Despite his bleak prognosis - or perhaps because of it - the lifelong bachelor embarked on a romance with MAT actress Olga Knipper, with whom he had fallen in love during rehearsals for "The Seagull." They married in 1901. On the advice of his doctors, he moved to the Black Sea resort city of Yalta, settling into a new villa he built in 1899. In March 1897, he suddenly collapsed at a Moscow restaurant and learned he was terminally ill with the disease. As early as 1884, Chekhov suspected he had tuberculosis, and he neglected it. Sadly, his ascendance as a playwright of genius coincided with the decline of his health. The MAT premiered Chekhov's subsequent classics "Uncle Vanya" (1899), "Three Sisters" (1901), and "The Cherry Orchard" (1904). (To this day a seagull serves as the company's logo). Petersburg premiere but its 1898 revival by the new Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, was a triumph that established the MAT's reputation and naturalistic method. His first major play, "The Seagull" (1896), was a fiasco at its St. 6" (1892), "The Black Monk" and "Rothschild's Violin" (both 1894), "My Life" (1896), "Peasants" (1897), "Ionych," and the trilogy "The Man in the Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love" (all 1898). During this period, Chekhov produced most of his finest mature stories, among them "Gusev" (1890), "The Duel" (1891), "Ward No. He also built schools for the local peasant children. Soon after his return, he bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, 40 miles south of Moscow, where his efforts as a district physician largely spared the region from the cholera epidemic of 1893-1894.
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In 1890, he made an arduous 6000-mile trek to the Far East to investigate the Sakhalin penal colony, reporting his findings in a series of essays later published as his only nonfiction book, "The Island of Sakhalin" (1895), but, overall, he left muckraking to others. The appearance of the prize-winning story collection "At Twilight" (1887), the masterful long tale "The Steppe" (1888), and the play "Ivanov" (1887, revised 1889) put him firmly in the front rank of Russian writers. From then on, Chekhov produced more carefully-crafted stories under his own name. Suvorin not only agreed to bring out his work under very favorable terms, but became one of his few intimate friends. Encouragement from authors Nikolai Leskov and Dmitry Grigorovich was followed in 1886 by his introduction to Alexei Suvorin, Russia's most powerful publishing magnate.
Chekhov's early writings were mostly popular ephemera - "Oh, with what trash I began," he lamented at the end of his life - though stories such as "A Living Chattel" (1882) and "Misery" (1885) offered hints of what was to come. While he liked to claim that "Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress," he never made much money as a doctor and treated the poor for free. His first collection, "Tales of Melpomene," was published in 1884, the year he became a practicing physician. To alleviate their poverty, he began selling jokes and satirical sketches to periodicals written under several pseudonyms, the most frequent being Antosha Chekhonte.
He managed to win a scholarship to study medicine at Moscow University and rejoined his family in 1879.
Young Anton was left behind to fend for himself. His father, a grocer and domestic tyrant, went bankrupt in 1876, and, to avoid debtor's prison, he fled to Moscow with most of the family. Chekhov was born in Taganrog, the grandson of a former serf who had purchased his freedom. Russia's greatest dramatist and short story writer, he had a seminal influence on 20th century literature.
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