ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather was a serf, but managed to buy his freedom and that of his family some years before the abolition of serfdom by the emperor Alexander II in 1861. Chekhov attended the Greek high school in Taganrog, and, on graduating in 1879, went on to study medicine in Moscow. In that same year he wrote his first play, entitled Fatherlessness and later known as Platonov, after the central character. It was never published or performed in his lifetime, but has recently been produced to great acclaim. To support himself in medical school, Chekhov wrote comic sketches for the newspapers, as he had done earlier in Taganrog, but by the time he graduated in 1884, writing had become a more serious matter for him. In that same year he first showed symptoms of the tuberculosis that was to cut short his life. In 1887 a theater director in Moscow commissioned a play from him, and ten days later Chekhov gave him Ivanov, which was produced with success in Moscow and a year later in Petersburg. He also wrote a number of one-act comic sketches during those years. Then in 1894 he wrote The Seagull, the first of the four great plays that have since become central works of modern theater. The original production, in Petersburg, was disappointing, especially for Chekhov, but the play was noticed by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder with Konstantin Stanislavsky of the new Moscow Art Theatre. Their production in 1898 was a triumph and is now recognized as one of the greatest events in Russian, and world, theater. Chekhov’s next play, Uncle Vanya, was published in 1897 and produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899. It was followed by Three Sisters in 1901 and, finally, by The Cherry Orchard in 1904. During the spring of that year, Chekhov’s tuberculosis became critical; he went to a sanatorium in Badenweiler, in the Black Forest, and died there in mid-July.

RICHARD NELSON’S plays include the four-play series The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country (That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry and Regular Singing), Nikolai and the Others, Farewell to the Theatre, Conversations in Tusculum, How Shakespeare Won the West, Frank’s Home, Rodney’s Wife, Franny’s Way, Madame Melville, Goodnight Children Everywhere, New England, The General from America, Misha’s Party (with Alexander Gelman), Two Shakespearean Actors and Some Americans Abroad. He has written the musicals James Joyce’s The Dead (with Shaun Davey) and My Life with Albertine (with Ricky Ian Gordon), and the screenplays for the films Hyde Park-on-Hudson and Ethan Frome. He has received numerous awards, including a Tony (Best Book of a Musical for James Joyce’s The Dead), an Olivier (Best Play for Goodnight Children Everywhere) and two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards (James Joyce’s The Dead and The Apple Family). He is the recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He lives in upstate New York.

RICHARD PEVEAR was born in Boston, grew up on Long Island, attended Allegheny College (BA 1964) and the University of Virginia (MA 1965). After a stint as a college teacher, he moved to the Maine coast and eventually to New York City, where he worked as a freelance writer, editor and translator, and also as a cabinetmaker. He has published two collections of poetry, many essays and reviews, and some thirty books translated from French, Italian and Russian.

LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY was born in Leningrad, attended Leningrad State University and, on graduating, joined a scientific team whose work took her to the far east of Russia, to Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island. She emigrated to Israel in 1973, and to the United States in 1975, where she attended Yale Divinity School and St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary. Soon after settling in New York City, she married Richard Pevear, and a few years later they moved to France with their two children.

Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated twenty books from the Russian, including works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Leskov. Their translation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov received the PEN Translation Prize for 1991; their translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was awarded the same prize in 2002; and in 2006 they were awarded the first Efim Etkind International Translation Prize by the European University of St. Petersburg.