements List of avant-garde artists List of modernist poets Maximalism Modernity Neo-primitivism Neo-romanticism New Hollywood New Objectivity Poetic realism Postmodern music Postmodernism Film Television Pulp noir Reactionary modernism Metamodernism Remodernism Second Viennese School Structural film Underground film Vulgar modernism ← Romanticism Category Authority control databases International FAST ISNI VIAF WorldCat National Norway Chile Spain France BnF data Argentina Catalonia Germany Italy Israel Finland Belgium 2 United States Sweden Latvia Japan Czech Republic Australia Greece Korea Croatia Netherlands Poland Portugal 2 Russia Vatican Academics CiNii Artists KulturNav MusicBrainz People Deutsche Biographie Trove Other RISM SNAC IdRef

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"Someone came from the Grigoryevs' to fetch a book, but I said you were not at home. The postman brought the newspaper and two letters. By the way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak to Seryozha. To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he is smoking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."

Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court, who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed.

"Seryozha smoking…" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is he?"

"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a bad and pernicious5 habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in the beginning."

"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"

"He takes it from the drawer in your table."

"Yes? In that case, send him to me."

When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at the same time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror. It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of smoking, though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand. Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself, growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis there often is underlying his rational activity, and how little of established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer…

And such light and discursive8 thoughts as visit the brain only when it is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch's head; there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not remain long in the mind, but seem to glide over its surface without sinking deeply into it. For people who are forced for whole hours, and even days, to think by routine in one direction, such free private thinking affords a kind of comfort, an agreeable solace.

It was between eight and nine o'clock in the evening. Overhead, on the second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor above that four hands were playing scales. The pacing of the man overhead who, to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of something harassing, or was suffering from toothache, and the monotonous scales gave the stillness of the evening a drowsiness that disposed to lazy reveries9. In the nursery, two rooms away, the governess and Seryozha were talking.

"Pa-pa has come!" carolled the child. "Papa has co-ome. Pa! Pa! Pa!"

"Votre père vous appelle, allez vite!" cried the governess, shrill as a frightened bird. "I am speaking to you!"

"What am I to say to him, though?" Yevgeny Petrovitch wondered.

But before he had time to think of anything whatever his son Seryozha, a boy of seven, walked into the study.

He was a child whose sex could only have been guessed from his dress: weakly, white-faced, and fragile. He was limp like a hot-house plant, and everything about him seemed extraordinarily soft and tender: his movements, his curly hair, the look in his eyes, his velvet jacket.

"Good evening, papa!" he said, in a soft voice, clambering on to his father's knee and giving him a rapid kiss on his neck. "Did you send for me?"

"Excuse me, Sergey Yevgenitch," answered the prosecutor, removing him from his knee. "Before kissing we must have a talk, and a serious talk ... I am angry with you, and don't love you any more. I tell you, my boy, I don't love you, and you are no son of mine..."

Seryozha looked intently at his father, then shifted his eyes to the table, and shrugged his shoulders.

"What have I done to you?" he asked in perplexity, blinking. "I haven't been in your study all day, and I haven't touched anything."

"Natalya Semyonovna has just been complaining to me that you have been smoking... Is it true? Have you been smoking?"

"Yes, I did smoke once... That's true..."

"Now you see you are lying as well," said the prosecutor, frowning to disguise a smile. "Natalya Semyonovna has seen you smoking twice. So you see you have been detected in three misdeeds: smoking, taking someone else's tobacco, and lying. Three faults."

"Oh yes," Seryozha recollected, and his eyes smiled. "That's true, that's true; I smoked twice: to-day and before."

"So you see it was not once, but twice... I am very, very much displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are spoilt and have become a bad one."

Yevgeny Petrovitch smoothed down Seryozha's collar and thought:

"What more am I to say to him!"

"Yes, it's not right," he continued. "I did not expect it of you. In the first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you. Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he takes anyone else's ... he is a bad man!" ("I am not saying the right thing!" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch.) "For instance, Natalya Semyonovna has a box with her clothes in it. That's her box, and we - that is, you and I -- dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That's right, isn't it? You've got toy horses and pictures... I don't take them, do I? Perhaps I might like to take them, but ... they are not mine, but yours!"

