100 Fun Facts About Anton Chekhov

Besides writing, what was Anton Chekhov's profession?

Physician: "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress," he wrote, and he went on treating the poor free of charge.

In which port city on the Sea of Azov was Chekhov born in 1860?

Taganrog: his father ran a grocery there and conducted the church choir. When the business failed the family fled to Moscow, leaving sixteen-year-old Anton behind to finish school.

After The Seagull was booed, Chekhov vowed never again to do what?

Write plays: "I shall never either write plays or have them acted," he told a friend the next day. Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard were still to come.

Which director's Moscow Art Theatre revived The Seagull in 1898?

Konstantin Stanislavski had to be talked into it by his co-founder Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. The triumph made the company's name, and it took a seagull as its emblem.

Chekhov told writers that anything hung on the wall in the first chapter must be used later, naming what as his example?

A rifle: "If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." The rule, now known as Chekhov's gun, says every element of a story must earn its place.

Which disease killed Chekhov in 1904 at the age of 44?

Tuberculosis: he first coughed blood in his mid-twenties but made light of it for years, begging a brother who saw a bloodied handkerchief not to tell their mother and sister.

Dying in a German spa town in 1904, Chekhov drained a final glass of what?

Champagne: "It's a long time since I drank champagne," he said at Badenweiler in the Black Forest, then emptied the glass, lay down on his left side and died.

Chekhov's body was carried to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for what?

Oysters: the detail outraged Maxim Gorky, and in Moscow some of the thousands of mourners followed a general's funeral procession by mistake, to the sound of a military band.

Whom did Chekhov marry quietly in 1901?

Olga Knipper, a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theatre: he had a horror of weddings, so they married almost in secret, and her work kept her in Moscow while his health kept him in the south.

Chekhov wrote that he wanted a wife who, like which celestial body, would not appear every day?

The moon: his other condition, set out in 1895, was that she live in Moscow while he lived in the country. Six years later he got just such a marriage.

In 1890 Chekhov travelled across Siberia to take a census of the convicts on which penal island?

Sakhalin: he spent three months there on his own initiative and at his own expense, questioning thousands of convicts and settlers for his census.

Chekhov famously called which Siberian city "a very dull town" with dull inhabitants?

Tomsk had its revenge in 2004 with a bronze caricature of a barefoot Chekhov in a silly hat, shown as seen "through the eyes of a drunk lying in a ditch".

The young Chekhov signed comic sketches as "Antosha Chekhonte" and as "Man Without" what?

Spleen: "Man Without Spleen" was one of a string of jokey signatures on the daily sketches he wrote to pay his tuition and keep his bankrupt family.

A veteran novelist wrote to the young Chekhov, "You have real talent", and urged him to do what?

Write less: Dmitry Grigorovich told him to stop dashing off sketches and respect his gift. Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a flash of lightning".

Chekhov's story collection At Dusk won which honour in 1888?

The Pushkin Prize, awarded by the Academy of Sciences: only two years earlier Chekhov had still been dashing off comic sketches for the newspapers under jokey pen names.

Chekhov's long friendship with his right-wing publisher Alexey Suvorin cooled over which French scandal?

The Dreyfus affair: Chekhov backed Dreyfus and Zola and objected to the anti-Semitic attacks on them in Suvorin's newspaper.

Asked by a Moscow theatre manager for a play in 1887, Chekhov delivered which four-act drama within a fortnight?

Ivanov: he sent each act off for rehearsal as he finished it, then complained that the actors "do not know their parts and talk nonsense".

At which estate did Chekhov build a lodge in the orchard and begin writing The Seagull?

Melikhovo: he threw himself into the estate, planting trees he tended, his brother said, as though they were his children, and building three village schools nearby.

Chekhov's Crimean villa, where he wrote his last two plays, is known by what name?

The White Dacha: he kept dogs and tame cranes there and received Tolstoy and Gorky, yet he called the place his "hot Siberia" and was always relieved to get away.

Chekhov told Ivan Bunin that people might keep reading him for how many years?

Seven: asked why, he amended it to "seven and a half", and added that he himself would live for fewer, perhaps six. He is still read more than a century later.

