Anton Chekhov through the years: photographs

Anton Chekhov in 1888.

Painter Konstantin Korovin wrote of Chekhov: “He was a handsome man with a big face and kind, laughing eyes.”
Photo: Anton Chekhov in 1891.

Chekhov started writing at school, first verses and then short stories and vignettes, but the roots of his literary biography have remained secret. “How glad I am that nobody knows when I started to write,” Chekhov wrote to his sister.
Photo: Anton Chekhov as a student.

“All his life Chekhov lived by his own soul; he was always himself, inwardly free, and he never troubled about what some people expected and others - coarser people - demanded of Anton Chekhov.” This is how writer Maxim Gorky described Chekhov, whom he had known since 1898

Tolstoy also mentions Chekhov’s sincerity. “The main thing is that he is always sincere, which is a great merit for a writer,” he wrote. “It is thanks to his sincerity that Chekhov created completely new forms of literature.”
Photo: Anton Chekhov (left) and Leo Tolstoy (right) in the Crimea. 1901.

The Chekhov family home was always filled with friends and acquaintances.Photo: Anton Chekhov with friends and family in the courtyard of his house in Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Street in Moscow, spring 1890. From the collection of the Chekhov Museum in Moscow.

Anton Chekhov’s brother Nikolai (right) was a talented artist who worked on paintings in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. Nikolai died of tuberculosis when he was barely 30.

In 1890, Chekhov travelled to Sakhalin “to study the life of prisoners and exiles.” He later published two books about his trip, “From Siberia,” and “Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin).”
Photo: Anton Chekhov before his departure to Sakhalin, 1890.

These books for the first time told society the truth about the life of exiles in Sakhalin. One important result of Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin was that a census was carried out on the island, populated mostly by exiles and their families.
Photo: Anton Chekhov in 1894.

In 1892 Chekhov bought an estate in Melikhovo outside Moscow.
Photo: Anton Chekhov in Melikhovo. 1897.

Chekhov married actress Olga Knipper when he was 41. The story of their love affair, one of seemingly endless separations, is best gleaned through the hundreds of letters they wrote to each other.
Photo: Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, 1902.

Chekhov and Knipper spent a lot of time apart, because she was an actress with the MKhAT drama theater in Moscow, while his health forced him to move to Yalta.
Photo: Anton Chekhov with family in Yalta.

Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper.

Chekhov died on July 2, 1904 in Badenweiler, a health resort and spa in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. He was 44. When asked what life is, Chekhov once said life is life, and that’s it.
Photo: Anton Chekhov in the last year of his life. 1904.