Marriage Quote by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov doesn’t romanticize his double life; he domestically itemizes it, then slips the knife in with a grin. Calling medicine a “lawful wife” frames his clinical work as duty, legitimacy, and social permission: the respectable profession that pays, stabilizes, and excuses his presence in the world. Literature, meanwhile, gets the charged, illicit language of desire. “Mistress” isn’t just passion; it’s risk, secrecy, and the ego’s private appetite. The joke works because it’s indecently honest about how art often lives off the margins of responsibility, stealing hours from sleep and propriety.

The subtext is less misogynistic than diagnostic: Chekhov is describing two competing forms of care. Medicine demands attention to bodies, symptoms, triage. Literature demands attention to motives, contradictions, the quiet humiliations people can’t name. When he says he “spend[s] the night” with the other, he’s confessing that neither vocation is a hobby; each claims intimacy, exhaustion, even betrayal. The comic framing also shields him from sanctimony. Rather than presenting himself as a sainted healer-poet, he admits to mood, fatigue, and the need for escape.

Context sharpens the stakes. Chekhov practiced medicine amid poverty and epidemics, all while writing under deadline and living with tuberculosis. So the line is gallows humor from someone who knew burnout before it had a name. It’s also a manifesto: art and science aren’t rivals in his world; they’re alternating methods of telling the truth about suffering.