Editing Anton Chekhov (section)

===Melikhovo===
[[File:Melihovo.jpg|thumb|[[Melikhovo]], now a museum]]
Mikhail Chekhov, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:

{{blockquote|From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melikhovo, the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting.<ref name=autogenerated1>From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.</ref>}}

Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, but the greatest cost was making journeys of several hours to visit the sick, which reduced his time for writing.<ref name=autogenerated2>From the biographical sketch, adapted from a memoir by Chekhov's brother Mihail, which prefaces Constance Garnett's translation of Chekhov's letters, 1920.</ref> However, Chekhov's work as a doctor enriched his writing by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society: for example, he witnessed at first hand the peasants' unhealthy and cramped living conditions, which he recalled in his short story "Peasants". Chekhov visited the upper classes as well, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."<ref name="note">{{Cite book |last=Chekhov |first=Anton Pavlovich |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12494 |title=Note-Book of Anton Chekhov |date=2004-06-01 |language=English |translator-last=Koteliansky |translator-first=S. S. (Samuel Solomonovitch) |translator-last2=Woolf |translator-first2=Leonard}}</ref> In 1893/1894 he worked as a [[Zemstvo]] doctor in [[Zvenigorod]], which has numerous sanatoriums and rest homes. A local hospital is named after him.

In 1894, Chekhov began writing his play ''The Seagull'' in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since he had moved to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended the orchard and the pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, he "looked after&nbsp;... as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his ''[[Three Sisters (play)|Three Sisters]]'', as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."<ref name = "Bio"/>

The first night of ''The Seagull'', at the [[Alexandrinsky Theatre]] in St. Petersburg on 17 October 1896, was a fiasco, as the play was booed by the audience, stinging Chekhov into renouncing the theatre.{{sfn|Rayfield|1997|pp=394–398}} But the play so impressed the theatre director [[Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko]] that he convinced his colleague [[Konstantin Stanislavski]] to direct a new production for the innovative [[Moscow Art Theatre]] in 1898.<ref name = "Ben">Benedetti, ''Stanislavski: An Introduction'', 25.</ref> Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text, and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting.<ref>Chekhov and the Art Theatre, in Stanislavski's words, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage."{{harvnb |Allen |2002 |p=[https://archive.org/details/performingchekho0000alle/page/10/mode/2up 11]}}</ref> The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year staged ''Uncle Vanya'', which Chekhov had completed in 1896.<ref>{{harvnb|Rayfield|1997|pp=390–391}}: Rayfield draws from his critical study ''Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the "Wood Demon"'' (1995), which anatomised the evolution of the ''Wood Demon'' into ''Uncle Vanya''—"one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements."</ref> In the last decades of his life he became an [[atheist]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Tabachnikova|first=Olga|title=Anton Chekhov Through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers: Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov|year=2010|publisher=Anthem Press|isbn=978-1-84331-841-5|page=26|quote=For Rozanov, Chekhov represents a concluding stage of classical Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, caused by the fading of the thousand-year-old Christian tradition that had sustained much of this literature. On the one hand, Rozanov regards Chekhov's positivism and atheism as his shortcomings, naming them among the reasons for Chekhov's popularity in society.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary|year=1997|publisher=Northwestern University Press|isbn=978-0-8101-1460-9|editor1-first=Simon |editor1-last=Karlinsky |editor2-first=Michael Henry|editor2-last=Heim| last=Chekhov|first=Anton Pavlovich|page=13|quote=While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a non-believer in the last decades of his life.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov|year=2009|publisher=Random House Digital, Inc.|isbn=978-0-307-56828-1|pages=xxii|author=Richard Pevear|quote=According to Leonid Grossman, 'In his revelation of those evangelical elements, the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.'}}</ref>