Anton Chekhov

The grandson of a serf who had bought his own freedom, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in the Crimean provincial town of Taganrog in southern Russia.  His severe and pious father ran a small shop, and Chekhov, the third of six children, described his childhood as “sheer suffering.”  Chekhov began writing merely as a way to supplement his family’s meager income while he studied medicine.