1860–1904 · Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician
Anton Chekhov practised medicine while writing the stories and plays that reshaped both forms — The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. He was a relentless letter-writer, and his correspondence with his older brother Alexander, who had literary ambitions of his own, contains some of the sharpest working advice he ever gave. His method was to distrust the general and reach for the specific: not a mood described, but an object seen.