Anton Chekhov
5 May 1889
Born	Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-01-29)29 January 1860 Taganrog, Russian Empire
Died	15 July 1904(1904-07-15) (aged 44) Badenweiler, German Empire
Occupation	Physician, short story writer, playwright
Nationality	Russian
Influences Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Émile Zola, Nikolai Leskov, Dmitry Grigorovich, Aleksandr Ostrovsky
Influenced Constantin Stanislavski, Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, John Cheever, Cornel West, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Frank O'Connor, Bob Dylan, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, David Means, Guram Dochanashvili, Charles Bukowski, Ivan Bunin, Sreda literary group, Jhumpa Lahiri, Abdulla Qahhor
Signature

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860^[1] – 15 July 1904)^[2] was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history.^[3] His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.^[4][5] Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."^[6]

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble^[7] as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."^[8]

Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.^[9] His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.^[10] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.^[11]

Biography[link]

Childhood[link]

Birth house of Anton Chekhov

Young Chekhov in 1882

The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.

Portrait of young Chekhov in country clothes

Young Chekhov (left) with brother Nikolai in 1882

Chekhov family and friends in 1890. (Top row, left to right) Ivan, Alexander, Father; (second row) unknown friend, Lika Mizinova, Masha, Mother, Seryozha Kiselev; (bottom row) Misha, Anton

Chekhov's classic look: pince-nez, hat and bow-tie

Melikhovo, now a museum

Anton Chekhov in 1893

Osip Braz: "Portrait of Anton Chekhov"

Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900

Chekhov and Olga, 1901, on honeymoon

Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery store. A director of the parish choir, devout Orthodox Christian, and physically abusive father, Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.^[12] Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia.^[13][14] "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother."^[15] In adulthood, Chekhov criticised his brother Alexander's treatment of his wife and children by reminding him of Pavel's tyranny:

Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool.^[16][17]

Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog gymnasium, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam.^[18] He sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs. In a letter of 1892, he used the word "suffering" to describe his childhood and recalled:

When my brothers and I used to stand in the middle of the church and sing the trio "May my prayer be exalted", or "The Archangel's Voice", everyone looked at us with emotion and envied our parents, but we at that moment felt like little convicts.^[19]

In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after over-extending his finances building a new house,^[20] and to avoid the debtor's prison fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolay, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow, Chekhov's mother physically and emotionally broken.^[21] Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his education.

Chekhov remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man called Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house.^[22] Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by—among other jobs—private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches, and selling short sketches to the newspapers.^[23] He sent every ruble he could spare to Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer up the family.^[23] During this time, he read widely and analytically, including Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer;^[24][25] and he wrote a full-length comedy drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication."^[26] Chekhov also enjoyed a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.^[23]

In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the medical school at Moscow University.^[27]

Early writings[link]

Chekhov now assumed responsibility for the whole family.^[28] To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by Nikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time.^[29] Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.^[30]

In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free.^[31] In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened; but he would not admit tuberculosis to his family and friends,^[15] confessing to Leikin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues."^[32] He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodation. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid per line a rate double Leikin's and allowed him three times the space.^[33] Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.^[34][35]

Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman,^[36] "You have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality.

Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and confessed, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself."^[37] The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising.^[38] Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."^[39]

Turning points[link]

That year, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.^[40] On his return, he began the novella-length short story The Steppe, "something rather odd and much too original," eventually published in Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald).^[41] In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe, which has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", represented a significant advance for Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper.^[42]

In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November.^[15] Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality.^[43] Mikhail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career.^[15] From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's which has become known as "Chekhov's gun", noted by Ilia Gurliand from a conversation: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act."^[44][45]

The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolay from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life which he realises has been without purpose.^[46][47] Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolay's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.^[15]

Sakhalin[link]

In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the far east of Russia and the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, where he spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to Sakhalin are considered to be among his best.^[48] His remarks to his sister about Tomsk were to become notorious.^[49][50]

"Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too."^[51]

The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting a mocking statue of Chekhov.