Which revolutionary believed that reading Chekhov's Ward No. 6 had made him one?

Vladimir Lenin: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!" he is said to have remarked. In the story the hospital's own doctor ends up admitted as a patient.

The Seagull's character Trigorin is a famous what?

Story writer: Trigorin never stops taking notes, and on seeing a shot gull he jots down a plot about a man who destroys a girl out of sheer boredom, then does much the same to Nina.

In The Seagull, who is Arkadina's son, the symbolist playwright?

Konstantin Treplev shoots a seagull and lays it at Nina's feet. In the play's last moments he shoots himself offstage while the others sit playing lotto.

Which Chekhov story follows a lost mongrel dog who is taken in and trained for the circus ring?

Kashtanka: on her circus debut she hears her old master's boy shout her name from the gallery and bolts back to the drunken owner she had lost.

At The Seagull's hostile premiere, what happened to the actress playing Nina?

Lost her voice: Vera Komissarzhevskaya had moved those watching to tears at rehearsal. Chekhov left his seat and spent the last two acts behind the scenes.

Chekhov insisted The Seagull was what kind of play?

A comedy: "It's a comedy," he wrote while drafting it, with "little action, tons of love". It ends with a gunshot offstage and a suicide.

Uncle Vanya is a reworking of which earlier Chekhov play?

The Wood Demon: he wrote it at an act a day for a friend's theatre, then took it off the stage dissatisfied. Reworked years later, its suicide became Vanya's botched shooting.

In Uncle Vanya, what was Serebryakov's career before he retired to the estate?

University professor: when the retired great man announces he will sell the estate, Vanya snaps, chases him with a pistol and fires at him twice, missing both times.

Which character in Uncle Vanya is the country doctor obsessed with the destruction of forests?

Astrov is loved without hope by Sonya while he falls for Yelena, the old man's young wife, who takes one of his pencils as a keepsake when she leaves.

Which Japanese film, a 2022 Oscar winner, centres on a staging of Uncle Vanya?

Drive My Car: its widowed director runs his lines on the road, listening to tapes of the play recorded by his late wife, as he prepares a multilingual production in Hiroshima.

What is the surname of the Three Sisters?

Prozorov: the sisters spend the whole play longing to go back to Moscow and never do, while their sister-in-law Natasha takes control of the house.

In the third act of Three Sisters, what disaster strikes the town as the family's troubles come to a head?

A fire: with the alarm ringing offstage at two in the morning, the brother admits he has mortgaged the family house without telling his sisters.

In Three Sisters, Masha falls in love with which lieutenant-colonel?

Vershinin, an idealistic married officer, begins a secret affair with her. When his brigade is transferred she is crushed, and goes back to the husband who knows everything.

In Three Sisters, Irina's fiance Baron Tuzenbach is killed how?

In a duel: the jealous Captain Solyony shoots him the day before the wedding, and Irina resolves to leave and devote herself to work all the same.

Which actor-director's 1970 film of Three Sisters was the last feature he directed?

Laurence Olivier based the film on his 1967 National Theatre staging, cast his wife Joan Plowright as Masha and played the old army doctor Chebutykin himself.

In The Cherry Orchard, who buys the estate at auction?

Lopakhin, the merchant grandson of a serf, can hardly believe it: he has bought the estate where his father and grandfather "weren't even allowed into the kitchen".

What is the name of the aristocratic landowner at the centre of The Cherry Orchard?

Ranevskaya comes home from Paris deep in debt, yet she ignores every plan to save the estate and is giving a ball on the day it goes to auction.

As The Cherry Orchard ends, which sound comes from the sold estate?

Axe blows: the buyer starts felling the orchard before the family has even left. The play opened in Moscow in January 1904, less than six months before Chekhov died.

Which elderly servant in The Cherry Orchard calls the emancipation of the serfs a disaster?

Firs is forgotten when the family leaves: in the last scene he finds himself shut inside the boarded-up house and lies down, resigned, to die.

Where do the lovers of "The Lady with the Dog" meet while on holiday?

