Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on Jan 29, 1860, he was a Russian physician and supreme short story writer and playwright. He was the third of six children. His father was a grocer, painter and religious fanatic with a mercurial temperament who "thrashed" his children and was likely emotionally abusive to his wife. Chekhov, like Dickens, was no stranger to financial hardship, and in 1875 his father took the family and fled to Moscow to escape creditors. Chekhov stayed behind for three more years to finish school. He paid for his tuition by catching and selling goldfinches and dispensing private tutoring lessons and selling short sketches to the newspaper. He sent any money he could spare to his family in Moscow. Chekhov is considered an exemplar author in the genre of Realism. A child-family separation theme plays out in several of Chekhov's stories . In 1879 Chekhov was admitted to medical school and he joined his family in Moscow. He assumed financial responsibility for the family and while attending classes at Moscow State University, he wrote and sold a large number of humorous stories and vignettes of contemporary Russian life. He published more than four hundred short stories, sketches and vignettes by the age of twenty-six. He once said: "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other." Chekhov, known as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor, To Alexei Suvorin who was a lifelong friend, he said: “ By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear in my sky every day.” On 25 May 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper and the marital arrangements with Olga was, he lived largely at Yalta (southern Ukraine), she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. Chekhov is said to be the father of the modern short story end had influenced Ernest Hemingway, Shimizu Kunio, Ai Nagai Woody Allen and many more. It was Chekhov who first deliberately wrote dialogue in which the mainstream of emotional action ran underneath the surface. It was he who articulated the notion that human beings hardly ever speak in explicit terms among each other about their deepest emotions, that the great, tragic, climactic moments are often happening beneath outwardly trivial conversation One can argue Anton Chekhov is the second-most popular writer on the planet. Only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov in terms of movie adaptations of their work, we generally know less about Chekhov than we know about mysterious Shakespeare. Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 on Jul 15, 1904. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app