Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather was a serf who had bought his freedom; his father kept a grocer's shop and had a violent temper, often beating his children. When Anton was sixteen his father went bankrupt and the family fled to Moscow to escape their creditors, leaving him alone in Taganrog to finish school by tutoring. Later he studied medicine at Moscow University and, to support the whole family, wrote hundreds of comic sketches for humorous magazines under various pen names. After graduating he practised as a doctor, and liked to say: 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress.' At thirty, already ill, he crossed Siberia to spend three months studying the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. In his last years, suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Yalta and wrote the great plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. He died at forty-four at a spa in Germany.