Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia, to Pavel Chekhov and Yevgeniya Chekhova. His father was a grocer who often struggled with money. His mother shared her love of storytelling with Anton and his five siblings. Pavel compelled his son to help out in the shop and join the church choir, which Pavel conducted. Despite his mother’s kindness, childhood remained a painful memory to Chekhov, although it later proved to be a vivid and absorbing experience that he often invoked in his works.

 

When Pavel’s business failed in 1875, he moved the family to Moscow while Anton remained in Taganrog to finish school. His school thoroughly but unimaginatively taught students Greek and Latin classics. Chekhov finally joined his family in Moscow in 1879 and started medical school. His father was still struggling financially, so Chekhov supported the family with his freelance writing career, producing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pseudonym for local magazines. He cheerfully took on this duty and the responsibilities associated with becoming the de facto head of the family - combining  writing with medical studies and a busy social life.

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As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. He and his classmates would often break school rules to visit the Taganrog Playhouse. He wrote farces while in school and revisited them as a medical student. 

 

During the mid-1880s, Chekhov worked as a doctor and began publishing serious works of fiction under his own name. Although he had largely moved on from his work in comics, humor remained an important element of all of his work. His story “Steppe” was an important success, earning Chekhov the Pushkin Prize in 1888. “Steppe” was an autobiographical story about a child’s journey through Ukraine. Like most of Chekhov’s early work, it showed the influence of the major Russian realists of the 19th century, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

Chekhov also wrote for theatre during this period. His earliest plays were short farces; however, he soon developed his signature style, a unique mix of comedy and tragedy. Plays like Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889) told stories about educated men of the upper classes coping with debt, disease, and inevitable disappointment in life. By the late 1880s, many critics were reprimanding Chekhov for holding no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a proper sense of direction. This annoyed Chekhov, who was unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted.

 

In early 1890, he suddenly left urban intellectual life to take a one-man sociological expedition to the remote island of Sakhalin. His journey was long and hazardous. After arriving, Chekhov took a census of the islanders and returned to publish his findings as a research thesis.

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​In the 1880s, Chekhov and his family began spending summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school, and then in a cottage owned by the Kiselyov family. It was during those summers that Chekhov gained first-hand knowledge of the manor house setting he employed in many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of the officers of a battery, who turn up as characters in Three Sisters.