Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia; his grandfather had been a serf who bought his freedom. His father's grocery business failed, and the family moved to Moscow, where Anton studied medicine at Moscow University and qualified as a doctor in 1884. To support his family he wrote hundreds of short humorous stories for magazines, and his writing gradually grew more serious. In 1890 he traveled across Siberia to the prison island of Sakhalin and wrote a study of the conditions there. He bought a small estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow, where he treated local peasants. His plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, staged by the Moscow Art Theatre, changed modern drama with their quiet, everyday action. Ill with tuberculosis, he moved to Yalta and married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901. He died at a German spa town in 1904, aged 44.

Anton Chekhov is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church by a devout father who led the parish choir; his own adult beliefs are not well documented. Source: Wikipedia