Chekhov witnessed much on Sakhalin that shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and forced prostitution of women. He wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."^[52][53] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents. For example:

"On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict who had murdered his wife and wore fetters on his legs. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together."^[54]

Chekhov later concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer, but that the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science – not literature – worthy and informative rather than brilliant.^[55][56] Chekhov found literary expression for the "Hell of Sakhalin" in his long short story The Murder,^[57] the last section of which is set on Sakhalin, where the murderer Yakov loads coal in the night, longing for home. Chekhov's writing on Sakhalin is the subject of brief comment and analysis in Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84.

Melikhovo[link]

In 1892, Chekhov bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles south of Moscow, where he lived until 1899 with his family. "It's nice to be a lord," he joked to his friend Ivan Leontyev (who wrote humorous pieces under the pseudonym Shcheglov),^[19] but he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and soon made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief for victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks of 1892, he went on to build three schools, a fire station, and a clinic, and to donate his medical services to peasants for miles around, despite frequent recurrences of his tuberculosis.^[12][31][58]

Mikhail Chekhov, a member of the household at Melikhovo, described the extent of his brother's medical commitments:

From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melikhovo, the sick began flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his door waiting.^[15]

Chekhov's expenditure on drugs was considerable, but the greatest cost was making journeys of several hours to visit the sick, which reduced his time for writing.^[15] Chekhov's work as a doctor, however, enriched his writing by bringing him into intimate contact with all sections of Russian society: for example, he witnessed at first hand the peasants' unhealthy and cramped living conditions, which he recalled in his short story Peasants. Chekhov visited the upper classes as well, recording in his notebook: "Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women."^[59]

Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in 1894, in a lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended orchard and pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mikhail, he "looked after… as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his Three Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years."^[15]

The first night of The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a fiasco, booed by the audience, and the play's reception stung Chekhov into renouncing the theatre.^[60] But the play so impressed the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced his colleague Constantin Stanislavski to direct it for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.^[61] Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the text and restored Chekhov's interest in playwriting.^[62] The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the following year staged Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.^[63]

Yalta[link]

In March 1897 Chekhov suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow. With great difficulty he was persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner of life.^[64]

After his father's death in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Yalta and built a villa there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though he planted trees and flowers in Yalta, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received guests such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot Siberia" for Moscow or travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was installed there.^[65][66] In Yalta he completed two more plays for the Art Theatre, composing with greater difficulty than in the days when he "wrote serenely, the way I eat pancakes now"; he took a year each over Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.^[67]

On 25 May 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper—quietly, owing to his horror of weddings—a former protegée and sometime lover of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull.^[68][69][70] Up to that point, Chekhov, called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor",^[71] had preferred passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment;^[72] he had once written to Suvorin:

By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her ... give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.^[73]

The letter proved prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart, although Russian scholars have conclusively refuted that claim.^[74][75] The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence which preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints about Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.^[76]

In Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories, The Lady with the Dog^[77] (also called Lady with Lapdog),^[78] which depicts what at first seems a casual liaison between a married man and a married woman in Yalta. Neither expects anything lasting from the encounter, but they find themselves drawn back to each other, risking the security of their family lives.^[79]

Death[link]

By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Mikhail Chekhov recalled that "everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off, but the nearer [he] was to the end, the less he seemed to realise it."^[15] On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, from where he wrote outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha describing the food and surroundings and assuring her and his mother that he was getting better. In his last letter, he complained about the way the German women dressed.^[80]

Chekhov's death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history",^[81] retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga wrote this account of her husband's last moments:

Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ("I'm dying"). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: "It's a long time since I drank champagne." He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child...^[82]

Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which offended Gorky.^[83] Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military band.^[84] Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.^[85]

Legacy[link]

A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin he thought people might go on reading him for seven years. "Why seven?" asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half," Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live."^[86]

