In May 1901, the great playwright married actress Olga Knipper – much to the dismay and confusion of his family and friends, who knew him to be a compulsive womanizer. Less than a year later, Knipper became severely ill and had to terminate a pregnancy. It turns out, as biographer Donald Rayfield has discovered, that the child could not have been Chekhov’s, and he almost certainly knew it.