Chekhov

Chekhov: A Biography is a 1986 biography of Russian playwright and author of short stories Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, widely considered one of the greatest Russian authors of the nineteenth century. The prolific French biographer Henri Troyat also covered the lives of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Troyat uses a wide array of primary and secondary resources, including more than 4,000 letters, the autobiographies of his friends and colleagues, and Chekhov’s published works, to show how his work evolved over time and in response to contemporary thinkers. Troyat paints Chekhov as a charming, kind, and loyal person who grew up in a working-class family and was an outsider to academia and highbrow intellectual culture. Unlike the radical revolutionary Gorky and the fanatically religious Tolstoy who lived at the same time, Chekhov revealed the most about himself through the stories he crafted.

Troyat begins by describing Chekhov’s early childhood. He was born on January 29, 1860, in the port of Taganrog in southern Russia. Several of his siblings died in early childhood, and Chekhov was the third to survive. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, was the son of a serf. His mother, Yevgeniya Chekhov, was from the Ukranian village of Olhovakta and managed a grocery store. Pavel Chekhov directed the choir for the family’s Orthodox Christian church. He abused his wife and children, and this contradiction between his public and private life eventually informed Chekhov’s interest in hypocritical characters. Yevgeniya instilled in her son a love of stories, drawing from her wealth of experiences traveling with her father, a cloth salesman, throughout Russia. Chekhov would later declare that his father was the source of his talent, but his soul came from his mother. He found his father’s actions reprehensible and readily called out his brother Alexander when he noticed that he was repeating their father’s patterns of abuse in his own marriage.

After describing Chekhov’s early life, Troyat turns to several key aspects of his life and personality. The first was his endeavor to become a physician. Chekhov, always unsure what the optimal career path would be, had a complex relationship with medicine. He gradually gave up working as a physician as he became more deeply involved in writing. Second, Chekhov was a well-known philanthropist in education and medicine. He worked tirelessly to build a hospital that could treat poor tuberculosis patients, especially writers and artists, in Yalta. Third, Troyat focuses on Chekhov’s internal struggle to balance his emotions. Deeply compassionate and thoughtful, he had difficulty expressing himself, even to those who were closest to him.



Chekhov suffered from tuberculosis but denied it publicly for many years. Troyat suggests that the author may not have even accepted his diagnosis. He had frequent coughing fits as early as 1887, almost two decades before his death. Eventually, his reorganized priorities, accepting his illness and prognosis once they became undeniable. He went back on his commitment never to marry when, in 1901, he married Olga Knipper. By this time, he was already nearing death. Troyat acknowledges that little is known about why Chekhov, who habitually blew off female companionships, suddenly affirmed the institution of marriage. Troyat demonstrates that Chekhov was at once a prolific, loved, and deeply misunderstood man, who is still understood today mainly through his plays and stories.