Episode Details

In the summer of 1904, a dying Anton Chekhov sat up in a German spa town, announced he was dying, drained a glass of champagne, and quietly passed away. His body went home to Russia in a refrigerated car marked for oysters, and part of the Moscow crowd followed the wrong funeral. This episode argues that this tragicomic ending is the perfect metaphor for a writer who found dark humor in despair and tragedy in the mundane.

We follow the grandson of a serf from Taganrog through an abusive childhood singing in his father's church choir, the years supporting his family by writing comic sketches while studying medicine, the letter from Grigorovich that made him take his craft seriously, his punishing journey to the Sakhalin penal colony, the disastrous premiere of The Seagull, and the Moscow Art Theatre revival with Stanislavsky that unlocked the theater of mood. The conversation closes with his unusual long-distance marriage to Olga Knipper, The Lady with the Dog, and a legacy that reaches from Tolstoy and Lenin to Brando and De Niro.

• Why Chekhov called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress
• How a hypocritical, abusive father trained him to watch what people do rather than what they say
• The three-month census on Sakhalin Island and the book that argued the system itself was the disease
• Subtext, Chekhov's gun, and how The Seagull's revival led to method acting
• Why he abandoned the event plot and gave his stories no neat endings