Where is anton chekhov from

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Russian writer Anton Chekhov is recognized as a master of the modern short story and a leading playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time he was in his forth year of medical school, he had caught the attention of several editors. By , his stories were earning him not only money but notoriety. Chekhov's Literary Purpose As a writer, Chekhov did not subscribe to a particular religion or political affiliation.

He wanted to satirize not preach. At the time, artists and scholars debated the purpose of literature. Some felt that literature should offer "life instructions. For the most part, Chekhov agreed with the latter view. Chekhov the Playwright Because of his fondness for dialogue, Chekhov felt drawn to the theatre.

His early plays such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon artistically dissatisfied him. In he began working on a rather original theatrical project: The Seagull. It was a play that defied many of the traditional elements of common stage productions. It lacked plot and it focused on many interesting yet emotionally static characters.

In The Seagull received a disastrous response on opening night. The audience actually booed during the first act. Fortunately, innovative directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danechenko believed in Chekhov's work. Their new approach to drama invigorated audiences. Chekhov's Love Life The Russian storyteller played with themes of romance and marriage, but throughout most of his life he did not take love seriously.

He had occasional affairs, but he did not fall in love until he met Olga Knipper, an up-and-coming Russian actress. They were very discreetly married in Olga not only starred in Chekhov's plays, she also deeply understood them.

More than anyone in Chekhov's circle, she interpreted the subtle meanings within the plays. Olga and Chekhov were kindred spirits, though they did not spend much time together. Their letters indicate that they were very affectionate to one another. Radically, he wrote about the predicaments faced by women with the clarity of a non-ideological feminist. By non-ideological, I mean that he saw those women as clearly as he saw their oppressors. He got married, at 39, to Olga Knipper, an actress who spent most of her time in Moscow and St.

I used to feel little for Chekhov. I was born in the Soviet Union and majored in Russian literature at university to try to reconnect with my heritage after a decade of trying hard to pass for American.

I was riven with confusion and doubt—so is every undergraduate, but I had an extra piece due to losing my home country at nine—and was easily seduced by the grandeur, nobility, moral preoccupation, and clarity of the grandees we read. America felt free, but more frivolous, than the Soviet Union. Here was the opposite of frivolity. Here were writers who believed—no, took for granted—that the writer was a moral accountant to a fallen world, charged with showing the way forward.

And that there was a way forward, as opposed to an endless array of equally compromised truths. From a young age, my parents had generously exercised in me a self-respect, not to say self-regard, that few children get to feel. That ego was trampled by immigration. In America, I felt inept and painfully out of place. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—even the hand-wringing Turgenev—helped me find value, dignity, purpose.

In my early years here, I craved only one thing: certainties. I cycled through many false ones before Chekhov put me at rest about their impossibility even for less bifurcated people. If you can hold on to that, he seemed to be saying, you might live in a little more peace and write in a little more truth.

Perhaps the saddest way in which Chekhov remains relevant for our times is how accurate, in spirit, his portrait of Russia remains: power without account; greed, nepotism, and boot-licking; stability at the expense of freedom. What would Chekhov say of Vladimir Putin? Only there is enough initiative in him only for that gesture, and little by little the initiative in the family must migrate to the woman.

Only that she does not want the initiative. She wants to be looked after. They keep going, partly from fear, partly from suspicion that the human spirit has enough grace in it that there is still kindredness for them to discover. He assumed financial responsibility for the family and while attending classes at Moscow State University, he wrote and sold a large number of humorous stories and vignettes of contemporary Russian life.

He published more than four hundred short stories, sketches and vignettes by the age of twenty-six. Some consider Chekhov to be the founder of the modern short story and his influence is observed in a diverse group of writers including Flannery O'Connor , Tennessee Williams, William Somerset Maugham , Raymond Carver and John Cheever.

Some popular starting points for short story readers include: Ward No. A Dreary Story is also an excellent work. Due to it's length I have classified it here as a book. It's also well known under the alternative title A Boring Story which is the title listed in the short story section as a convenience to readers searching under that name.