Anton Chekhov Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Anton Chekhov - Research Paper Example Chekov was born in 1860 in southern Russia and lived in a difficult family. Some say his father, who was physically abusive, became the main influence on later characters who were portrayed as hypocrites.1 Chekov did well in school and studied to become a physician. But a part of him wanted to write too, so he started to do this for a little money. He was recognized and people began to like his work and he took a more experimental approach to literature with this new confidence. He was generally a modest man who was concerned with social issues. For several years he was concerned about prison reform. He even traveled over land a great distant to the island of Sakhalin off the coast of eastern Siberia where he interviewed prisoners about the conditions they lived under. Prisons in Russia have always been a problem, as seen in later years in the writer Solzhenitsyn work about the Russian gulags and the Siberian exiles. For Chekov this was all important to the Russian soul. He covered m any topics with aplomb and brought a clinical eye to the social relations he witnessed throughout his native land. When he died in 1904 he was praised all over Russia and statues were erected to him and prizes named after him. Two of Chekov’s most important contributions or innovations for contemporary literature are his use of stream-of-consciousness writing and also his refusal to declare a moral conclusion at the end of his stories, allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion. In the first case, Chekov would often take the reader directly into the head of the character to show what they were really thinking about—often details not directly relevant to the plot or narrative pacing—and also how they saw and judged the things around them. This technique later became very popular with writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who used it to make a huge