Yalta: Gurov, a married Moscow banker, expects one more passing seaside affair, then finds back home that he has fallen in love for the first time in his life.

What breed of dog does Anna Sergeyevna walk along the seafront in "The Lady with the Dog"?

A Pomeranian, a white one: Gurov beckons it over and wags a finger at it when it growls, which gives him his excuse to start talking to its owner.

In Chekhov's "The Bet", a lawyer endures fifteen years of solitary confinement, then does what hours before winning?

Walks out: his note says years of reading have taught him to despise wealth, so he leaves five hours early and forfeits two million roubles, sparing the ruined banker who had crept in to kill him.

In Chekhov's story Ward No. 6, the ward of the title houses which patients?

The mentally ill: five men are kept in a filthy annexe of a provincial hospital under a porter who beats them, and the doctor in charge finds one of them the only person in town worth talking to.

Which story did Chekhov call "something rather odd and much too original" after a trip to Ukraine?

The Steppe, a journey across the grasslands seen through the eyes of a young boy sent away from home, won him his first place in a serious literary journal instead of a newspaper.

Chekhov was held back a year at school for failing an exam in which language?

Ancient Greek, at fifteen: an irony, since his first lessons had been at the Greek school beside the local Greek church, and he sang in a Greek monastery choir.

Which Raymond Carver story retells Chekhov's death?

Errand: the title is the widow's request to a young hotel servant, who is to fetch the most respected mortician in town quietly, as if on an errand and nothing more.

George Bernard Shaw subtitled which play "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes"?

Heartbreak House: in his preface Shaw said Chekhov's plays fitted every cultured country house in Europe: "The same nice people, the same utter futility."

Which translator's versions won Chekhov his English-language readership?

Constance Garnett began learning Russian from a Russian exile while pregnant in 1891, and went on to translate about 70 volumes, Chekhov's stories, plays and letters among them.

Chekhov was buried next to his father in which Moscow cemetery?

Novodevichy: thousands of mourners followed the coffin there. In the Soviet era the remains of Gogol were moved to the same cemetery from a monastery marked for demolition.

Sailing home from the Far East in 1890, Chekhov stopped in Ceylon and bought which pets?

Mongooses: back in Moscow he worried in letters about one breaking the crockery and tearing the wallpaper, and in 1892 he handed his last mongoose to the Moscow zoo.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which topic of debate at the banker's party leads to the famous wager?

Capital punishment divides the guests: the banker calls a quick execution kinder than a life behind bars, and a 25-year-old lawyer says any life beats none.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what sum does the banker stake that a young lawyer cannot endure years of isolation?

Two million rubles was a trifle to the banker on the night of the party. By the time the wager fell due, paying it would have ruined him.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what does the young lawyer declare he is staking against the banker's fortune?

His freedom is all the young man puts up, and the host mocks him at supper, predicting he will give in within three or four years.

In Chekhov's The Bet, how does the young lawyer answer the banker's dare to endure solitary confinement?

He triples the term on the spot, offering fifteen years where only five were asked. The sum at stake stays exactly as it was.

In Chekhov's The Bet, where on the banker's grounds does the young lawyer serve his fifteen years?

A lodge in his garden becomes the cell, and the prisoner may not cross its threshold, see another person or receive a letter.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which instrument sounds day and night from the prisoner's quarters in his first year?

Piano music fills a first year of loneliness and depression, then falls silent in the second.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which single book does the prisoner read for nearly a year after his tenth year?

The Gospel puzzles the banker: a man who mastered six hundred learned volumes in four years lingers almost a year over one thin, easy book.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what has drained the banker's fortune by the time the fifteen years are almost up?

Stock Exchange gambling and wild speculation have turned the fearless millionaire into a middling banker who trembles at every rise and fall.

In Chekhov's The Bet, through what does the prisoner receive everything he orders during his confinement?

A small window, made specially for the purpose, is his only link with the outside. He writes an order and whatever he asks for is passed in.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which two permitted comforts does the prisoner refuse during his first year alone?

Wine and tobacco are both turned away: drink, he writes, stirs up desires, the prisoner's worst foes, and smoke would spoil the air of his room.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what kind of reading does the prisoner mostly send for during his first year?