Chekhov biographies

Always modest, Chekhov could hardly have imagined the extent of his posthumous reputation. The ovations for The Cherry Orchard in the year of his death showed him how high he had risen in the affection of the Russian public—by then he was second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy,^[87] who outlived him by six years—but after his death, Chekhov's fame soon spread further afield. Constance Garnett's translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield. The issues surrounding the close similarities between Mansfield's 1910 story The Child Who Was Tired and Chekhov's Sleepy are summarised in William H. New's Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform^[88] The Russian critic D.S. Mirsky, who lived in England, explained Chekhov's popularity in that country by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values."^[89] In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the revolution but was later adapted to the Soviet agenda, with the character Lopakhin, for example, reinvented as a hero of the new order, taking an axe to the cherry orchard.^[90][91]

One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" and noted similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: "the same nice people, the same utter futility."^[92]

In America, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of subtext: "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches," wrote Stanislavski, "but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word… the characters often feel and think things not expressed in the lines they speak."^[93][94] The Group Theatre, in particular, developed the subtextual approach to drama, influencing generations of American playwrights, screenwriters, and actors, including Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan and, in particular, Lee Strasberg. In turn, Strasberg's Actors Studio and the "Method" acting approach influenced many actors, including Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism.^[95] In 1981, the playwright Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin.

Despite Chekhov's eminence as a playwright, some writers believe his short stories represent the greater achievement.^[96] Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story Errand about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov the greatest of all short-story writers:

Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.^[97]

Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer."^[98] And Vladimir Nabokov once complained of Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions."^[99] But he also declared The Lady with the Dog "one of the greatest stories ever written" and described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice."^[100]

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's breakthrough was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life."^[101]

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader (1925):

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.^[102]

Chekhov's works have been translated into many languages. The famous Uzbek writer Abdulla Qahhor translated many of Chekhov's stories into the Uzbek language. Qahhor was influenced by Chekov and considered the Russian dramatist to be his teacher.^[103]

Bibliography[link]

See also[link]

Literature portal

• Alexander Chekhov
• Maria Chekhova
• Nikolay Chekhov
• Ann Dunnigan, English-language translator
• Jean-Claude van Itallie, English-language translator
• Flash fiction
• Melikhovo, Chekhov's country estate near Moscow
• Physician writer
• List of short stories by Anton Chekhov
• White Dacha, Chekhov's House in Yalta

Gallery[link]

• 

  Portrait of Chekhov by his brother Nikolay

• 

  Portrait by Isaac Levitan, 1886

• 

  Portrait by Valentin Serov, 1903

• 

  Chekhov Monument in Taganrog

• 

  Chekhov's monument in Serpukhov

• 

  Chekhov's monument in Rostov-on-Don

• 

  Statue, Tomsk. "Anton Pavlovich in Tomsk—drunkard's view, lying in a ditch, who never read Kashtanka"^[104]

• 

  English translation of Three Sisters

• 

  Chekhov International Theatre Festival poster

• 

  Modern production of The Seagull

• 

  Grave of Anton Chekhov

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Tufarulo,G,M.- La Luna è morta e lo specchio infranto. Miti letterari del Novecento, vol.1- G. Laterza, Bari, 2009- ISBN 978-88-8231-491-0.

External links[link]

Find more about Anton Chekhov on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

Biographical

• Biography at books and writers (Petri Liukkonen)
• Biography at The Literature Network
• "Chekhov's Legacy" by Cornel West at NPR, 2004
• The International competition of philological, culture and film studies works dedicated to Anton Chekhov's life and creative work (Russian)
• Works by Anton Chekhov on Open Library at the Internet Archive

Misc

• Campaign to save Chekhov's house in Yalta

Works

• Works by and about Anton Chekhov at Internet Archive. Scanned books, color, some illustrated, original editions.
• Recorded Stories of Anton Chekhov at Internet Archive. Translated by Constance Garnett, Marion Fell, and others. Presented in mp3 and ogg format.
• Works by Anton Chekhov at Project Gutenberg. All Constance Garnett's translations of the short stories and letters are available, plus the edition of the Note-book translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf – see the "References" section for print publication details of all of these. Site also has translations of all the plays.
• 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett presented in chronological order of Russian publication with annotations.
• Works of Anton Chekhov available to read online at ReadmeFree
• Антон Павлович Чехов Texts of Chekhov's works in the original Russian. Retrieved 16 February 2007. (Russian)

