page_title: The Bishop (short story)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: The Bishop (short story) / Background
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Епископ Михаил (в миру Михаил Михайлович Грибановский; 2 (14) ноября 1856, Елатьма, Тамбовская губерния — 19 (31) августа 1898, Крым) — епископ Таврический и Симферопольский. Богослов.
context_page_description: "The Bishop" is a 1902 short story by Anton Chekhov, first published in the April 1902 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh. The story, telling about the last days of a terminally ill priest, in many ways reflects the psychological state of the author, who was at the time full of premonitions of his own inevitable demise, and in that respect is considered to be partly autobiographical.
context_section_description: S.N. Shchyukin in his memoirs remembers one particular episode in early 1899 which most certainly gave Chekhov an original idea for the story. "One day, when he was still living in his dacha at Ilovayskoye, A.P. returned from the city quite animated. He had seen at a photographer's a photo of Mikhail, the Bishop of Tavria. The portrait impressed him a lot, he bought it and spent some time examining it at home... The Bishop was not an old man, but he suffered from severe case of consumption. On the photo he was with his old mother... He had this spirited, intelligent, very sad face of a suffering man... Anton Pavlovich enquired a lot about Bishop Mikhail, and later I sent him a book by the latter, called Above the Gospels."
  Shchyukin continued: "Once [Anton Pavlovich] told me. 'Now, here's a fine idea for a short story. The Bishop conducts the morning service on Maundy Thursday. He is ill. The church is overcrowded. The choir sings. The Bishop reads the Passion of Jesus. He greatly emphasizes with the text, he feels pity for Christ, for the people, for himself. Then he feels as if some burden descends upon him, realizes that he might be dying, that he may die any moment now. This feeling of his, either through the tone of his voice, the general tension in the atmosphere, or by some other unseen, unfathomable ways, is transported to the clergymen around him, then to the people praying. Feeling his own demise approaching, the Bishops starts to cry, and the whole of the church cries with him. Everybody is transfixed with this touch of inevitable death."   
  Shchyukin's version of the story's history was strongly supported by Ivan Bunin.
  According to Mikhail Chekhov, the prototype for the story's main hero was Stepan Alexeyevich Petrov, who lived on the Sadovo-Kudrinskaya street in Moscow. Once a Moscow University philology faculty student, he suddenly became a monk and soon made quite a career in theology. "Father Sergiy, as he became known, often visited Anton Pavlovich in Yalta, mostly at the latter's dacha, in Yautka," according to Mikhail Chekhov. Later literary historians put this assumption to doubt. Chekhov did correspond with Father Sergiy in 1897—1900 and 1902—1904, but they met for the first time apparently only in spring 1904.
  It was only after Chekhov's death, and with the publication of his correspondence, that it became clear how many personal thoughts and autobiographical details went into the main character. The premonition of death, feelings of loneliness in provincial desolation, anger at countless petty things which hindered his work, were the main motives of his 1899—1902 Yalta letters. He complained of the necessity to have tea again and again ("...guests spent more than an hour with me now, then asked for tea, now went to put the samovar on," 30 October 1899, to Olga Knipper) and the endless flow of guests "…among whom there is no single person to whom I could talk and unburden my heart" (Pyotr's words in the story); of being "sick and lonely," and feeling "as if in exile." "First I thought I had typhoid, now I see it's another thing," he informed Knipper on 6 September 1901, then two month later: "So now I keep thinking: what about going abroad?". Several times he mentioned thinking of  leaving Yalta and just go away, "to roam freely the world," another idea he shared with Bishop Pyotr.
caption: The Yalta Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky, who died in 1898 aged 41, is considered to be the prototype of the story's main character.
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