Light novels come first: tales with tangled love plots and sensational, fantastic stories. A year on he asks only for the classics.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what does the prisoner do each morning with the pages he wrote overnight in his fifth year?

He tears them up after hours of writing through the night. That year he also lies on his bed yawning, talks angrily to himself and is heard crying.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which signal does the prisoner request if experts find no mistake in his six-language letter?

A gunshot would tell him his efforts had not been thrown away, he writes. The banker grants the wish and has two fired.

In Chekhov's The Bet, with what does the desperate banker think of stifling his sleeping prisoner?

A pillow, he reasons, would leave no sign of violent death for even the most careful expert to find. He decides to read the sheet of paper on the table first.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what does the banker do to the sleeping prisoner after reading the page on the table?

He kisses his head and goes out weeping, feeling a contempt for himself greater than any heavy loss had ever caused him.

In Chekhov's The Bet, on whom does the banker expect suspicion to fall if he murders his prisoner?

The watchman does not answer when called twice, so the banker assumes he has taken shelter from the rain and fallen asleep somewhere.

In Chekhov's The Bet, where does the banker lock away the prisoner's final letter to avoid talk?

A fireproof safe at home hides the letter for good. The same one had held the key to the prisoner's door for fifteen years.

In Chekhov's The Bet, what motive does the old banker assign to the young lawyer for taking the wager?

Greed for money is his verdict on the lawyer, while he blames his own part on the caprice of a pampered man. He decides the whole thing proved nothing.

In Chekhov's The Bet, which Romantic poet does the prisoner ask for, as well as Shakespeare, in his last two years?

Byron turns up among orders for chemistry books, a medical manual and treatises on philosophy, all demanded at once.

Chekhov's The Bet first appeared in the daily Novoye Vremya on New Year's Day 1889 under which title?

Fairytale was the heading of the first printing, which came in three parts. Chekhov renamed it for his Collected Works and dropped the third part.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what has young Sasha Uskov done that forces his uncles into a secret family council?

He cashed a forged note at a bank, signing it in his uncle the Colonel's name, and it fell due three days before the council met.

In Chekhov's A Problem, which label does Sasha Uskov reject all evening and then accept in the final line?

Criminal is the word he hears through the study door and bristles at. He finally applies it to himself in a sledge, on his way to a drinking party.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does Sasha Uskov feel on the stairs the moment he learns he has been forgiven?

Joy, not remorse, is what surges up in him: a weight slips from his shoulders and he longs to breathe, to move swiftly, to live.

In Chekhov's A Problem, which kind-hearted uncle takes Sasha Uskov's part at the secret family council?

Ivan Markovitch is the one uncle who is not an Uskov by blood, yet he argues hardest for the family name, in soft and trembling tones.

In Chekhov's A Problem, on what condition do the uncles finally agree to settle Sasha Uskov's debt?

Work in the country, starting the very next day under his uncle's eye, is the price, along with a promise to repent.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what sum must the uncles pay to keep Sasha Uskov's case from going to trial?

1,500 rubles strikes Sasha as paltry, and he cannot see why his aristocratic relations raise such a storm over it.

In Chekhov's A Problem, whose unseen presence in the study does a weeping uncle invoke to save Sasha Uskov?

His late mother is weeping and pleading for her boy, the uncle insists, and for her peace beyond the grave they must spare him. The debate starts over.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does Sasha Uskov threaten when his uncle hesitates to hand him cash in the street?

To turn himself in the next day, undoing the whole rescue, is the threat. His horrified uncle, backed against a lamp-post, pays up.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does Sasha Uskov feel while he sits outside the study awaiting his relatives' verdict?

Weariness and emptiness are all he feels: no terror, shame or depression. He came only because his kind-hearted uncle begged him to.

In Chekhov's A Problem, how did Sasha Uskov's high-school education end, according to the uncle defending him?

He was expelled in the fifth class, which the uncle offers as an excuse: an orphan since early childhood, Sasha had practically no education or guidance.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what is the taciturn, rheumatic uncle's only argument for hushing up Sasha Uskov's case?

Newspaper publicity is all the dull-witted man can think of: the Uskov name in print if the case goes to trial.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does Sasha Uskov claim to do when in funds, as proof of his soft character?

He helps the poor, he tells himself, so he cannot be wicked. Debt is no sin either, he reasons, since the Colonel himself owes money.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does the Colonel call shielding a guilty relative to protect the family name?

Civic cowardice is his phrase for it: screening a scoundrel, whoever he is, breaks the law and is unworthy of a gentleman.

In Chekhov's A Problem, who beckons Sasha Uskov from the drawing-room door and tearfully begs him to plead?

The Colonel's wife calls him Alexandre and admits she knows he dislikes her. Sasha only shrugs at her weeping.

In Chekhov's A Problem, where is half the Uskov household's staff confined while the family council meets?

The kitchen holds half the servants, forbidden to leave it. The other half are sent off to the theatre or the circus so the secret cannot leak.

In Chekhov's A Problem, what does the Colonel say Sasha Uskov keeps ordering in his relatives' names?

Suits from tailors, billed to the uncles, are his proof that Sasha will never reform and that paying once would only invite the next prank.

In Chekhov's A Problem, which word describes the Colonel's detestable voice as Sasha Uskov hears it through the door?

Metallic is how the hated voice sounds as it drowns out the gentler uncle. Sasha longs to burst in and shout that the Colonel is lying.

In Chekhov's A Problem, which thinker does Sasha Uskov's defender cite to argue that the human will is not free?

Lombroso's latest school, the uncle says, treats every offence as a product of anatomy. The Colonel begs him to stop thundering and be serious.

In Chekhov's A Problem, where is Von Burst celebrating his name-day on the night Sasha Uskov is spared?

The Bear comes to mind as soon as Sasha is out under the street lamps. He has no cash for the party, so he turns on his uncle.

In Chekhov's A Problem, which friend's promised loan never reaches Sasha Uskov in time to cover his debt?

Handrikov is the name Sasha stammers when the Colonel asks what he expected. It is almost the only thing he manages to say to the council.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, to whom does the ticket that Ivan Dmitritch checks in the paper belong?

His wife owns it and had collected the interest on it that Tuesday. The longer he daydreams, the more that fact rankles.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, how does the couple's ticket finally compare with the winning one in the printed list?

Right series, wrong number: the paper shows 9,499 and 46, and the ticket is 26. Ivan Dmitritch reads it out triumphantly, to spite his wife.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, what does Ivan Dmitritch say he would buy first if the ticket has won?

Landed property would take a third of the winnings, he reckons. It would save renting a summer villa and would always bring in an income.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, what feeling toward each other replaces Ivan Dmitritch and Masha's shared smiles?

Hatred fills them both while the result is still unknown, each resenting the other's unspoken plans for the winnings.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, what does Ivan Dmitritch imagine drinking with a salted mushroom on cold autumn days?

Vodka, a big glass and then another, crowns the daydream: he stays outdoors until thoroughly chilled, then warms up with a soused cucumber on the side.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, on what kind of tree does Ivan Dmitritch threaten to hang himself in the last line?

An aspen, the first he comes to, is his parting threat, made as the evenings ahead suddenly look long and wearisome.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, Ivan Dmitritch decides for the first time that Masha is saturated with what smell?

Cooking, he decides, clings to her through and through, and she has grown elderly and plain, while he fancies himself still young and fresh.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, what does Ivan Dmitritch call his own relations once their faces strike him as hateful?

Reptiles is his word for his own family, whose faces he had always viewed impartially. Masha's kin, he is sure, would come whining like beggars.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, Ivan Dmitritch dreams of escaping late autumn in the South of France, Italy and where?

India is the farthest stop on his imagined itinerary. He soon decides the trip would be pleasanter alone, since Masha would fret over every farthing.

In Chekhov's The Lottery Ticket, what does Ivan Dmitritch grumble about at home once the daydream collapses?

The unswept rooms suddenly offend him: bits of paper, crumbs and husks underfoot wherever he steps. Minutes before, the same home had contented him.