" Take them if you like!" said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. "Please don't hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine, but I don't mind... Let it stay."

"You don't understand me," said Bykovsky. "You have given me the dog, it is mine now and I can do what I like with it; but I didn't give you the tobacco! The tobacco is mine." ("I am not explaining properly!" thought the prosecutor. "It's wrong! Quite wrong!") "If I want to smoke someone else's tobacco, I must first of all ask his permission..."

Languidly11 linking one phrase on to another and imitating the language of the nursery, Bykovsky tried to explain to his son the meaning of property. Seryozha gazed at his chest and listened attentively (he liked talking to his father in the evening), then he leaned his elbow on the edge of the table and began screwing up his short-sighted eyes at the papers and the inkstand. His eyes strayed over the table and rested on the gum-bottle.

"Papa, what is gum made of?" he asked suddenly, putting the bottle to his eyes.

Bykovsky took the bottle out of his hands and set it in its place and went on:

"Secondly, you smoke... That's very bad. Though I smoke it does not follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame myself and don't like myself for it." ("A clever teacher, I am!" he thought.) "Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who smokes dies earlier than he should. It's particularly bad for boys like you to smoke. Your chest is weak, you haven't reached your full strength yet, and smoking leads to consumption and other illness in weak people. Uncle Ignat died of consumption, you know. If he hadn't smoked, perhaps he would have lived till now."

Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with his finger, and heaved a sigh.

"Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!" he said. "His violin is at the Grigoryevs' now.

Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank into thought. His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he were listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress and something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world, while their children and violins remain upon the earth. The dead live somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the earth. Can they endure the parting?

"What am I to say to him?" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch. "He's not listening to me. Obviously he does not regard either his misdoings or my arguments as serious. How am I to drive it home?"

The prosecutor got up and walked about the study.

"Formerly, in my time, these questions were very simply settled," he reflected. "Every urchin who was caught smoking was thrashed. The cowardly and faint-hearted did actually give up smoking, any who were somewhat more plucky and intelligent, after the thrashing took to carrying tobacco in the legs of their boots, and smoking in the barn. When they were caught in the barn and thrashed again, they would go away to smoke by the river ... and so on, till the boy grew up. My mother used to give me money and sweets not to smoke. Now that method is looked upon as worthless and immoral. The modern teacher, taking his stand on logic, tries to make the child form good principles, not from fear, nor from desire for distinction or reward, but consciously."

While he was walking about, thinking, Seryozha climbed up with his legs on a chair sideways to the table, and began drawing. That he might not spoil official paper nor touch the ink, a heap of half-sheets, cut on purpose for him, lay on the table together with a blue pencil.

"Cook was chopping up cabbage to-day and she cut her finger," he said, drawing a little house and moving his eyebrows. "She gave such a scream that we were all frightened and ran into the kitchen. Stupid thing! Natalya Semyonovna told her to dip her finger in cold water, but she sucked it ... And how could she put a dirty finger in her mouth! That's not proper, you know, papa!"

Then he went on to describe how, while they were having dinner, a man with a hurdy-gurdy had come into the yard with a little girl, who had danced and sung to the music.

"He has his own train of thought!" thought the prosecutor. "He has a little world of his own in his head, and he has his own ideas of what is important and unimportant. To gain possession of his attention, it's not enough to imitate his language, one must also be able to think in the way he does. He would understand me perfectly if I really were sorry for the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured and cried... That's why no one can take the place of a mother in bringing up a child, because she can feel, cry, and laugh together with the child. One can do nothing by logic and morality. What more shall I say to him? What?"

And it struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as strange and absurd that he, an experienced advocate, who spent half his life in the practice of reducing people to silence, forestalling what they had to say, and punishing them, was completely at a loss and did not know what to say to the boy.

"I say, give me your word of honour that you won't smoke again," he said.

