Chekhov's Doctors: A Collection of Chekhov's Medical Tales

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Jan 2003 · Kent State University Press

About this ebook

In his brief but distinguished life, Anton Chekhov was a doctor, a documentary essayist, an admired dramatist, and a humanitarian. He remains a nineteenth-century Russian literary giant whose prose continues to offer moral insight and to resonate with readers across the world.

Chekhov experienced no conflict between art and science or art and medicine. He believed that knowledge of one complemented the other. Chekhov brought medical knowledge and sensitivity to his creative writing--he had an intimate knowledge of the world of medicine and the skills of doctoring, and he utilized this information in his approach to his characters. His sensibility as a medical insider gave special poignancy to his physician characters. The doctors in his engaging tales demonstrate a wide spectrum of behavior, personality, and character. At their best, they demonstrate courage, altruism, and tenderness, qualities that lie at the heart of good medical practice. At their worst, they display insensitivity and incompetency.

The stories in Chekhov's Doctors are powerful portraits of doctors in their everyday lives, struggling with their own personal problems as well as trying to serve their patients. The fifth volume in the acclaimed Literature and Medicine Series, Chekhov's Doctors will serve as a rich text for professional health care educators as well as for general readers.

About the author

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Ukraine, in 1860. In the mid-1880s, Chekhov became a physician, and shortly thereafter he began to write short stories. Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta.