(I'm really sorry that I mistakenly posted an unedited version of this earlier.)
Well. I've decided. You know that question what famous dead person would you like to have dinner with? My definitive choice is the 19th-century poster boy for artistic, tortured geniuses. The writer who said, "Any idiot can face a crisis, it's the day to day living that wears you out."
Portrait by his brother Nicolai, 1883
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress," said Anton Chekhov. The short story is revolutionized and drama is modern because of him. He was born 150 years ago today.
He endured a painful childhood in Southern Russia. His father, a serf who worked to free himself, didn't know any better than to treat his family with brutality. Chekhov wrote to his brother: "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."
"My childhood had no childhood," he said.
His sterling-sounding father lost the farm, or rather the grocery store, and moved the family to Moscow to avoid creditors. Chekhov finished high school, tutoring to pay the way, and joined the family the following year.
While taking medical courses, at the urging of his brother, he started writing and having his humorous stories published in the satire "entertainment" magazines he and his brother liked to read.
I picture it like this:
Anton lies around spinning a scenario about a badly timed belch between would-be lovers-- a detail in one of his early stories. His brother scrapes lather off his face with a straight razor, taps it into a bowl and says, "That's funny, you should send it in to that magazine."
The part of Anton should be played by Robert Downey Junior or Johnny Depp, although both are older now than Chekhov was when he died. Maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, I dunno, we'll work on this later.
Chekhov finished his medical courses in 1884, and credited his medical education for nurturing in him a respect for objective observation and an attention to unique circumstances. By the next year he was supporting his family not so much from the medical practice as from writing. And he was already coughing up blood, having contracted tuberculosis from a patient.
By the 1880s he had made friends with the publisher of better and better periodicals and was encouraged by celebrated writers of the day. One advised Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality. The words had an effect on the 26-year-old.
He was a crazy hard worker. He never stopped practicing as a physician, he supported his family and wrote stories and plays, a number of which are winners of the Supreme Achievement of Humankind award that I just made up.
Our boy with D.M. Musina-Pushkina in Melihovo
No one at the time, or before, had written so humanly, bringing realism to the page in that dark and exquisitely moving way he has. Because of his particular use of detail, Tolstoy called Chekhov a photographer. Present-day scholar Cornell West says Anton Chekhov, really, was playing the blues.
The first production of his play, The Seagull, was an utter failure, with people hissing and breaking out into fights out of boredom by the end of it. But a later production, by the Moscow Art Theater, was a spectacular success. A seagull remains the theater's official emblem. The London Guardian reviewer Peter Constantine writes that at least three of his other plays are "incomparable and altered the history of the theater."
After the death of his brother, he went through Nicolai's papers and became obsessed, as his brother had been, with the state of the prisoners at Sakhalin Island, then-Russia's penal colony. He made the eccentric --and dangerous, for one in his condition--journey to the islands beyond Siberia. He stayed for months, interviewing prisoners and documenting what he saw--embezzlement, flogging, forced prostitution, and the lives of the child of prisoners living at the penal colony with their parents. From his notes on thousands of 3 x 5 note cards, he wrote a book that remains a classic of muted anger and compassion. The book, The Island of Sakhalin, brought about change in the living conditions of the prisoners.
The guy was a non-stop social activist in other areas too: he initiated support programs for famine relief after a crop failures and helped Jewish people fill out naturalization papers. He provided medical care to 25 villages during a cholera out-break. He had three schools built, arranged for a fire department, and engaged in massive forest plantation. In his hometown he opened a library. During his pro-active life he never stopped writing, composing more than 600 short stories in his too-short life.
He traveled to warmer climates, hoping to improve his health and eventually moved from his estate outside Moscow, Mihikovo, to Yalta. He is famously quoted, "I will be a splendid husband. But give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky everyday." At the age of 40, in 1901, he married actress Olga Knipper. He stayed mostly in Yalta to write and she in Moscow to work. He wrote her hundreds of touching love letters, beginning the letters, "Dear Actress." She began her letters to him, "Dear Writer."
In June of 1904, "The Cherry Orchard" was staged, the last of his works. In July, his health declining, Olga took him to Baddenweiler, Germany, a place famous for its restorative water, not hoping for a recovery, but a respite. In a hotel room, a doctor gave him a glass of champagne and an injection of camphor, thought to be an anodyne. The last words of the man who invented the inconclusive ending, where problems are never solved, just presented were: "It's been a long time since I've had champagne." He was forty-four years old. He is buried at Novadechivi Cemetery, under a gravestone shaped like a face-down open book.
201 of the 600 stories are here: chekhov2.tripod.com. The photos are from my-checkhov.com, which has zillions of wonderful photos, most of them unfortunately unattributed.
