Ward Number Six and Other Stories

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Chekhov carne of humbler social origins than the leading Russian fiction-writers of earlier generations: he was the third son, born in i86o, of a struggling grocer in the southern Russian port ofTaganrog.

He was a lively boy: a gifted mimic, a keen attender of the gallery at his home-town theatre, a great practical joker. He read widely, and was fortunate in attending the local grammar school, where the study of Latin and Greek loomed large in the curriculum. Though these studies bored the boy—whose school marks tended to be average— his school provided him with a stimulating social framework within which to develop. It also helped to qualify him for entering Moscow University.

In I 879 the nineteen-year-old Chekhov moved more than six hundred miles north from Taganrog to settle in Moscow, after which that city and its environs remained his base for two decades. He qualified as a doctor in 1884, but was to practise only sporadically, having already become an established writer of short humorous sketches and tales. From the proceeds of these the undergraduate Chekhov had already been helping to support his family—including his once strict father (now often unemployed) and mother as well as a sister and two younger brothers.

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