Abstract
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the town of Taganrog on the sea of Azov in southern Russia on 17 January 18601, the third of six children, five boys and a girl. He might have been born a serf, as his father Pavel Yegorovich had, for the Emancipation came only in 1861; but his grandfather, a capable and energetic estate overseer named Yegor Chekh, had prospered so well that in 1841 he had purchased his freedom along with his family’s. The boy’s mother Yevgeniya was the orphaned daughter of a cloth merchant and a subservient spouse to her despotic husband. To their children, she imparted a sensibility he lacked: Chekhov would later say, somewhat unfairly, that they inherited their talent from their father and their soul from their mother.2
Nature and life conform to the very same outdated stereotypes that even editors turn down. Chekhov to Suvorin (30 May 1888)
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The date given by Chekhov himself, although he would appear to have been born on the 16th. The 17th was his ‘name-day,’ that is, the day of the saint for whom he was christened. Dates given here are ‘Old Style,’ in accord with the Julian calendar, twelve days behind the Gregorian.
M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 44.
Ernest Simmons, Chekhov. A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 6.
Peter the Great had established a table of ranks which stratified society status into civil, military, naval and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In the civil hierarchy, meshchanin (townsman) came just above peasant. Treplyov, in The Seagull, complains that his father had been classified as a meshchanin of Kiev, even though he was a famous actor, and that the same rank appears on his own passport. He finds it particularly galling since the term had come to suggest petty bourgeois philistinism.
Letter to Dmitry Savlyev, Jan. (?) 1884. All quotations from Chekhov’s creative writings and letters are based on the texts in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochineny i pisem (30 vols.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1974–1974), henceforth referred to as PSS. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Maksim Gorky, Literary Portraits, tr. Ivy Litvinov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 158–59.
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© 1985 Laurence Senelick
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Senelick, L. (1985). A Life. In: Anton Chekhov. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17981-7_1
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