v t e Works by Anton Chekhov Biography Bibliography Plays Platonov (1881) On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco (1886, 1902) Swansong (1887) Ivanov (1887) The Bear (1888) A Tragedian in Spite of Himself (1889) The Wedding (1889) The Wood Demon (1889) A Marriage Proposal (1890) The Festivities (1891) The Seagull (1896) Uncle Vanya (1897) Three Sisters (1901) The Cherry Orchard (1904) Novellas The Shooting Party (1884) The Steppe (1888) The Duel (1891) The Story of an Unknown Man (1893) Three Years (1895) My Life (1896) Short stories List of short stories by Anton Chekhov "The Bet" (1889) "The Black Monk" (1894) "The Lady with the Dog" (1899) Related articles Chekhov's gun Osip Dymov Fragments Wild Honey

vep:Čehov Anton

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born	(1803-05-25)May 25, 1803 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	April 27, 1882(1882-04-27) (aged 78) Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.
Era	19th century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Transcendentalism
Main interests	Individualism, Mysticism
Notable ideas	Self-reliance, Over-soul
Influenced by Michel de Montaigne, Henry David Thoreau, Emanuel Swedenborg, Hegel, Plato
Influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henry David Thoreau, Émile Armand, Emma Goldman, Marcel Proust, Harold Bloom, Ivan Cankar, Robert Musil
Signature

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".^[1]

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic; "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul."

While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time, Emerson's essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson's work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."^[2]

Early life, family, and education[link]

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803,^[3] son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and the father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo.^[4] Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles.^[5] Three other children—Phebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline–died in childhood.^[5]

The young Ralph Waldo Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday.^[6] Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family; his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in particular had a profound effect on Emerson.^[7] She lived with the family off and on, and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863.^[8]

Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine.^[9] In October 1817, at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent students and send messages to faculty.^[10] Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World".^[11] He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts.^[12] By his senior year, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo.^[13] Emerson served as Class Poet; as was custom, he presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18.^[14] He did not stand out as a student and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people.^[15]

In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek out warmer climates. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the weather was still too cold.^[16] He then went further south, to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach, and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine, he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat. Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was only two years his senior; they became extremely good friends and enjoyed one another's company. The two engaged in enlightening discussions on religion, society, philosophy, and government, and Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education.^[17]

While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first experience of slavery. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while there was a slave auction taking place in the yard outside. He wrote, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with 'Going, gentlemen, going'!"^[18]

Early career[link]

Engraved drawing, 1878

After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William^[19] in a school for young women^[20] established in their mother's house, after he had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; when his brother William ^[21] went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, then went to Harvard Divinity School. Emerson's brother Edward,^[22] two years younger than he, entered the office of lawyer Daniel Webster, after graduating Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate and he soon suffered a mental collapse as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June 1828 at age 23. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834 from apparently longstanding tuberculosis.^[23] Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis,^[24] making him the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die in a period of a few years.

Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her when she was 18.^[25] The couple moved to Boston, with Emerson's mother Ruth moving with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already sick with tuberculosis.^[26] Less than two years later, Ellen died at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831, after uttering her last words: "I have not forgot the peace and joy."^[27] Emerson was heavily affected by her death and visited her grave in Roxbury daily.^[28] In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, Emerson wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin."^[29]

Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to serve as its junior pastor and he was ordained on January 11, 1829.^[30] His initial salary was $1,200 a year, increasing to $1,400 in July,^[31] but with his church role he took on other responsibilities: he was chaplain to the Massachusetts legislature, and a member of the Boston school committee. His church activities kept him busy, though during this period, facing the imminent death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.

After his wife's death, he began to disagree with the church's methods, writing in his journal in June 1832: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers."^[32] His disagreements with church officials over the administration of the Communion service and misgivings about public prayer eventually led to his resignation in 1832. As he wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it."^[33] As one Emerson scholar has pointed out, "Doffing the decent black of the pastor, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher, of the thinker not confined within the limits of an institution or a tradition." ^[34]

Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and later wrote of his travels in English Traits (1857).^[35] He left aboard the brig Jasper on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing first to Malta.^[36] During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland, and had to be dragged by fellow passengers to visit Voltaire's home in Ferney, "protesting all the way upon the unworthiness of his memory." ^[37] He then went on to Paris, a "loud modern New York of a place,",^[38] where he visited the Jardin des Plantes. He was greatly moved by the organization of plants according to Jussieu's system of classification, and the way all such objects were related and connected. As Richardson says, "Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science."^[39]

Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle in particular was a strong influence on Emerson; Emerson would later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle, and in March 1835, he tried to convince Carlyle to come to America to lecture.^[40] The two would maintain correspondence until Carlyle's death in 1881.^[41]

Daguerreotype of 'Lidian' Jackson Emerson and son Edward Waldo Emerson, 1840

Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833, and lived with his mother in Newton, Massachusetts, until October, 1834, when he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his step-grandfather Dr. Ezra Ripley at what was later named The Old Manse.^[42] Seeing the budding Lyceum movement, which provided lectures on all sorts of topics, Emerson saw a possible career as a lecturer. On November 5, 1833, he made the first of what would eventually be some 1,500 lectures, discussing The Uses of Natural History in Boston. This was an expanded account of his experience in Paris.^[43] In this lecture, he set out some of his important beliefs and the ideas he would later develop in his first published essay Nature:

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.^[44]

On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lydia Jackson proposing marriage.^[45] Her acceptance reached him by mail on the 28th. In July 1835, he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Concord, Massachusetts which he named "Bush"; it is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House.^[46] Emerson quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town. He gave a lecture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord on September 12, 1835.^[47] Two days later, he married Lydia Jackson in her home town of Plymouth, Massachusetts,^[48] and moved to the new home in Concord together with Emerson's mother on September 15.^[49]

Emerson quickly changed his wife's name to Lidian, and would call her Queenie,^[50] and sometimes Asia,^[51] and she called him Mr. Emerson.^[52] Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at Lidian's suggestion.^[53]

Emerson was poor when he was at Harvard,^[54] and later supported his family for much of his life.^[55][56] He inherited a fair amount of money after his first wife's death, though he had to file a lawsuit against the Tucker family in 1836 to get it.^[56] He received $11,600 in May 1834,^[57] and a further $11,674.49 in July 1837.^[58] In 1834, he considered that he had an income of $1,200 a year from the initial payment of the estate,^[55] equivalent to what he had earned as a pastor.

Literary career and Transcendentalism[link]

Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1859

On September 8, 1836, the day before the publication of Nature, Emerson met with Henry Hedge, George Putnam and George Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-minded intellectuals.^[59] This was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836.^[60] On September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together.^[61] Fuller would prove to be an important figure in Transcendentalism.

Emerson anonymously published his first essay, Nature, on September 9, 1836. A year later, on August 31, 1837, Emerson delivered his now-famous Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar",^[62] then known as "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature") in 1849.^[63] Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so, at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month.^[1] In the speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a writing style all their own and free from Europe.^[64] James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary annals".^[65] Another member of the audience, Reverend John Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address".^[66]

In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau. Though they had likely met as early as 1835, in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, "Do you keep a journal?" The question went on to have a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau.^[67] Emerson's own journal comes to 16 large volumes, in the definitive Harvard University Press edition published between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider the journal to be Emerson's key literary work.^[68]

In March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on The Philosophy of History at Boston's Masonic Temple. This was the first time he managed a lecture series on his own, and was the beginning of his serious career as a lecturer.^[69] The profits from this series of lectures were much larger than when he was paid by an organization to talk, and Emerson continued to manage his own lectures often throughout his lifetime. He would eventually give as many as 80 lectures a year, traveling across the northern part of the United States. He traveled as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and California.^[70]

On July 15, 1838,^[71] Emerson was invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his "Divinity School Address". Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo".^[72] His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. For this, he was denounced as an atheist,^[72] and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years.^[73]