"Word of hon-nour!" carolled Seryozha, pressing hard on the pencil and bending over the drawing. "Word of hon-nour!"

"Does he know what is meant by word of honour?" Bykovsky asked himself. "No, I am a poor teacher of morality! If some schoolmaster or one of our legal fellows could peep into my brain at this moment he would call me a poor stick, and would very likely suspect me of unnecessary subtlety... But in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates the question. If this boy were not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner on his trial, I should not be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be racing all over the place!"

Yevgeny Petrovitch sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha's drawings to him. In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and smoke which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in zigzags up to the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a soldier with dots for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure 4.

"A man can't be taller than a house," said the prosecutor.

Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get comfortably settled there.

"No, papa!" he said, looking at his drawing. "If you were to draw the soldier small you would not see his eyes."

Ought he to argue with him? From daily observation of his son the prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the grasp of grown-up people. Had he been attentively observed, Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations. Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread... To his mind sound was closely connected with form and colour, so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on.

Abandoning his drawing, Seryozha shifted about once more, got into a comfortable attitude, and busied himself with his father's beard. First he carefully smoothed it, then he parted it and began combing it into the shape of whiskers.

"Now you are like Ivan Stepanovitch," he said, "and in a minute you will be like our porter. Papa, why is it porters stand by doors? Is it to prevent thieves getting in?"

The prosecutor felt the child's breathing on his face, he was continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha's jacket.

He looked at the boy's big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his wife and everything that he had ever loved.

"To think of thrashing him ..." he mused. "A nice task to devise a punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic... The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book..."

It struck ten.

"Come, boy, it's bedtime," said the prosecutor. "Say good-night and go."

"No, papa," said Seryozha, "I will stay a little longer. Tell me something! Tell me a story..."

"Very well, only after the story you must go to bed at once."

Yevgeny Petrovitch on his free evenings was in the habit of telling Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs, he did not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a single fairy tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with the stereotyped: "In a certain country, in a certain kingdom," then he heaped up all kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as he told the beginning how the story would go on, and how it would end. Scenes, characters, and situations were taken at random, impromptu15, and the plot and the moral came of itself as it were, with no plan on the part of the story-teller. Seryozha was very fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed that the simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the impression it made on the child.

"Listen," he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Once upon a time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an old, very old emperor with a long grey beard, and ... and with great grey moustaches like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there grew oranges, you know ... bergamots, cherries ... tulips, roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of different colours sang there... Yes... On the trees there hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a softer, tenderer note than metals... Well, what next? There were fountains in the garden... Do you remember you saw a fountain at Auntie Sonya's summer villa? Well, there were fountains just like that in the emperor's garden, only ever so much bigger, and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar."

Yevgeny Petrovitch thought a moment, and went on:

"The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom -- a boy as little as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went to bed early, he never touched anything on the table, and altogether he was a sensible boy. He had only one fault, he used to smoke..."

Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father's eyes without blinking. The prosecutor went on, thinking: "What next?" He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this:

"The emperor's son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor little bells in the garden... That's what happened."

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naïve, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice:

"I am not going to smoke any more..."

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down the room and smiled to himself.

"They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form," he meditated. "It may be so, but that's no comfort. It's not the right way, all the same... Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills? It's not normal... It's falsification ... deception ... tricks ..."

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a "speech," of the general public who absorb history only from legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables, novels, poems.

"Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish habit since the days of Adam… though, indeed, perhaps it is all natural, and ought to be so... There are many deceptions and delusions in nature that serve a purpose."

He set to work, but lazy, intimate thoughts still strayed through his mind for a good while. Overhead the scales could no longer be heard, but the inhabitant of the second storey was still pacing from one end of the room to another.
Current Page: 1

GRADE:6

Additional Information:

Rating: A Words in the Passage: 770 Unique Words: 343 Sentences: 73
Noun: 271 Conjunction: 69 Adverb: 60 Interjection: 2
Adjective: 41 Pronoun: 114 Verb: 163 Preposition: 105
Letter Count: 3,816 Sentiment: Positive Tone: Conversational Difficult Words: 158
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