On this date in 1860, Anton Chekhov was born. 10 things you might not know about him:
He was born in Taganrog, a port on the sea of Azov in southern Russia. He was the third of six children.
His father ran a grocery store and also directed the parish choir. Anton sang in his father’s choirs. His father was abusive, though, and Chekhov described his childhood as “suffering”.
Chekhov attended the Taganrog Gymnasium (since renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium). At fifteen, he was held back a year because he failed an exam in ancient Greek, but his writing talents had already begun to manifest. While at school he edited humour magazines and wrote amusing captions for cartoons.
In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after being cheated by a contractor he’d employed to build a new house. He fled to Moscow, where two of his sons were at university, in order to avoid debtor’s prison. Anton was left behind to finish his school education, which he now had to pay for himself. He took various jobs including private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers. He sent any spare money he had to his family.
He finished school in 1879, when he joined his family in Moscow and attended medical school. He qualified as a doctor and continued working as a physician even when he became a successful writer.
The money he earned from writing allowed him to treat some patients for free. Medicine was his first career and writing a hobby. He once said “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I am bored of one, I spent the night with the other.”
In 1890, he visited a penal colony on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He spent three months there interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. It was an arduous journey involving trains, boats and horse-drawn carriages, and had a detrimental effect on his health.
On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress who’d appeared in one of his plays. It was a quiet wedding as Chekhov hated weddings. They lived apart for much of the time as by this time, Chekhov was living in Yalta, a town on the Black Sea, which had a mild climate, for the sake of his health, and Olga spent a lot of time in Moscow pursuing her acting career. They wrote to each other regularly.
He wrote four classic plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. His speciality was short stories. He wrote 574 of those, and one novel, The Shooting Party, published in 1884.
He died of tuberculosis at just 44 years old.
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