Old postcards Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a writer, playwright and physician from Taganrog; his plays The Seagull, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard have been staged around the world for more than a century. The Soviet postcards in this subsection were printed in 1970 and reproduce photographs from different years — the dates in the captions refer to the photographs themselves.

The sequence opens with a Taganrog picture, Chekhov with his family, from 1874. His Moscow years are represented by house no. 6 on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street, where he lived in 1886–1890. In 1892 he bought the Melikhovo estate outside Moscow and lived there, with breaks, until 1899 — hence a card captioned “Melikhovo, late March 1892”.

His last years belong to Crimea: at the end of 1898 Chekhov bought a plot in Yalta and built a house there. From this period come Chekhov and Gorky in Yalta, 5 May 1900, Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy in Gaspra, 12 September 1901 and a photograph outside his Yalta house with his dogs Tuzik and Kashtan, dated 18 April 1904.

Taken together, the cards form a thirty-year photo biography running from Taganrog to Yalta.