Anton Chekhov has many connections to music, both passive and active. He was the second best loved Russian writer after Pushkin, a popular choice for twentieth-century Russian composers. The composers illustrated are Chekhov's contemporaries Petr Chaikovskii and Sergei Rakhmaninov, as well as Dmitrii Shostakovich, Veniamin Fleishman, Valerii Gavrilin and Rodion Shchedrin.
Without the music in and around Chekhov both he and the music itself would be much the poorer.