Chekhov and the Brontës

Abstract Chekhov’s biographer Donald Rayfield claims, in two different scholarly works, that Chekhov may have been inspired by the Brontë family’s biography when writing his drama Three Sisters (1901). Rayfield’s ideas in turn inspired Blake Morrison and Arlene Hutton in their creative adaptations of Three Sisters, in which the plot and structure of Chekhov’s drama were supplemented with Brontëan historical characters and themes. In this paper, the author questions whether Chekhov really did know about the family of the three writers from Yorkshire and, accordingly, whether he put this knowledge to work in his own literary endeavour. To this end, the author charts the availability of Russian nineteenth-century translations of the Brontës’ works and biographical sources, and examines biographical parallels between Chekhov’s family and the Brontës.