Anton Chekhov. A life

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Anton once told me, 'In time all my things must see the light of day and I have no reason to be ashamed of them.' Bykov to Maria Chekhova, 7 April 1910 (LN87, 356)

We recognize Anton Chekhov today as a founding father of the modern theatre, where the author, not the actor, is king. We acknowledge him as the author who gave Europe's narrative fiction a new ambiguity, density and subtle poetry. Of all the Russian 'classics' he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy. Chekhov's approachability is inseparable from his elusiveness. It is very hard to say what he 'meant', when he so rarely judges or expounds. From Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's fiction we can reconstruct a philosophy and a life. From Chekhov's work, and from his many letters, we get only fleeting and contradictory glimpses of his inner world and experience. His many biographers have tried to build out of the evidence a consensual life of a saint - a man who in a life shortened by chronic illness pulled himself from poverty to gentility, became a doctor and tended to the oppressed, won fame as the leading prose-writer and dramatist of his time in Europe, was supported all his life by an adoring sister and, though too late, found happiness in marriage with the actress who interpreted him best.

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