Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was a grocer’s son from Taganrog who supported his family through medical school by writing comic sketches, became the greatest short-story writer in any language, and in his last decade wrote the four plays that made the Moscow Art Theatre: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In them nothing much happens and everything is at stake, and the characters talk past one another about the lives they have not lived. He was a practising doctor, travelled to the penal colony of Sakhalin to report on it, and died of tuberculosis at forty-four in a German spa, after a glass of champagne.