Chekhov: Medicine Is My Wife, Literature My Mistress
Quick answer: How Anton Chekhov paid his family's debts by writing jokes by the line while training as a doctor, and why he called literature his beloved mistress.
In 1876 a grocer in the Russian port town of Taganrog went bankrupt and fled to Moscow to escape debtors' prison, taking most of his family with him. He left behind his sixteen-year-old son Anton to finish school alone, sell off the household furniture piece by piece, and post whatever roubles he could earn from tutoring younger boys. That teenager spent three years fending for himself on the Sea of Azov, then followed the family to Moscow, found them in a damp basement, enrolled in medical school and started writing jokes for money.
Anton Chekhov never planned to become one of the most influential short story writers who ever lived. He planned to become a doctor, and he did. The writing began as piecework, comic filler sold by the line to humour weeklies, signed with pseudonyms because a medical student did not want his professors spotting his name above gag columns. The famous line came later, in a letter of 1888: medicine is my lawful wife, literature my mistress. It reads like a joke, and it is also the most honest job description he ever gave himself.
The Boy Who Stayed Behind
Pavel Chekhov's grocery shop failed when Anton was in the middle of his schooling, and the collapse scattered the family. What matters about the Taganrog years is what they trained into him: he learned to earn, to budget, to work unsupervised, and to watch people closely, because a boy who tutors merchants' sons sees every kind of household from the inside. Biographers generally agree those three solitary years produced the self-possessed adult who would later hold an entire family together.
He reached Moscow in 1879 with something practical: a small monthly stipend from the Taganrog town council to study medicine, arranged by himself. He entered the medical faculty of Moscow University and found that the stipend could not feed eight people. His older brothers Alexander and Nikolai were already selling sketches and drawings to the humour press. Anton, the medical student, followed them into it, and quickly out-earned them both.
Jokes by the Line
His first accepted piece appeared in 1880 in a St Petersburg humour magazine called Strekoza, The Dragonfly. After that the floodgates opened. Through the early 1880s he wrote comic sketches, parodies, captions, courtroom scenes and miniature stories under pen names, most famously Antosha Chekhonte, a nickname a school teacher had once given him. The pay was by the line, and it was meagre, but multiplied across dozens of pieces a month it kept the Chekhov household fed, clothed and eventually moved out of the basement.
The most important of his early editors was Nikolai Leykin, who ran the Petersburg weekly Oskolki, meaning Fragments. Leykin imposed a hard limit of roughly a hundred lines per piece. Chekhov chafed against it and complained about it, yet that ceiling did something no writing course could have done: it forced him to cut every slack sentence, to open stories in the middle of the action, and to imply what other writers would explain. By most counts he published several hundred short pieces before he turned twenty six. He qualified as a doctor in 1884, hung up his plate, and began seeing patients, many of them peasants he treated for nothing. That same year he first coughed blood, an early sign of the tuberculosis he chose to ignore for as long as he could.
A Letter from an Old Man
The turn in Chekhov's story arrived in March 1886, and it came from a single reader. Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated writer of the older generation, wrote to Chekhov out of nowhere. His message, warmly meant and bluntly put, was that Chekhov possessed real talent, that he was squandering it on throwaway comic work, and that he owed it respect: write less, write more carefully, and sign your own name.
Chekhov's reply is one of the most touching documents in Russian literary history. He confessed that he had written his hundreds of stories carelessly, the way reporters dash off accounts of fires. Something in him shifted. He began signing his real name, moved his serious work to the newspaper Novoye Vremya, where the publisher Alexei Suvorin paid properly and gave him room, and started building stories that were quiet, exact and unhurried. In 1888 the Academy of Sciences awarded him the Pushkin Prize for his collection At Dusk. The joke writer had become, in two years, a major Russian author. He was twenty eight.
The Wife and the Mistress
The famous sentence comes from an 1888 letter to Suvorin: medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When one bored him, he said, he spent the night with the other. What matters is that he meant the first half. Chekhov never abandoned medicine. In 1890 he crossed Siberia by carriage and river boat to the penal island of Sakhalin, where he single-handedly carried out a census of thousands of convicts and settlers, an act of medical and moral fieldwork that became the book Sakhalin Island. In 1892, settled at his small estate in Melikhovo, he served without pay as a district cholera doctor.
Medicine fed the fiction constantly. Chekhov's stories are full of exactly observed bodies, symptoms, deaths and doctors, rendered without melodrama because he had sat at real bedsides. He also credited medicine with teaching him scientific habits of mind, a distrust of exaggeration that became the backbone of his style. He worked at both trades until tuberculosis stopped him. He died at a German spa in July 1904, aged forty four, having remained, to the end, a doctor who wrote.
What a Working Writer Can Take from Chekhov
The first lesson is the one writers most resist: the day job was not the obstacle to the work, it was an engine of it. Medicine gave Chekhov material, discipline and independence from literary fashion. If you write around a job, you are not failing at the writer's life; you are living the version of it that produced Ward No. 6. The second lesson hides in Leykin's hundred-line rule. Constraint taught Chekhov compression, and compression became the most imitated prose style of the twentieth century. A tight limit on your poems or stories is a teacher, not a cage.
The third lesson is about readers. Chekhov wrote brilliantly for six years without taking himself seriously, and one earnest letter from one serious reader changed that overnight. Sometimes what a writer needs is not more talent but one honest response. That is a strong argument for putting work where it will actually be read and answered: Writory's monthly contest scores every single entry on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, so no poem you send between the 1st and the 25th is met with silence.
Where to Start Reading Him
Begin with the mature stories: The Steppe from 1888, his first long serious work; Ward No. 6 from 1892, as dark and controlled a story as exists; and The Lady with the Little Dog from 1899, which manages to make an adulterous affair feel like a moral awakening. Then the four great plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, all of which reward reading on the page.
Poets in particular should read his letters. They are full of working advice, including his often-cited counsel to a fellow writer that coldness in the telling lets the reader supply the feeling. Nobody has ever put the case for restraint better, and restraint is a poet's daily business.
What poets can take from this
- Treat your day job as source material: note the speech, gestures and small injustices you witness there.
- Set yourself a hard length limit for a month of writing and let it force compression.
- Keep a pseudonym stage if it helps you produce freely, but know when to sign your name and mean it.
- When one serious reader praises you, believe them enough to raise your own standard.
- Cut the explanation and keep the detail; the reader will do the feeling for you.
- Finish and sell small pieces regularly rather than guarding one large unfinished one.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of no more than twenty lines set entirely inside your workplace, in which the job is never complained about but one precise observed detail carries all the feeling.
Questions
Did Chekhov ever give up medicine for writing?
No. He practised throughout his life, treating peasants free of charge at Melikhovo, serving as a volunteer cholera doctor in 1892, and conducting a census of convicts on Sakhalin Island in 1890. He said medicine and literature each improved the other, and he kept both until tuberculosis ended his working life.
How many stories did Chekhov write?
Counts vary depending on what is included, but he is generally credited with several hundred short stories and sketches, a large share of them written in the early 1880s under pen names such as Antosha Chekhonte. The mature, celebrated stories are a smaller body of work produced mostly after 1886.
What did Chekhov mean by calling medicine his wife and literature his mistress?
The line comes from an 1888 letter to his publisher Alexei Suvorin. It was a wry way of saying that medicine was his lawful, dependable profession while literature was the passion he escaped to, and that moving between the two kept him fresh. In practice he honoured both commitments for his entire adult life.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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