I, A. P. Chekhov, was born on 17 January 1860 in Taganrog. I was first educated at the Greek school attached to the Church of the Emperor Constantine, and later at the Taganrog Gymnasium. In 1879 I entered the Medical School of Moscow University. At the time I had only a vague knowledge of the University’s different faculties, and I do not remember why I chose medicine, but I have had no subsequent regrets. I began publishing in weekly newspapers and journals during my first year, and by the beginning of the 1880s these literary activities had assumed a permanent, professional character. In 1888 I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I travelled to Sakhalin Island in order to write a book about our penal and hard-labor colony there. In addition to court reporting, reviews, articles of various kinds, news reports and everything written on a daily basis for newspapers that would now be difficult to trace and collect, I have in my twenty years of literary activity produced more than 4,800 pages of novellas and stories. I have also written plays.

 

I have no doubt that my involvement in medical science has had a strong influence on my literary activities; it significantly enlarged the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose true worth to a writer can be evaluated by someone who is himself a doctor; it has also provided me with a sense of direction, and I am sure that my closeness to medicine has also enabled me to avoid many mistakes. My knowledge of the natural sciences and the scientific method has always caused me to err on the side of caution, trying wherever possible to take scientific facts into consideration, and where they are all right.

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"They demand that the hero and heroine be theatrically effective. But really, in life people are not every minute shooting each other, hanging themselves, and making declarations of love. And they are not saying clever things every minute. For the most part they eat, drink, hang about, and talk nonsense; and this must be seen on the stage. A play must be written in which people can come, go, dine, talk about the weather, and play cards, not because that's the way the author wants it, but because that's the way it happens in real life.

Let everything on the stage be just as complex and at the same time just as simple as in life. People have dinner, merely dinner, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed.

Man will become better only when you make him see what he is like."

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From Chekhov’s Notebooks about Three Sisters

• To live one must have something to hang on to… In the provinces only the body works, not the spirit.

• You won’t become a saint through other people’s sins.

• KULYGIN. “I am a jolly fellow, I infect everyone with my mood.”

• The wife implores the husband: “Don’t get fat.”

• Oh, if there were a life in which everyone grew younger and more beautiful.

• IRINA. “It is hard to live without a father, without a mother.” - “And without a husband.” - “Yes, without a husband. Whom could one confide in? To whom could one complain? With whom could one share one’s joy? One must love someone strongly.”

• It is difficult to live without orderlies. You cannot make the servants answer your bell.

• The doctor enjoys being at the duel.