The Transcendental group began to publish its flagship journal, The Dial, in July 1840.^[74] They planned the journal as early as October 1839, but work did not begin until the first week of 1840.^[75] George Ripley was its managing editor^[76] and Margaret Fuller was its first editor, having been hand-chosen by Emerson after several others had declined the role.^[77] Fuller stayed on for about two years and Emerson took over, utilizing the journal to promote talented young writers including Ellery Channing and Thoreau.^[67]

It was in 1841 that Emerson published Essays, his second book, which included the famous essay, "Self-Reliance".^[78] His aunt called it a "strange medley of atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame.^[79]

In January 1842 Emerson's first son Waldo died from scarlet fever.^[80] Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem "Threnody" ("For this losing is true dying"),^[81] and the essay "Experience". That same month, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather.

Bronson Alcott announced his plans in November 1842 to find "a farm of a hundred acres in excellent condition with good buildings, a good orchard and grounds".^[82] Charles Lane purchased a 90-acre (360,000 m²) farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, in May 1843 for what would become Fruitlands, a community based on Utopian ideals inspired in part by Transcendentalism.^[83] The farm would run based on a communal effort, using no animals for labor; its participants would eat no meat and use no wool or leather.^[84] Emerson said he felt "sad at heart" for not engaging in the experiment himself.^[85] Even so, he did not feel Fruitlands would be a success. "Their whole doctrine is spiritual", he wrote, "but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money".^[86] Even Alcott admitted he was not prepared for the difficulty in operating Fruitlands. "None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart", he wrote.^[87] After its failure, Emerson helped buy a farm for Alcott's family in Concord^[86] which Alcott named "Hillside".^[87]

The Dial ceased publication in April 1844; Horace Greeley reported it as an end to the "most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country".^[88] (An unrelated magazine of the same name would be published in several periods through 1929.)

In 1844, Emerson published his second collection of essays, entitled "Essays: Second Series." This collection included "The Poet," "Experience," "Gifts," and an essay entitled "Nature," a different work from the 1836 essay of the same name.

Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and much of the rest of the country. He had begun lecturing in 1833; by the 1850s he was giving as many as 80 per year.^[89] He addressed the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Gloucester Lyceum, among others. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects and many of his essays grew out of his lectures. He charged between $10 and $50 for each appearance, bringing him as much as $2,000 in a typical winter "season". This was more than his earnings from other sources. In some years, he earned as much as $900 for a series of six lectures, and in another, for a winter series of talks in Boston, he netted $1,600.^[90] He eventually gave some 1,500 lectures in his lifetime. His earnings allowed him to expand his property, buying 11 acres (45,000 m²) of land by Walden Pond and a few more acres in a neighboring pine grove. He wrote that he was "landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less".^[86]

Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy when reading the works of French philosopher Victor Cousin.^[91] In 1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas.^[92] Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul":

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.^[93]

From 1847 to 1848, he toured England, Scotland, and Ireland.^[94] He also visited Paris between the February Revolution and the bloody June Days. When he arrived, he saw the stumps where trees had been cut down to form barricades in the February riots. On May 21 he stood on the Champ de Mars in the midst of mass celebrations for concord, peace and labor. He wrote in his journal: "At the end of the year we shall take account, & see if the Revolution was worth the trees."^[95]

In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850.^[96] Within a week of her death, her New York editor Horace Greeley suggested to Emerson that a biography of Fuller, to be called Margaret and Her Friends, be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away".^[97] Published with the title The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,^[98] Fuller's words were heavily censored or rewritten.^[99] The three editors were not concerned about accuracy; they believed public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure.^[100] Even so, for a time, it was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century.^[98]

Walt Whitman published the innovative poetry collection Leaves of Grass in 1855 and sent a copy to Emerson for his opinion. Emerson responded positively, sending a flattering five-page letter as a response.^[101] Emerson's approval helped the first edition of Leaves of Grass stir up significant interest^[102] and convinced Whitman to issue a second edition shortly thereafter.^[103] This edition quoted a phrase from Emerson's letter, printed in gold leaf on the cover: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career".^[104] Emerson took offense that this letter was made public^[105] and later became more critical of the work.^[106]

