Anton Chekhov

Born in Lake Taganrog on the Sea of Azov into a family of merchants who later went bankrupt and were forced to sell the family’s ancestral home and flee to Moscow (see the ‘ancestry’ of the cherry orchard that’s for sale in the play of the same name), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is the pioneering author of a series of masterpieces: “Platonov”, “Ivanov”, “The Seagull”, “Uncle Vanya”, “Three Sisters”, “The cherry orchard”.

As well as a playwright, he was also a daring doctor and researcher. He crossed Siberia to reach Sakhalin Island, a penal colony on the Pacific, to study the appalling living conditions of the prisoners, and dedicated himself to fighting the cholera epidemic that had broken out in the Russian countryside—the natural landscape in which his later dramas would be set.