Volume 20, Number 11 · June 28, 1973
Hearing from Chekhov
By V.S. Pritchett
The Letters of Anton Chekhov
edited and translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, with the assistance of Babette Deutsch
Viking, 512 pp., $15.00
The Letters of Anton Chekhov
selected and edited by Simon Karlinsky, translated by Michael Henry Heim, in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky
Harper & Row, 494 pp., $17.50
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a greed for more. By the time of his death from tuberculosis when he was in his early forties, Chekhov had spent himself in every breathless minute, not only in the writing of his hundreds of stories, his plays, and his research on the convict island of Sakhalin—where he even took a census—but in exhausting work as a doctor, a founder of clinics and hospitals, schools and libraries, as the practical manager for many years of a small estate, as an indefatigable traveler in Russia, Europe, and Asia.
Review, 3237 words
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