Civil War years[link]

Emerson was staunchly anti-slavery, but he did not appreciate being in the public limelight and was hesitant about lecturing on the subject. He did, however, give a number of lectures during the pre-Civil War years, beginning as early as November, 1837.^[107] A number of his friends and family members were more active abolitionists than he, at first, but from 1844 on, he took a more active role in opposing slavery. He gave a number of speeches and lectures, and notably welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown's visits to Concord.^[108] He voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but Emerson was disappointed that Lincoln was more concerned about preserving the Union than eliminating slavery outright.^[109] Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made it clear that he believed in immediate emancipation of the slaves.^[110]

Around this time, in 1860, Emerson published The Conduct of Life, his final original collection of essays.^[111] In this book, Emerson "grappled with some of the thorniest issues of the moment," and "his experience in the abolition ranks is a telling influence in his conclusions.^[112] In the book's opening essay, Fate, Emerson wrote, "The question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?"^[113]

Emerson visited Washington, D.C, at the end of January, 1862. He gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian on January 31, 1862, and declared: "The South calls slavery an institution... I call it destitution... Emancipation is the demand of civilization".^[114] The next day, February 1, his friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln was familiar with Emerson's work, having previously seen him lecture.^[115] Emerson's misgivings about Lincoln began to soften after this meeting.^[116] In 1865, he spoke at a memorial service held for Lincoln in Concord: "Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain as this has caused, or will have caused, on its announcement."^[115] Emerson also met a number of high-ranking government officials, including Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury, Edward Bates, the attorney general, Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war, Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, and William Seward, the secretary of state.^[117]

On May 6, 1862, Emerson's protégé Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 and Emerson delivered his eulogy. Emerson would continuously refer to Thoreau as his best friend,^[118] despite a falling out that began in 1849 after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.^[119] Another friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, died two years after Thoreau in 1864. Emerson served as one of the pallbearers as Hawthorne was buried in Concord, as Emerson wrote, "in a pomp of sunshine and verdure".^[120] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864.^[121]

Final years and death[link]

Emerson's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord

Starting in 1867, Emerson's health began declining; he wrote much less in his journals.^[122] Beginning as early as the summer of 1871 or in the spring of 1872, Emerson started having memory problems^[123] and suffered from aphasia.^[124] By the end of the decade, he forgot his own name at times and, when anyone asked how he felt, he responded, "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well".^[125]

Emerson's Concord home caught fire on July 24, 1872; Emerson called for help from neighbors and, giving up on putting out the flames, all attempted to save as many objects as possible.^[126] The fire was put out by Ephraim Bull, Jr., the one-armed son of Ephraim Wales Bull.^[127] Donations were collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild, including $5,000 gathered by Francis Cabot Lowell, another $10,000 collected by LeBaron Russell Briggs, and a personal donation of $1,000 from George Bancroft.^[128] Support for shelter was offered as well; though the Emersons ended up staying with family at the Old Manse, invitations came from Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James Thomas Fields and Annie Adams Fields.^[129] The fire marked an end to Emerson's serious lecturing career; from then on, he would lecture only on special occasions and only in front of familiar audiences.^[130]

While the house was being rebuilt, Emerson took a trip to England, continental Europe, and Egypt. He left on October 23, 1872, along with his daughter Ellen^[131] while his wife Lidian spent time at the Old Manse and with friends.^[132] Emerson and his daughter Ellen returned to the United States on the ship Olympus along with friend Charles Eliot Norton on April 15, 1873.^[133] Emerson's return to Concord was celebrated by the town and school was canceled that day.^[124]

In late 1874 Emerson published an anthology of poetry called Parnassus, which included poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Jean Ingelow, Lucy Larcom, Jones Very, as well as Thoreau and several others.^[134] The anthology was originally prepared as early as the fall of 1871 but was delayed when the publishers asked for revisions.^[135]

