Authors

Russian · 1860–1904

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov is one of the supreme masters of the short story and a playwright whose four late plays — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard — transformed world theatre. Trained as a doctor, he worked as a physician his entire writing life, providing free medical care to peasants near his estate at Melikhovo. His work is characterized by compassion for ordinary people, ironic restraint, and an absence of explicit moral judgement that felt revolutionary to his contemporaries. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four in a German spa town.