There's a lot of Chekhov on the cultural calendar for June, so I thought it appropriate to take a minute to talk about another of Russia's great authors.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on Jan. 29, 1860, in Taganrog, in Rostov Oblast on the northern part of the Black Sea. There is a fairly active Yahoo! group for families who have adopted from Rostov, so if you're one of the lucky ones headed to this region, maybe you can cadge a side trip to Taganrog. The guidebooks say that it has preserved much of Chekhov's legacy in the town, which was also where the Russian Tsar Alexander I died of typhus in 1825.

The tale of Chekhov's life makes him seem like one of those "I pulled myself up by the bootstraps" characters that my former colleagues in the American business press love to write about. He was the grandson of a serf. (Feudal slavery would not be abolished in Russia until the year after Chekhov's birth; you might have already read the passage in Anna Karenina where Levin and his half-brother debate the liberation of the serfs.) Chekhov's father built up a successful grocery business and gave his son a good education. But Pavel Chekhov's ambition got the better of him and he fled Taganrog to avoid debtor's prison, leaving his teenage son to bail the family out.

The young Chekhov did that by doing a variety of odd jobs, including writing short stories. This format would become his mainstay, and frankly I like his short stories better than his plays, which have always seemed lumpy to me. But Chekhov also found the resources to go to medical school and 1884, he became a doctor. (If you're a medical professional who likes to read fiction by other medical professionals, there's an intriguing Chekhov anthology compiled by a doctor on Amazon.com.

Indeed, it was the medical side of Chekhov that got me interested in him again in 2004 (I had sworn him off after seeing a particularly bad production of "The Cherry Orchard"). It seems that in 1890, Chekhov was commissioned to go to Sakhalin Island, then a Russian penal colony, to conduct a census. I was researching the island because I was starting my second adoption and Sakhalin was one of the few regions that hadn't gone to a two-trip format (it has now). On Sakhalin, Chekhov found a population in dire straits and lobbied, largely unsuccessfully, for prison reform.

Where can you go to learn more about Anton Chekhov? Thanks to the magic of Internet collaboration there are two good annotated lists of his writings on Amazon.com. You can read them here and here.

Image Credit: Alexander Mirgorodskiy