"The Bishop" (Russian: Архиерей, romanized: Arkhiyerei) 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.

[1][2] Chekhov promised to Viktor Mirolyubov to write a story for Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh in a December 1899 letter.

But he set to work upon it much later, judging by his 16 March 1901 letter to Olga Knipper, in which he wrote: "Now I am writing a story called 'The Bishop', based upon a plotline that had been sitting in my head for some fifteen years."

He sent the story to the magazine only on 20 February 1902 with apologies, explaining the delay with his deteriorating health, and with a kind of warning, that he'd be "challenging the censors for every single word" and won't let the badly mangled text published.

During the evening service, on the eve of Palm Sunday, while distributing the pussy willow shoots, he sees in the crowd a woman who looks like his mother whom he had not seen for nine years.

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.

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.

[1] 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.

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,"[7] and feeling "as if in exile.

Several times he mentioned thinking of leaving Yalta and just go away, "to roam freely the world," another idea he shared with Bishop Pyotr.

Several critics (including A.Elf in Vostochnoye Obozreniye) praised the story both for its artistic merits and the way it provided a detailed, insightful picture of a Russian clergyman's life.

On 14 October Mirolyubov wrote to Chekhov: "I've been to Yasnaya Polyana, the Old Man [Leo Tolstoy] expressed delight with The Bishop, and asked after your health.