Petersburg on 17 October 1896, was a fiasco, as the play was booed by the audience, stinging Chekhov into renouncing the theatre.

f] [12] The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience. The evocative world of Chekhov's plays reflects not only the Russian society of his time but also speaks to the human experience as a whole, making them true classics.In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. For Rozanov, Chekhov represents a concluding stage of classical Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, caused by the fading of the thousand-year-old Christian tradition that had sustained much of this literature.

I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around, glass in hand with an endless grin on your face. From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920. Russian novelist and playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) has often been considered the father of the modern short story, such was his skill. Set in a country suffering from political, ideological and spiritual stagnation, Chekhov's first full-length play anticipates the explosive revolutionary atmosphere of Russia at the turn of the century. The Seagull’s rise under the direction of Stanislavski, who transformed it into a tragedy, saw the play dubbed one of the greatest events in Russian theatre history.In 1888, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk ( V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth". To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man Without Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His plays depend, as comedy does, on the vitality of the actors to make pleasurable what would otherwise be painfully awkward—inappropriate speeches, missed connections, faux pas, stumbles, childishness—but as part of a deeper pathos; the stumbles are not pratfalls but an energized, graceful dissolution of purpose.

In a letter to his brother, he wrote that he "did not recognise his first remarks as my own" and that the actors "do not know their parts and talk nonsense". The plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity, but the parts appear greater than the whole. Ivanov depicts a man stifled by inactivity and lost idealism, and The Seagull contrasts a young man's selfish romanticism with the stoicism of a woman cruelly abandoned by her lover. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit his tuberculosis to his family or his friends.I liked this more, and I wonder if maybe it's just because I'm getting a tiny bit more used to Chekhov; I understand his sortof idiosyncratic use of anguished, expository soliloquy better, and his weird sense of humor, and his quiet form of depression. Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway-car meant for oysters, a detail that offended Gorky. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886, and a year later his second volume In the Twilight, for which he received the Pushkin Prize.