Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian dramatist and short-story writer, who is one of the foremost figures in Russian literature.

The son of a merchant who had been born a serf, Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Ukraine, and educated in medicine at Moscow State University. While still at university he published humorous magazine stories and sketches. He rarely practised medicine because of his success as a writer and because he had tuberculosis, at that time an incurable illness. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1890 Chekhov visited the penal colony of Sakhalin Island off the coast of Siberia to escape the irritations of urban intellectual life and later wrote The Island of Sakhalin (1891-1894), an account of his visit. Chekhov's frail health caused him to move in 1897 from his small country estate near Moscow to the warmer climate of the Crimea. He also made frequent trips to health resorts in Western Europe. Near the end of the century he met the actor and producer Constantin Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Art Theatre, which in 1898 produced Chekhov's play The Seagull (1896; trans. 1923). This association of playwright and director, which continued until Chekhov's death, led to the production of several of his one-act dramas and his other notable plays, Uncle Vanya (1899; trans. 1923), Three Sisters (1901; trans. 1923), and The Cherry Orchard (1904; trans. 1923). In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper who was appearing in his plays in Moscow. Chekhov died at the German spa of Badweiler on July 14/15, 1904.

Modern critics consider Chekhov one of the masters of the short-story form. He was largely responsible for the modern type of short story that depends for effect on mood and symbolism rather than on plot. His narratives, rather than having a climax and resolution, are a thematic arrangement of impressions and ideas. Using themes relating to everyday life, Chekhov portrayed the pathos of life in Russia before the 1905 revolution: the futile, boring, and lonely lives of people unable to communicate with one another and unequipped to change a society they knew to be inherently wrong. Some of Chekhov's best known stories are included in the posthumously published Darling and Other Stories (1910; trans. 1916-1922).

In the Russian theatre Chekhov is pre-eminently a representation of modern Naturalism. His plays, like his stories, are studies of the spiritual failure of characters in a feudal society that is disintegrating. To portray these themes Chekhov developed a new dramatic technique, which he called “indirect action”. He concentrated on subtleties of characterization and interaction between characters rather than on plot and direct action. In a Chekhov play important dramatic events take place offstage and what is left unsaid is often more important than thoughts and feelings that are articulated. Some of his plays were originally rejected in Moscow, but his technique has become accepted by modern playwrights and audiences, and his plays appear frequently in theatrical repertories.