A bear

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.