Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
Chekhov the Subversive
By Aileen Kelly
Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary
Translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim. with Simon Karlinsky, introduction and commentary by Simon Karlinsky
Northwestern University Press, 494 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity
by Richard Gilman
Yale University Press, 261 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Anton Chekhov: A Life
by Donald Rayfield
HarperCollins (To be published in the US by Henry Holt in March 1998), 674 pp., £25.00
One of the 'most profoundly subversive writers who ever lived': few even of Chekhov's most devoted admirers would recognize him from this description in Simon Karlinsky's introduction to a selection of his letters. Unlike the novels of Dostoevsky, which revealed the demonic potential of the human psyche, Chekhov's plays and stories portrayed ordinary men and women leading uneventful, often humdrum lives. While Tolstoy preached anarchism and thundered against the Russian Church and State, Chekhov worked peacefully as a country doctor and small-scale farmer, until his health broke down and he was forced to spend his winters in Yalta.
Review, 6471 words
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