“You utter the name ‘Chekhov’ and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room.” “Chekhov attracts a kind of sickening piety,” Janet Malcolm wrote in a 2003 monograph. We often struggle to reconcile great art and private monstrosity it can be difficult to appreciate what a particular annoyance Chekhov’s radiant, inexplicable goodness has proved for his biographers. “Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work,” he once wrote. He endowed libraries, built schools, treated thousands of patients free of charge in a year traveled to Siberia to advocate for prison reform, all the while cheerfully supporting his family, including two profligate brothers and the brutish father who had made their childhood a misery. To Tolstoy, he was “beautiful, magnificent.” “The good doctor” in the Neil Simon play of the same name and a model for “Doctor Zhivago,” Chekhov has become the embodiment of humility, patience and decency. In letters, he complained of “ cholera-loneliness” but also confessed: “There is a great deal that is interesting in cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view.”
He began ministering to 25 local villages, refusing all remuneration. “There is no time even to think of literature,” he wrote to a friend. In 1890, Anton Chekhov, 30 years old, trained as a physician and coming into fame as a writer, was confronted by the horror of a cholera pandemic ravaging Europe and Asia. “Everywhere there is cholera, everywhere quarantine and terror.”
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