»You want my biography? Here it is.« It sounds sincere, but Chekhov meant it ironically – in reality he almost never banged his own drum. With an amazing wealth of contemporary photos and documents, this book attempts to approach its subject in the form of a biography in pictures. Far more than an illustrated life story of a great author, the book creates a comprehensive panorama of the history of contemporary Russian thought, the social and political atmosphere upon which Chekhov commented, the surroundings and conditions in which an oeuvre, unparalleled in world literature, came into being.