Product Description

From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspondents, including family and friends, his publisher and fellow writers - not to mention actresses. These letters tell the story of ChekhovÂ’s life as a man and a writer and he emerges from them as a tough, generous, life-enhancing, and enigmatic character.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37005 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-24
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian physician and writer of short stories and plays, including the masterpieces: 'Uncle Vanya', 'The Seagull', and 'The Cherry Orchard'. Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000) and Wagner and Russia (CUP, 1995). She is currently working on a biography of Anton Chekhov that will be published by Simon & Schuster. Anthony Phillips is the translator of the letters between Dmitry Shostakovich and Isaak Gilkman that were published as Story of a Friendship (Faber, 2001/ Cornell UP, 2001)

Customer Reviews

Landscapes and Lyricism
This new uncensored edition of 370 letters, selected by Rosamund Bartlett, covers the period 1876 to 28 June 1904, just two days before Chekhov's tragically prosaic death from consumption aged fifty-four.

The letters reveal a side to Chekhov seldom conveyed in the brilliant detachment and ambiguity of his best fiction and plays. Here we see the warm and affectionate Chekhov, the caring brother, devoted son and impassioned lover: "resilient, generous, charming, life-enhancing".

The literary correspondence with Suvorin and Leikin, the exchanges with an admiring Maxim Gorky, the fleeting references to quiet masterpieces: this collection holds a wealth of treasures. Chekhov's admiral and principled stance, along with Zola, over the Dreyfus case draws one even more to this enigmatic character.

Even mundane reminders or notices become, with Chekhov's skilful touch, beguiling, captivating.

Chekhov's letters contain some prose as fine as any of his short stories; love letters and portrayals of the Russian landscape and character which would not sit ill at ease in any of his plays. And all infused with a warm, sometimes quite surreal humour, which is at times laugh at loud funny.

This most-beloved of Russian writers arose in a period proceeding the great mid-19th Century novelists (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy et al), and died just a year before the tragedy of 1905 and the monumental struggles which followed. It is interesting to think how Chekhov would have reacted to the workers' revolution, the revolution of the city, which so uprooted the provincial world of his plays. An ambivalence recognisable from his fiction is still apparent in many of these letters, and as Bartlett's introduction says, Chekhov was aware of the contradiction of his friendships with right-wing reactionaries like Suvorin and the monarchist Tchaikovsky and fully-fledged revolutionaries and anarchists in the form of Gorky and Tolstoy.

Interestingly, one of the last plays Lenin went to see before his death was Uncle Vanya; according to his wife Krupskaya he enjoyed it a great deal- much more than the contemporary avant-garde productions. And Arthur Ransome wrote in his 'Six Weeks in Revolutionary Russia', on seeing the same play performed in February 1918: "I realized also that Chekhov was a great master in that his work carried across the gulf between the old life and the new, and affected a revolutionary audience of today as strongly as it affected that very different audience of a few years ago".

It is of course difficult and ultimately futile to ask such questions, but it is undeniable Chekhov possessed a penetrating social conscience. He spent many an hour treating poor peasants free of charge in his role as a zemstvo doctor and at time spoke passionately on cholera and famine. He supported Dreyfus and documented penal conditions on Sakhalin island. Chekhov though, was not one for grand moral gestures, and his fiction is testament to his valiant restraint.

All in all, anyone with even a fleeting interest in the brilliance which was, and remains, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov should have this collection, and place it proudly alongside The Cherry Orchard and The Lady with the Little Dog.

inappropriate use of 'americanisms'
On reading this translation I was appalled at the frequent use of jarring americanisms. After reading Wilks' translations, Figges, and others where the standard of English is excellent, this translation has 19th Century Chekhov using such dreadful terms as 'sonofabitch', '22 carat psychopath', 'shag', 'screw', 'enough already' and others.
Surely this book is not intended for the American market, which is very limited, nor for a limited foul-mouthed British readership. So who is it intended for? The impression is that these two translators - from Durham and Oxford universities - are appealing to sensationalists who cannot take their prose delivered eloquently, nor carry out a conversation without tilting to American crudity.
Why not market the book in the same terms in which it has been written? At least it would have honesty to commend it. There might then be very few readers but at least they would not end up utterly dismayed.
Even Chaucer translated into modern English would pall with the kind of treatment here meted out to Anton Chekhov.