Anton Chekhov.

At age 15, Chekhov was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for three years while finishing the Classical Gymnasium in Taganrog. He was the third of six children born to Pavel Chekhov, a religious fanatic and grocer, and Evgenia Chekhova. In 1879, he obtained a scholarship at Moscow University Medical School, graduating in 1884 as a Medical Doctor.

While a medical student, Chekhov published humorous stories under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte. His first play, Ivanov, was produced in 1887. In 1888, he won the Pushkin Prize for his story collection At Dusk. In 1890, he made a 6,000-mile journey to Sakhalin Island to study penal colonies, resulting in the book Sakhalin Island 1895. The 1896 premiere of The Seagull in St. Petersburg was a fiasco, but its 1898 revival by Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theater was a landmark success. He wrote Uncle Vanya 1899, Three Sisters 1901, and The Cherry Orchard 1904. He also practiced medicine during the 1897-1899 cholera epidemic.

Chekhov married Olga Knipper, a leading actress at the Moscow Art Theater, in 1901. They had met during rehearsals of The Seagull in 1898. The marriage was marked by long separations because Chekhov’s health kept him in Yalta while Knipper continued her career in Moscow. They exchanged many letters, later published. He had been a confirmed bachelor until meeting Knipper. Chekhov diagnosed himself with tuberculosis in 1884 but refused treatment until a severe hemorrhage in 1897.

The Moscow Art Theater adopted a seagull as its logo after the 1898 revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. His use of understatement and the Chekhov’s Gun principle became standard in modern drama. His works continue to be performed worldwide. The White Dacha in Yalta is a museum. He is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His detailed study of Sakhalin Island was later used by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.