SOURCE: "Introduction," in Chekhov for the Stage, Northwestern University Press, 1992, pp. 1-16.

In this essay, Ehre discusses Chekhov's efforts to "capture common reality" in his plays.

Anton Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in 1860. His father was a grocer; his grandfather had been a serf. A difficult childhood—poverty, an ambitious and tyrannical father, a long-suffering mother—left its scars: "In childhood I had no childhood." He was gregarious but had a streak of melancholy in his nature and fled from intimacy. "No one," his friend Ivan Bunin wrote, "not even those closest to him, knew what went on deep inside him. His self-control never deserted him." Neither did his good humor, his decency, his sense of personal dignity. In Chekhov's presence, Gorky remembered, "everyone involuntarily felt a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more oneself."

Chekhov reached maturity at...