His medical education, however, set the tone for Chekhov’s literary work, for he became a great pathologist of character, dealing chiefly with those sick of mind and heart whom we are wont to think of as unnormal. Early afflicted with the tubercular trouble which he combated in vain, and which carried him off July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany, at forty-four, he disclosed in his work, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, the double character of the observing physician and the sick patient. To the observer and in the observed, in such a dual rôle, trivialities would assume a larger interest than to the typical healthy man writing of complacent themes in a rosy land. And so they did to Chekhov--as will more and more appear. While yet the youth was in the University (1879) he began to write “fugitive sketches” for the minor metropolitan newspapers, and eventually for the better-known _Novoe Vremya_ and the St. Petersburg _Gazette_. A humor keen, if somewhat coarse, characterized these productions, which were often only a few hundred words in length. This light satirical tone prevailed until after the appearance in 1887 of his first book. Perhaps the critical disapproval it aroused made him see that one who could write so well might be better employed than in merely making people laugh, as one reviewer expressed it. At all events, his later work was more serious, though always a subtle, intellectual humor might be found--for it often lurked--in his most sober fictional and dramatic writings. Chekhov was so modest, so retiring, so diffident even, that he came to his own by dint of sheer merit. When in the later years of his short life he married Olga Knipper, the blonde beauty of the Théâtre Libre, they took a villa at Yalta, on the Black Sea, for the husband’s enfeebled health demanded a milder climate than that of the metropolis. At Yalta, for a time, dwelt also Tolstoi and Gorki, and there Chekhov learned to know his brother writers. With that sincere big-heartedness which is happily characteristic of each of the Russian littérateurs chosen for inclusion in this series, both did much to bring his work to the attention of the public to which they were themselves looking. With Tolstoi’s convictions Chekhov had little in common, so he did not seek him out. But the elder artist went to the younger, and a firm friendship ensued. That the enthusiastic prophesies of both Tolstoi and Gorki were not fully realized was doubtless due to the untimely ending of a career so full of promise and of real literary achievement. * * * * * Naturally, Chekhov’s attitude toward life was something more personal than was his conscious philosophy. The lost illusions of the Russian people--I speak now of the Russia of the late eighties and early nineties--were perfectly reflected in our author’s work. Of one of his characters he writes: