Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian short story writer and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on 29 January 1860, and died of tuberculosis at the health spa of Badenweiler, Germany, on 15 July1904. His playwriting career produced four classics, while his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress".
Chekhov had at first written stories only for the money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.
His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later employed by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.