The problems with his memory had become embarrassing to Emerson and he ceased his public appearances by 1879. As Holmes wrote, "Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much, on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times".^[125] On April 21, 1882, Emerson was diagnosed with pneumonia.^[136] He died on April 27, 1882. Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.^[137] He was placed in his coffin wearing a white robe given by American sculptor Daniel Chester French.^[138]

Lifestyle and beliefs[link]

Ralph Waldo Emerson in later years

Emerson's religious views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine.^[139] Critics believed that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry Ware, Jr. said, Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum".^[140] Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism.^[141] His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal the truth but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from nature.^[142]

Emerson did not become an ardent abolitionist until 1844, though his journals show he was concerned with slavery beginning in his youth, even dreaming about helping to free slaves. In June 1856, shortly after Charles Sumner, a United States Senator, was beaten for his staunch abolitionist views, Emerson lamented that he himself was not as committed to the cause. He wrote, "There are men who as soon as they are born take a bee-line to the axe of the inquisitor... Wonderful the way in which we are saved by this unfailing supply of the moral element".^[143] After Sumner's attack, Emerson began to speak out about slavery. "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom", he said at a meeting at Concord that summer.^[144] Emerson used slavery as an example of a human injustice, especially in his role as a minister. In early 1838, provoked by the murder of an abolitionist publisher from Alton, Illinois named Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Emerson gave his first public antislavery address. As he said, "It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live".^[143] John Quincy Adams said the mob-murder of Lovejoy "sent a shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent".^[145] However, Emerson maintained that reform would be achieved through moral agreement rather than by militant action. By August 1, 1844, at a lecture in Concord, he stated more clearly his support for the abolitionist movement. He stated, "We are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics".^[146]

Emerson may have had erotic thoughts about at least one man.^[147] During his early years at Harvard, he found himself attracted to a young freshman named Martin Gay about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry.^[54][148] He also had a number of crushes on various women throughout his life,^[54] such as Anna Barker^[149] and Caroline Sturgis.^[150]

Legacy[link]

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ Issue of 1940

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Concord Sage—became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States.^[151] Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had "a defect in the region of the heart" and a "self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name", though he later admitted Emerson was "a great man".^[152] Theodore Parker, a minister and Transcendentalist, noted Emerson's ability to influence and inspire others: "the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new start, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes".^[153]

Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson's godson. "There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial — while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence. To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance.” Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane."^[154]

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as "The prophet of the American Religion," which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson's lifetime, but also to Mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: "The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne."^[155] Several of Emerson's poems were included in Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson's essays, which Bloom listed as Self-Reliance, Circles, Experience, and "nearly all of Conduct of Life".

Namesakes[link]

• In May 2006, 168 years after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address," Harvard Divinity School announced the establishment of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship.^[156] Harvard has also named a building, Emerson Hall (1900), after him.^[157]

• Emerson Hill, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Staten Island, is named for his eldest brother, Judge William Emerson, who resided there from 1837 to 1864.^[158]

• The Emerson String Quartet, formed in 1976, took their name from Ralph Waldo Emerson.^[159]

• The Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize is awarded annually to high school students for essays on historical subjects.^[160]

• Author Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was named after Emerson.

Selected works[link]

Representative Men (1850)

Collections

• Essays: First Series (1841)
• Essays: Second Series (1844)
• Poems (1847)
• Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849)
• Representative Men (1850)
• English Traits (1856)
• The Conduct of Life (1860)
• May Day and Other Poems (1867)
• Society and Solitude (1870)
• Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Individual essays

• "Nature" (1836)
• "Self-Reliance" (Essays: First Series)
• "Compensation" (First Series)
• "The Over-Soul" (First Series)
• "Circles" (First Series)
• "The Poet" (Essays: Second Series)
• "Experience" (Essays: Second Series)
• "Politics" (Second Series)
• "The American Scholar"
• "New England Reformers"

Poems

• "Concord Hymn"
• "The Rhodora"
• "Brahma"

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door, a phrase often attributed to Emerson.
• Transparent eyeball

Notes[link]