Five Plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard

ANTON CHEKHOV was born in 186o in south Russia, the son of a poor grocer. At the age of 19 he followed his family to Moscow, where he studied medicine and kept the household financially afloat by writing comic sketches for popular magazines. By the end of the 188os he was established as a writer of serious fiction, and had some experience as a playwright while continuing to practise medicine on the small estate he had bought near Moscow. It was there that he wrote his innovatory drama The Seagull. Its disastrous opening performance was the cruellest blow of Chekhov's professional life, but its later successful production by the Moscow Art Theatre led to his permanent association with that company, his marriage to its leading actress, Olga Knipper, and his increasing preoccupation with the theatre. Forced by ill health to move to Yalta in 1897 he wrote there, despite increasing debility, his two greatest plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The premiere of the latter took place on his forty-fourth birthday. Chekhov died six months later, on 2 July 1904.

RONALD HINGLEY, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, edited and translated The Oxford Chekhov (9 volumes), and is the author of A Life of Anton Chekhov (also published by Oxford University Press).